I think HP are worst. Then Epson. Then Canon. Then Brother.
Avoiding their blobs may deny you of advanced features, but for documents where you're not aiming for max photo quality or color matching, it works very well.
It's 13 years old, but still runs like a champ. The network features are dead simple, like you'd expect. For $100, I think even the lifetime of the toner cartridges it came with is likely to be worth the cost.
I fully expect this printer to outlive my need to print things out.