No One Wants a Printer, but Everyone Wants to Print

Two birds with one stone: buy a Brother b/w laser printer or a scan/fax multifunction one. You’ll never look back.

If you for some reason don’t like Brother, you have two other brands to choose from: Ricoh and Epson. Yes, your only 3 good choices are from Japan; they seem to be the only ones who know what they’re doing.

There is one exception. The KSK requires me to send them everything by mail - two hundred pages and counting. They also require everything on A4 with no tacks, because they will scan everything back.

I don't want to print things. I'm just forced to. I suspect that it's the same for most people.

I've seen an HP Officejet All-in-one inkjet literally fall apart in less than a year because of (mild) daily use. Inkjet printers are trash. I would not rescue an inkjet printer from the curb.

I volunteered at a non-profit that had some sort of xerox solid wax BS printer that cost hundreds of dollars to maintain, we swapped it out with a laser and suddenly all the problems disappeared.

The daily printer problems my profession has to deal with - did you really intend that job to use legal size paper in the bypass tray?? People don't deserve this.

What I've done is 15 years ago I bought the smallest laser I could find (HP p1005) and I keep it in a cupboard. I use it maybe once a year and it never has ink clogs.

I suspect the most realistic route for most people is to use Other People's Printers, which is what this article is describing.

That is what I recommend to all my relatives - find an old business Laser printer on Craigslist or eBay. Otherwise you are endlessly buying cartridges.

I connected a Raspberry Pi Zero to the USB slot and shared it wirelessly. Now I can print from a laptop or a phone or whatever.

The last one we got is a Brother MFC-J5945DW. What's really nice is that it has refillable ink tanks (I'm using 3rd party refills to save a ton of money) and it'll print on ledger/tabloid/A3 paper (as well as regular sizes). This is particular nice for printing booklets.

Fuji Xerox doesn't make it or anything like it anymore. HP has one that looks similar [1] – could that be as good? The equivalent Brother models all seem much bigger and uglier.

I'm not looking forward to having to replace it, whenever that day comes.

[1] https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-laserjet-m110we-printer

I had to argue with my mom for a couple years to convince her to ditch the inkjet. I was tired of having to help her fix it. She kept insisting she needed it to print photos. I finally convinced her that Walgreens will always print higher quality photos than her inkjet, and a cheapo laser printer will easily handle her other occasional printing requirements.

But +1 on Brother laser printers, at least older ones. I have two. Aftermarket consumables are cheap and good quality, and the printers, even at months between prints, just up and print, no fuss. The MFC7020 one can also scan and photocopy, and the other, the HDL2270DW, is more reliable than a lightweight plastic construction that can flip pages and print on both sides has any right to be.

I finally broke down about a year ago and got a color brother laser printer. It does the job I need it to do, I can leave it alone for months and come back and print like nothing happened.

I can't exactly say that I have paid for it vs just going to staples and doing prints. But the convenience is nice.

Also, worse than the printing experience, a thousand times worse, scanning. Works 20% of the time. Files are always waaaaaaaay to big, I hate it every time I have to scan. Maybe I should just take photos and collate those.

7/11 is ubiquitous. And every store had a multi functional, professional grade printer.

You simply email your document to a central address. It emails you back a code. Go to any 7/11, pay (using a card that works everywhere, including public transport), enter the code, and get your document printed.

I'm very very happy with it. As of now, a few months in, I would never go back to color laser. Simpler mechanism and much lower running costs.

There are a whole bunch of different factors that go into something as simple as 2D printing. For example, what are the physical characteristics of the paper? Are the sheets stuck together? Is it too thick for the rollers to pick up? Are the edges within good enough tolerance that it'll move in a straight line through the printer?

And then ink (for an inkjet printer) is a whole other level of chemistry and materials science. You have a suspension of pigment in a solution that has to reliably form consistent sized droplets that get sprayed out of microscopic holes in the printhead onto the paper, and stick there. What if the ink is too viscous for the holes? What if the holes are clogged? The end-user doesn't want to worry about these things, they just want to print. So you end up packaging the ink into sealed containers with the printhead built in so that in theory the end user never has to worry about these issues as long as the cartridge is reasonably fresh.

So why are they so expensive? Because people don't want to spend a lot of money on a machine they only see themselves using occasionally. So if they buy a printer, they will generally buy the cheapest one that fits their needs. That means if a printer manufacturer wants to sell printers to the average consumer, they need to compete with their competitors on price, which is a race to the bottom. So the printer manufacturers figure that they'll sell the printer at a loss and make the sales up on ink cartridges.

In reality, the reason that inkjet printing is so expensive is because a ton of complexity is abstracted away from the average consumer. Laser printers win because they're in a different category of technology than inkjets, so consumers are willing to overlook the high price because it's a laser printer. Combined with the fact that toner expires much more slowly than ink, and drums and other laser printer parts generally wear much longer, and laser printers end up with a better reputation.

These problems have not yet been solved for consumer 3D printers. The best you can do is buy a reliable printer (like a Prusa) and then buy good quality filament that has been tested with that printer (like Prusament) and then follow all the instructions very carefully. But if you buy a cheap printer and cheap filament then you start to realize why good quality stuff is expensive. The reason why commercial and industrial printers are so expensive is because businesses don't want to mess around with tweaking their printers constantly, they just want them to work. Which is the same as most consumers want out of their 2D printers, which is why they're perceived to be so expensive, when in actuality they are surprisingly affordable for what they do and how accurately they do it.