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Comment by ph4te | Hacker News Reader

I agree on the Brother printers, I’ve only had two Brothers in the past 13 years, and the only reason I upgraded was to go from Black and White Laser, to Color Laser, it was still going strong. The best part about it was you would buy a toner cartridge and when it would tell you it’s getting low, put some electrical tape over the clear hole in the side and it would continue to print for another 1.5k. On top of that I just press the reset button for the toner life and it resets it just like I put in a brand new one. Then I print till it starts getting light. This last round of color toners I bought an off brand from Amazon that came with all the colors plus two black for half the price of the name brand set. I typically don’t buy off brand, but figured I would give it a shot. Still going good since last year.

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I still have an LCD screen Brother color laser printer that works great. The LCD is one or two lines. Works with any toner and paper and linux and wifi and I think AirDrop too (untried). It definitely is a beast but I think all color laser printers are big because they need 5 toner cartridges.

My Brothers work with Airdrop and I don’t get any weird pages that are zoomed in or some crazy alignment like I have with other printers.

I have a 15 year old Brother black and white laser all-in-one and a 6 year old black and white laser with Wi-Fi still on the starter toner in my office.

They work on Linux, Mac, and Windows. I can print to the Wi-Fi one from my iPhone.

In over 20 combined years I’ve never had a paper jam, magically been out of toner, or found myself in a pinch. The new(er) one has a very low power deep sleep so I don’t even have to fully turn it off.

I’ll probably never buy another printer, but as long as Brother doesn’t turn heel, my next printer will 100% be from them.

Even if your old one does start to go bad, I discovered it can be more effective to repair than replace for a multifunction printer/scanner. My old Brother was on the fritz a year ago. After being shocked by prices for new ones, I found a printer repair shop across the Bay from me. They fixed it for much less than the price of a new one. And they told me to keep it as long as I can because it’s such a good piece of hardware.

I bought a basic B&W brother toner printer back in college and it's still kicking on the original toner. I love the thing because it just freaking works, always worked out of the box on Windows/Mac and Linux with no additional drivers (there is one but it worked fine without them).

I've got the HL-L2300D and I recommend it to anyone that just 'needs a damn printer'.

> the best part

Is that you can easily circumevent the way this particular brand tries to cheat you.

It's less of cheating and more of toner is not heavy enough to maintain the desired darkness (it's a passive toner system, the toner uses its own weight to print). It's honestly wasteful but unfortunately active toner systems costs more and is much heavier than the already-heavy passive toner systems.

Sounds like you could remove the leftover toner from the first canister and add it to a second one after some use, reducing waste and not having the darkness issues.

But they're not refillable, you might say. Usually they're thinwalled plastic, nothing a little knife and some duct tape can't solve.

> Sounds like you could remove the leftover toner from the first canister

I am big on antiwaste, but if you have ever accidentally released toner, you realize that it's a very fine powder that aerosolizes easily and stains everything it touches.

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