Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine | Hacker News Reader

Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine

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195 pointswalterbell107 comments

When my office closed about 5 years ago, there was a Brother HL-4150CDN on the trash pile. Apparently the warning to replace the drum was enough to deem it not worthy of being shipped back to headquarters. I took it home, reset the drum life counter, and continue to use it to this day. I’ve replaced the toner once. It has been telling me that the belt life is almost up, but I’ll probably just reset that counter too. The only downside is that it is an older Ethernet/USB model with no support for AirPrint. However, a Pi Zero W attached to the back with Velcro, running CUPS and an AirPrint daemon, solves that issue.

For pretty much all the older USB-only printers, using something like a Pi (supply being the current limiting factor) is the solution to networking it. It is not that different than the "print server" built into the network-enabled models.

Bonus points for being able to update the print server SW to something NOT naked and stupid on the network.

As a downside, the trick of changing the "Ready" message on the HP printer's LCD panel by playing fun games with HPPJL isn't possible, either. Hrm. Maybe an idea - bundled Pi print servers with an LCD? Wonder if anyone makes such kits?

you can pick up cheap network printer adapters , skip the Pi, plug and play.

Fair, though not all printers can accept a NIC. And, we are also back to our of date NIC FW.

It’s probably better having the networking connected to an external device you can keep updated anyway.

Those warnings and replacement schedules are calibrated for heavy use in a mission-critical office environment, where people are printing dozens to hundreds of pages an hour (depending on the specific model) all day, every day; and where any printer failure costs many thousands of dollars in direct and opportunity costs.

In a residential office with orders of magnitude less use, and very low costs for an unexpected failure, it'll probably work fine for many years.

tl;dr Used office-grade laser printers are often a great bargain for home use.

Quite an excellent example of the difference between genuine human writing and generative-AI content.

I do genuinely enjoy it when writers go a bit unhinged like this. Perhaps now more than ever, having a feigned professional "tone" in writing is gonna make you sound like ChatGPT.

Makes me think, with all the guardrails ChatGPT has the only way to tell the AI apart from a human is how it writes about controversial topics.

Maybe we'll be seeing professional articles dropping more slurs just to prove they were written by a human.

Seems damned unlikely given a) how many contexts it's not considered OK to swear in, and how bloody easy it would be to start adding a few swear words to AI generated content if people did start feeling that way. The AI refusing to swear doesn't prevent the AI user from either manually or programatically adding in some fucking swear words.

Fuck me this is one complicated pile of shit we have made for ourselves.

Get out of here, SwearGPT!

OP didn't say swear, they said slur - as another example one thing a commercial AI will never be allowed to do is deny the holocaust. welcome to the new "prove you're a human" captchas.

hah europe is fucked then

Most websites contain swear words. The reason they don't on maybe Tiktok or YT is because those companies demonetize accounts that use it too heavily.

Cursing is perfectly acceptable, as long as one can acknowledge the difference in consequences between cursing in your own home vs on someone else's private property.

I've seen some far-right tech people suggest that the only kind of writing that may still be profitable in the near future will be extremist, since AI will be heavily censored until of course someone builds something comparable that can run on people's home computers.

> I do genuinely enjoy it when writers go a bit unhinged like this.

It almost makes me long for the days when The Register still published absurdly irreverent articles like they used to.

I used to use a color laser but when my last one died I got one of the cheap ones described in this article. back in 2016 we ran out of toner cartridges and my kid needed to print, so he just bought a whole new printer for less than a replacement cartridge, including one hour delivery.

We are still on the small starter cartridge that came with the printer almost 7 years ago. It's a wonder anyone makes small printers any more.

You never run out of toner in a cartridge. Just give it a shake for another lease on life. It’s like Zeno’s paradox. You just have to shake it increasingly often.

In theory. In practice, when you need to shake it more often than once per page, it becomes unusable. In physical universe, once you need to shake it more than once per scanline (perhaphs 1/600inch), you start losing resolution (classical version of Heisenberg uncertainty principle).

The laser printer Planck limit is rather large, and not constant.

Lol that's so funny. That picture is exactly the printer I have. It is indeed fine :)

However unfortunately brother is not free of skullduggery anymore. Recently there was an issue with a firmware update refusing to calibrate unofficial color toners.

Mine is black and white so this issue doesn't apply but it's pretty bad IMO.

I bought a Canon MF4150 laser printer about 15 years ago for around $150, and am still using it. I think I've changed the laser cartridge twice since then, and they've not been "original" cartridges. The cartridges cost about $15[1] and are good, I think, for about 2000 pages. It has a scanner/copier and duplexing unit but no wifi or ethernet, but that's ok for me because I have it hooked up to a home server via usb that serves as a print server.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Renewable-Toner-Compatible-Replacemen...

2000 pages seems a bit svelte, my laserjet 4200 toner does 20,000 pages.

The ChatGPT-generated section sounds exactly like the substance-free content farm articles you would find if you searched for "how to choose a laser printer".

I’m really impressed at how ChatGPT perfectly nails exceedingly generic writing.

What really steams my clams are sites that wholesale lift reams of copy, minus introduction and summary, from Baeldung and others that do the good work, but pepper them with enough google bait so that they are ranked higher than the original. (I speculate that detecting and down-ranking this practice is not considered a priority by google because the copy-cats are riddled with ads so generate more revenue per organic result listing)

I find this collusion unethical. And should be illegal, but I hesitate to ask our lawmakers to understand the nuance when their lobby income stream relies on the opposite.

The cool part will be when ChatGPT-like systems Hoover all of the content generated by ChatGPT and use it for their training data. Which in turn will generate content that gets hoovered up by yet more systems.

At some point some of these models might be trained predominantly by the output of other machine learning models!

> At some point some of these models might be trained predominantly by the output of other machine learning models!

Just like people!

That's what I told my boss when he asked what printer to get for the office.

"Just get the cheapest b/w Brother, they just work forever." Had one at the pub I worked at that printed daily reports and inventories for years, in a dusty basement next to the kegs and gas.

I had the same experience. I owned such a small Brother printers 10 years back, but then I wanted colour and bought an Epson printer. This was a big, ugly business printer that wasted a lot of ink and didn't have impressive printing quality. Then I bought a cheap Epson ink printer with a scanner and a duplex unit (and better printing quality), but it stopped working after 2 or 3 years. I bet this initial Brother printer, which I sold for a few bucks, is still printing somewhere like on its first day.

I purchased an ancestor of this model 10 years ago. It still works. TEN YEARS! My mother got hers 8 years ago, she's printed over 8,000 sheets (there's a service page you can print that tells you). She's looking at replacing it because it jams sometimes now. What an incredible product, I cannot recommend it enough.

I appreciate the tongue in cheek "AI" generated article but seriously, Brother isn't where it's at for home printers anymore. I had one of the mentioned printers and after a firmware update I couldn't use third party toners anymore. We moved to an Epson ink tank printer, so far so good.

Just remove the DRM chip that’s located on the starter cartridge, mine was on with a small Phillips screw. I then used the Brither DRM chip on my Linkyo toner cartridge and it works a treat. Problem solved AFICT.

I have both HL-2300 (USB) and HL-2370DW (USB/Eth/WiFi). 2300 I had for what feels like a decade and went through at least 5 toner cartridges, all cheapest possible off-brand from Amazon or eBay, every single one worked perfectly. The 2370DW is still on first cartridge, quick check on Amazon shows bunch of compatible of-brand cartridges so I don't think there should be any problems. HL-2300 is often used to print from my Linux laptop, through CUPS I think. These things just... work.

I have an HL-L2350DW and use nothing but e-z ink tn760 toners in it from amazon lol. It works fine.

The optimist in me wants to think that padding articles with AI text (with disclaimer to ignore it) will give honest writers a fighting chance to be succinct when appropriate without sacrificing search engine ranking.

haha I thought this was clever but man that writing is useless garbage. wonder if Google will learn to catch it.

Honest writers have to pay the bills too. There's nothing dishonest about not writing marketing copy like Bukowski.

As for search engines, I think we'll soon start looking elsewhere for quality writing, like a recommendation from a newsletter or other 'vouched' source. Pretty soon the search engine interface will just be a chat screen.

What are people printing that doesn't require color? Unless you're a business owner or something at least half of reasons to print that I find are color.

We have SyncThing and tablets now for random documents and manuals, print to PDF into a sync folder, no paper needed. Pocket thermal Bluetooth things do labels with more convenience. Pen and paper will suffice if needed for recovery codes and master key backups.

I own this printer and almost exclusively use it to print shipping labels. The only other thing I print is my strength training template once every 3-4 weeks so I don't accidentally spend 5 minutes scrolling between sets - I work out at home anyway so I don't mind looking like a doofus with a clipboard but my girlfriend enjoys making boomer jokes about it.

I haven’t had to print a color page in over a decade or more. What are you printing that requires color?

Receipts, warranties, tax docs, health docs, shipping labels, directions, manuals, schematics, electronic diagrams, and financial docs are things I print and I’ve never needed color. Most of the items I print aren’t even in color to begin with.

I find things in my life that require color printing are few & far between and would be better printed at a high res print shop.

The investment in color laser and cartridges would not be worth it in my case.

Same. 99% of my printing is B&W stuff for business purposes; e.g. forms to print, sign, and mail, etc. Some light scanning in there, too.

The few color things that I'd like to print -- pictures, posters, etc. -- might as well go to a print shop (I'm ~4 blocks from one) and get it printed on good paper, mounted, maybe even framed.

Last thing I printed was a bunch of clues for a scavenger hunt, before that it was Christmas cards.

I don't think I've ever printed a receipt, map(Aside from watching family print directions in the MapQuest era, but now we have phones), or warranty.

The only documents I ever print are remnants of some legacy process that can't be done some other way. I think one time I was emailed a contract, printed, and signed it, but I don't remember why we thought that was the most convenient way to do things.

I've probably scanned more diagrams and manuals than I've printed over the years.

For a business owner I totally get it, for a consumer, screens have replaced most documents.

> What are people printing that doesn't require color?

Documents and forms.

I had a colour-laser printer for a few years, and dealing with all the different toner (CMYK) cartridges was annoying. At some point went with a B&W Borther laser (like in the article) and haven't missed colour.

If I'm going to do photos I'll 'outsource' it, and if I really need colour for a few pages I'll do it at work.

You answered your own question. Most people don't need to print say, color photos anymore because they can be shared digitally more easily. However, people still need to print out documents physically sometimes.

I will say that color printing would have been preferable, had it not been for the adversarial business demon who is summoned when you say "color inkjet" three times.

We just use shutterfly for color printing. Every once and awhile my wife buys another shitty photo printer that ends up in the trash in 6 months or so. I told she's on her own with those things, I have a brother laser for the necessities and my loathsome printer repair days are behind me.

Color printers (even lasers) are a huge hassle and expensive. I just go to my local library for the off chance I want to print color. (Free for 3 pages a week)

The exception are small photo printers like the Canon Selphy.

It's very reliable, and the price (30c per photo), is cheaper than getting them from the store or ordering online (if you get less than 10 pictures).

For bulk photo orders, online ordering is cheapest, but the quality of print shops has gone down, so that my home printed photos are just as good or better (I haven't found a shop that prints photos as good as 90ies analog prints)

I got a similar Brother in 2020 after my Epson inkjet MFC became unusable. The Brother is reliable, simple, and was cheap, even when printers were thin on the ground. Before the latest in a series of Epson inkjets, I had a Brother laser that lasted from 2000 to 2010, when it died in flood--if it hadn't gotten soaked, it would probably still be kicking.

In the time between the Brothers I had a long period of no printer and two different Epson MFCs. The last was, in some way brilliant. It had a sheet feeder for the scanner, it did duplex printing, and the print quality was excellent. It even had separate tanks for each color of ink. But man the tanks were tiny and expensive. It seemed like you'd print 3 pages before it would need yet another tank. And you couldn't print black and white if the magenta tank was empty. But that notwithstanding, it was a pretty great printer. Until it wasn't. It started failing to pick up random sheets of paper mid print job. Then it would fail to pick up any pages at all unless you adjusted the paper tray just right, then it just stopped being able to feed paper 4 times out of 5. Then it stopped working completely. I cleaned the rollers over and over, it helped a little. But it just got worse and worse. Nothing made it better.

Supply chain shortages and pandemic printer buying sprees meant that I had few options. I made the choice to just get the cheapest, simplest laser printer I could find. If I really needed an MFC, I could get one later. Turns out I didn't need it. I scan things with my phone camera now. It's good enough for documents. I rarely need to do more than a few pages. I wasn't printing much color nothing that really needed it.

They way the thing is working, I figure there's a solid chance I could be good until 2030.

Purchased a Brother HL-L2360DN laser printer many years ago for the grand total of £83. Still feels like a steal to this day. It does have network printing, but not WiFi, only an ethernet connection. I only print sporadically, but when I do I want it to be reliable. And it never disappoints. I've changed the toner maybe once or twice.

I've recently purchased a Brother PT-H110 label maker which uses thermal printing. It has a very robust construction as with all things from Brother. It has helped me tremendously with organising things.

They make amazing gear, I honestly hope the company never changes.

Me: "How about a printer where I can scan a QR code, like an IoT device, and it 'just works'"? Tech industry: "How about AR glasses?"

While the complexity of translating screen -> paper across platforms, resolutions, etc. is huge and ever-expanding, can anyone comment on why it isn't a solved problem by now? Are there just too many ancient protocols left to support (for a large enough sales surface) so the drivers are too fragile to properly rewrite? Is it an issue of OS support for the latest protocols? It's not like printer frustration is a new phenomenon...

I've used Brother printers since he 1990s. I've never bought any other type, ever. I've looked, but nothing comes close to the value.

I used to print a LOT. A whole lot. So I would use up the drum life after 2 or 3 years. The $120 one - HL-L2305W - is the one I always bought. They had different model numbers over time, but that is the one. Except when I used to buy them a lot, they would always come on sale at some point or another and I could pick it up for $100.

High density toner cartridge is $58 for 2600 pages. Maybe there's remanufactured/refilled toner, but I don't know about that. But you will see that the drum is good for 12,000 pages. So you can only use 5 toner cartridges before your drum gets blasted out. And to replace that, it costs $93. So at that point, I'd always buy another printer, as the new printer is only a little bit more, plus you get any new upgrades. And by upgrades, when I first started using them, I first started buying them when they printed out 3 pages per minute, which was still way better than dot matrix printers. So I'd buy a new one when the drum died and upgrade to 8 ppm, then 15 ppm. It seems to have stalled out at 25-30 ppm, for a long time now. I guess it is just the mechanical nature of the beast, where it costs a lot more to increase the ppm rate.

I've been through about 5 of the printers. Always worked great. Best value. Not anymore, though. I don't have a laser printer now, don't need one.

Plus I learned tricks at the time.

And I know 99% of people will never get close to printing that much, but I'm just saying that I put those printers through their paces and never had a problem.

I've had to fight with the Linux drivers of a ~15 years old Brother printer. It's a great device otherwise and to be fair that they publish proprietary drivers for Linux that still work in any way is not bad.

The newer models support AirPrint/IPP everywhere and AirScan (whatever protocol sits behind that) and just work without any extra drivers.

Can't really complain about much. It prints. It scans. It probably also faxes. Never had any stuck paper, replacement ink is reasonably cheap.

How cool that printers like this still exist!

The only catch is if you want to scan at 1200 PPI, the only option I found is a windows laptop with all the brother software installed. On Mac with/without the driver stuff, it is limited to scan at 600PPI.

Spot-on. One of the few purchases I've made with absolutely zero buyer's remorse. Worth every penny.

Sometimes we can have nice things.

I have the predecessor? of this without wifi. I just fired up a CUPS + avahi Docker image on my local server for remote printing capabilities. I’m still on the “trial” toner it came with and I bought this near the beginning of the Covid pandemic. These thing are built like tanks and just work. You can even buy and use non OEM toners.

+1 for CUPS/docker. I've been running a Brother 1018 (circa 2012) off a Raspberry PI 3 over the home network so everyone in the house can use it. It just keeps on ticking with the odd toner cartridge change.

Thanks for the tip :)

> ChatGPT ideas about printers (I didn’t even proofread this. Don’t read it unless you are a lonely Google search robot, in which case look at this incredible demonstration of experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness and rank this post first in searches for “best printer.”)

I love the honesty.

Can someone recommend me the best colour printer? Unfortunately, The Google is filled with ads and skulduggery.

I bought a cheap brother color laser printer a few years ago and it has been fine. It was less than $200.

If you need to print photos, that’s a whole other thing.

<$200 new or used? Do you recall the model?

It was the HL-3170CDW, bought it new on Amazon. It’s discontinued now. Looks like HL-L3230CDW might be the replacement for it for about $100 more than I paid.

I'm stuck deciding between $120 for a duplex B&W and one of these now. I don't need color often, but it's nice to have when I do want it. It's a shame that there is such a massive price jump if you want to move from printing US Letter/A4 to A5.

Add this to your search:

site:reddit.com

It works well for now, until Reddit gets SEO spammed too.

Colour inkjet or colour toner?

Inkjet provides far better quality for things like photos, but you will tear your hair out due to how iffy ink cartridges can be.

I need a laser printer that prints 11x17

Any suggestions ?

None, unfortunately, suitable for home use. I looked into these a couple years ago because I also really wanted tabloid size. The only printers I could find it were huge and had huge prices. I wound up buying a LaserJet with an extra high-capacity sheet feeder and it was great, until a power outage/surges a couple of weeks ago killed it along with our refrigerator and dishwasher.

You can probably find replacement parts for it on eBay. Power supply and maybe the motherboard.

Thanks - we're going to first see if our homeowner's insurance will do something for us, at least enough to cover some kind of authorized repair.

I bought a used Ricoh Aficio SP C821DN about 8 years ago for little more than the price of shipping, and have been very happy with it.

It was sold by a company that liquidates old office equipment (this one came from Honda) and, as far as I can tell, makes money on the logistics (i.e. freight).

Toner lasts ages (40k-100k pages), paper handling is adequate, performance and quality are great. It's been reliable despite the fact it got pretty beat up in shipping (guess you get what you pay for - company offered to send a second unit but I didn't have the space). It's not on a UPS (most of them explicitly state not to use with laser printers) and survived power outages that occasionally knocked out other equipment.

I've made a handful of repairs on it myself, and do my own calibration. The insides are reasonably accessible. I got a copy of the service manual and some little-known tips on useful service codes (like overrides) found in online forums.

If you think vertically you can fit it into a smaller space than you might realize. It lived in my tiny old apartment in a "cubby" I built under a raised, theater-style couch. At my current place there's to-ceiling shelving above it for storing supplies and various specialty papers.

The C831DN is an updated model (with faster time-to-first-page) that was too expensive at the time but what I'd have bought say 4 years ago, and maybe still today (depending if it's successors are any good).

You might want to put that on a surge protector.

A printer being down whilst the power is out isn't usually a showstopper, and it's not as if you're likely to lose state as with a computer. But losing the magick smoke is still something of a downer.

Yeah I keep meaning to...

I've been using the same Brother laser - HL-2035 - since 2008. It's followed me through many, many house moves, and a couple of new toner cartridges. I'd love to get a wifi enabled one, but since this one just won't die, I've still got it. 15 years of printing once or twice a month.

The only thing I can't really understand is how Brother are still able to make these so cheaply. You'd think the market would have been saturated many times over.

I bought a Brother HL-2140 at least 15 years ago on sale for less than $100. Still using it. Replaced the drum, toner, etc. with all 3rd party stuff.

Prints forever on a toner cartridge, cheap, almost always works. I print regularly for the business so it was not occasional use.

As a bonus, I block the sensor port on the ink so that it can run the toner longer...I know it isn't great for the drum...but 3rd party drums are cheapish.

USB only but oh well...it works.

I have a brother laser printer sitting in the closet that worked great for a few years, until something went awry with its firmware and it started refusing to take print jobs regardless of connection method (tried USB, wifi, ethernet). Numerous factory resets haven’t fixed it.

Have read that reflashing its firmware might fix this but last time I looked into it that requires some obscure piece of software that’s given out to technicians.

7065DN here, had for years. It’s fine.

The models with D in them have a duplexer which means printing on both sides of the paper, W is for WiFi, N is for networking.

Got my 7065DN for $89 in 2012 and it’s still going strong.

I feel like mine was way more expensive than that, but it's been so long I really don't even remember when I got it.

Update, actually tried to use it today probably for the first time in a year and it's broken, won't take up paper and simple attempts at repair failed. RIP.

Got a HL2010 banging around for emergencies but fusing lockdown splurged on it's big, colour brother L8410CDW and it's amazing.

Driverless. Works (prints duplex, scans remotely, add, etc) from Linux. Crisp colours and a few thousand pages in and we're only just coming to end of one of the starter toners. £60 for a compatible replacement set.

You couldn't pay me to take an inkjet.

I bought a colour one last year, after the previous monochrome one started producing lines on the sides of the paper. Probably due to the humidity in my home office. I love the fact that it's not an ink jet whose ink evaporates and degrades over the weeks or months between uses. Just like the article, I haven't replaced the toner on one, it's just there for occasional print jobs.

I immediately knew which model it was before I opened the link. I bought one for grad school in 2010, my mom uses it now and it's holding up just fine in 2023. Toner cartridge prices are reasonable, considering it takes a long time to use one up.

Thankfully one of the few businesses whose CEOs didn't think this was a problem that required a software solution.

I have three of those decade+ old 2040 printers and I refuse to throw them out despite my partner insisting I’m “hoarding.” I love them.

We are on our second 2270DW since probably 2013 but only because we accidentally dropped the first one off a high shelf. I’ve had to replace the toner maybe 3 times across the 2 printers, with the most recent being in late 2020 after the pandemic and online school exponentially increased our at-home printing.

I think the duplexer may be jammed, but since it’s so infrequently used, I can’t be bothered to look up how to fix it. Other than that, I wish it had AirPrint as it would decrease the friction of printing from iPhones and iPads. When (if?) it breaks I’ll replace it with the updated model.

LOL I wondered if my printer was going be the one mentioned, and it was CLOSE!

They mention the Brother HL-L2305W.

I purchased the Brother HL-L2360DW used (opened/returned) on Amazon in 2016 for $75 (+$18 shipping).

For years, I used the USB mode to attach to my Airport Extreme to give it network accessibility.

Now I use the network cable attached directly to my Synology Router.

Print with it daily and its still going great!

I bought a very similar looking $120 Brother HL-2170W 13 years ago after moving cross country and being unable to justify schlepping my trusty Laserjet 4 Plus. I’ve apparently only printed 6500 pages and I think I’ve changed the toner two or three times but it has been surprisingly trusty for the price point.

I have the non-wifi version, can confirm good printer. You easily find linux support for it too.

Hook that up to a rPi and then install the Linux AirPrint drivers on the Pi and you've made it wireless.

I've got a laserjet 4100DN sitting at ~94,000 pages and still going strong. I got it from a dumpster around 2005.

Unfortunately all of the OEM cartridges are now new-old stock, which can't last forever.

Anyone have recommended refill/referb cartridge brands?

I got one of these and compared to the more expensive Brother printers the print quality kinda sucks. Text looks blocky, like a monitor when you accidentally turn off font aliasing. Maybe I have to do something on my end to calibrate it?

I have a HP laserjet 6L from 1993. It still works, although the paper feed needs to be encouraged sometimes. Doesn't get a lot of use anymore, but I think we only ever bought one new toner cartridge for it.

Good ol' HP from that era: nice.

Today's DRM-maniac HP: nope.

I bought a HL-5250DN for my father 14 years ago, best value for money printer ever. We never had an issue with it, the drum head been replaced once already (25000 pages).

I cannot say the same from my HP M476 which has print issues..

Can anyone recommend a good desktop color laser MFP that will fit in a roughly 20" x 30" footprint?

Something with true duplex (for both printing and scanning), decent toner life, and fast first-page-out.

Canon MF64x series. Smaller ones are 20x20 or less. Bigger ones top out at 23x23. MF644 does duplex auto sheetfed scanning, bed scanning, duplex printing from the tray or manual load, copies. Well-behaved on wi-fi and zero-config for printing on Mac, Windows, Android. Has a USB port that you can scan to or print from without a computer. $400-450 new, about $250 for a full set of first-party toner.

Yep agree. I own one. It’s simple. It works. Without any stupid subscription model, ad delivery mechanism, VR googles, AI voice control, or any other nonsense. How refreshing!

I am still running a HL-5250 DN which was released around 2005. Recently I've replaced the drum with an aftermarket part.

The only thing the irks me is the standby power consumption ~20W.

My main beef with my brother laser is that if it runs out of paper it keeps the drum heater going seemly forever on the assumption that you are going to quickly replace the paper and finish the print job. My wife likes to print out a bunch of recipes and then not get them until a day later so I often find the equivalent of a toaster being left running for half a day sucking power when I come home.

Brother HLL2305W is not available in my country, but I have a Xerox 3020 which is pretty good once you hack the firmware to accept toner cartridges without chips.

Yeah that's the one I have (more or less) and it's great. No complaints.

It really is a great printer.

People still print things at home?

You drive somewhere to pick up prints?

Rarely need to print anything at all - everything is digital. Bit like I don't have a fax machine.

For the 2-3 times a year I do need it...there are multiple shops in <5 min walking distance with printers. And if that fails I can always print at work.

Yes, just because you don't doesn't mean others don't.

Non digital submission forms, return labels, colouring pages for kids, tickets for events instead of installing apps, pages from car maintenance manuals instead of getting my phone dirty, so many more colour pages....

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