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Comment by ProjectArcturis | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea why anyone would buy an HP printer in the first place. The company is pretty much built entirely out of dark patterns ("You want to print a black and white document? Not while your magenta ink is low! Better buy a new ink pack. Or a new printer, they cost about the same.")

I've had much better experience with Brother.

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I've had "better" experiences with Brother, but it still seems to suffer from being a printer in the ecosystem of "printer hell".

My Brother printer no matter what I do likes to go into this deep sleep mode that may as well be powered off, nothing wakes it up, power cycle and it drops right back into deep sleep immediately.... The software for it is bulky, wants to run on my PC all the time (why?).

Is it better than an HP printer, yeah probably in some sense, but the landscape of printers all being a pain is still true.

I don't have a functional printer right now. I need one ... but I keep procrastinating buying one. I just don't want to deal with it.

I have a Brother HL-L2350W that I paid $120 for, and is a basically perfect black and white printer for my needs. Plugged it in, set it up on Wi-Fi (LAN only). It goes into deep sleep after a few minutes of zero use, but even after weeks hitting print on any system in the house (no third-party drivers needed, at least on Mac) wakes it and the first page is out of the machine before I can walk over there.

I'm sure that, like any other company, they have better and worse products -- but I did very little research on this, bought to price point, and have been very happy. Certainly not the HP experience.

I'm a big fan of Brother printers. I've got a B&W multifunction one that's 10 years old with 50,000+ printed pages in still going strong. Our new color laser has been nothing but a dream to work with too but it's only about a year old.

If your printer is not waking up from deep sleep, I've found it due to poor multicast support on your network. I've had to debug various issues related to waking/discovery and once I resolved the multicast issues this problem went away. Specifically I ran into a UniFi bug with mesh networking and this problem is significantly exacerbated by poor mesh networking equipment.

Brother printers rarely, if ever, need the full software suite and they indeed have a "driver-only" install available most of the time.

Interested if you've got a write-up somewhere of the multicast issues you tracked down and fixed as I'm currently in a nearly-identical predicament with my home network, except I'm using mikroTik hardware instead of Unifi (ever since I mournfully retired my AirPort Extreme and Express's)

>My Brother printer no matter what I do likes to go into this deep sleep mode that may as well be powered off, nothing wakes it up, power cycle and it drops right back into deep sleep immediately....

Give the printer its own fixed IP address by specifying the MAC address in the router's DHCP table.

That doesn’t sound right. I have 2 brother printers at different locations and neither suffer from anything like that. One is a colour the other is a black and white. Both print perfectly with no issues so far. I wonder if you could update and reinstall the software to fix it.

Brother printer and no problems with black and white. Was curious about Xerox wax as that might have been better environmentally, not sure, couldn't justify colour printing costs though.

>Is your lan not connected to the internet?

Certainly not except for the few dedicated internet PC's handled by IT for email, browsing and company-wide office apps. Those have so many layers of hardware firewalls and other passive & active security it's not easy to get as much office work done as in earlier years, but we work around it.

In my chem lab with all those expensive (some vintage) scientific instruments, I air-gapped ASAP when I came on board. I have made lots of scientifc progress but the most valuable thing I've done for my employer is kicking IT out of the lab. 100x reliability after that, averaging less than a single need for attention per year.

Here's something I just found out recently.

Had one of the Windows 10 2019 vintage (installed from unpatched ISO) PC's on my isolated local XP network, where a very old Lexmark non-network USB/parallel printer on an XP workstation was just a regular USB printer being shared with the rest of the LAN by XP.

The Lexmark was a business machine installed with 32-bit XP drivers which were available in about 2016, which was about the latest it was supported, which support ended with Windows 7.

Luckily it turned out I had chosen the PCL6 version of the drivers.

When I had added the 2019 W10 PC I had naturally used a 32-bit version since this one does not need to use more than 3.2GB of memory at all. With the local LAN & W10 configured (not so easy) so W10 could easily access the Lexmark shared by XP, upon first connection W10 requests the Lexmark drivers before it will proceed. I used the W7 PCL6 drivers and everything was just fine for years.

Unfortunately the Lexmark tragically succumbed to an untimely death before it reached its 21st birthday.

Then I was able to select a consumer-grade new Brother USB/LAN/Wifi unit having a model No only available from Walmart (over the last few years since release) as the best bargain. Only an inconsequential distinguishing feature difference from the non-walmart generally available equal-printing-performance machine. It's another whole story but was out of stock for $89 with no sign of restocking, appearing discontinued and replaced by a new equivalent model for $139. I knew people must have bought quite a few at $89 before they were all "gone", and could see lots of them NIB for $139 on Amazon. I dug in and found a refurbished (designated 1 item remaining in stock) for $79 and it arrived shortly from walmart.com. Looked like a NIB return with a refurb sticker on the back. There was still "one" remaining in stock for weeks after that when I checked. Hmm.

Never uninstalled the Lexmark drivers, just plugged Brother into USB of the XP PC, used the Brother W7 driver, and worked like it should on XP, shared with the local LAN no differently than the Lexmark had been. Office manager and IT couldn't believe I got a brand new printer to just drop-in to my decades-old XP network when it was not officially supported for XP.

Newer W10 & W11 ISO's were used on a couple new local workstations but these were so new they were already sporting the "Print Nightmare" "upgrade" so no shared network printing for you. Oh, well. Turns out, naturally you can't use the printer's LAN connection simultaneously with its Wifi, but I wasn't actually using either, just USB. And the Wifi-Direct option worked just great[0] to connect to one of the new W10/W11 PC's on an individual ad-hoc basis as needed and everything was well from those wifi PC's and laptops when they needed to occasionally print. No Wifi-Direct conflict with the USB connection shared by XP over the local LAN at all.

Now I don't actually use the instrument the 2019 W10 PC is connected to very often and was occasionally printing from it over the shared XP LAN for a number of months before I recently remembered I had never installed any Brother printer drivers at all, never even made an explicit request to connect to the Brother on the shared LAN like I had to do when I first got the Lexmark going. Double-checked and nothing but Lexmark as default printer on that W10 PC.

Brother just worked. Really dropped right in in this regard.

PCL6 FTW.

[0]>likes to go into this deep sleep mode

If asleep, must be woken up from the main wired LAN the USB printer is sharing, before connecting a session of Wifi-Direct.

Edit: you may be able to set the sleep delay from the printer keyboard.

Too late to edit again, but wanted to add, in Linux Mint an older similar Brother at home just works when you plug it into the USB connection, alternatively on Wifi when part of the online LAN, just works when a Mint PC is on the same Wifi router.

No drivers necessary either way.

One more thing, when W11 was released, the Brother website said they would have W11 drivers within 60 days or so. Showed up early and were the exact same driver files used for W10 the last few years.

I heard Brother is following the same dark pattern.

Is the company aware of why they’re so loved/respected these days?

Do you have a source or a link? From my experience Brother is the best brand of printers that I have worked with (monochrome, laser).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

Canon printers are the only ones that gave me peace of mind. I avoid everything from HP and everything from the top 3 brands as default.

I would love to know the source of this uttering.

At the risk of going against the grain here: I deliberately bought an HP laser printer and scanner combo(m148dw) a couple of years ago. Granted, the thing immediately got vlaned off from the Internet -- but that would apply to any device I don't fully control.

So far the performance has been rock-solid across several Linux and macOS machines and I almost forgot the saying "printers sense your fear and will break at the worst possible moment".

The newest consumer oriented HP printers (with model numbers ending in 'e') will not tolerate being disconnected from the internet. Even if you only ever print over USB, the printer has to maintain a wifi connection with internet access, or it will stop letting you print.

Out of idle curiosity I googled the current price for m148dw. I definitely don't think it justifies the current 400$+ price tag. Two years ago the prices were much more reasonable.

They are cheap. Most people don't realize the extra long-term cost. They only realize how hard they were fucked over when they need to get their first ink refill. I doubt many people buy more than a few printers in their life so the brand loyalty isn't strong.

I think the solution should be something like the EnerGuide labels that reveal the long-term cost. Then customers would be able to tell that this cheap printer sold at a loss will have crazy expensive ink.

Some years back I could usually find a cheap HP printer on sale for around $30. For the amount of printing I did, the starter ink would usually dry up before it was empty, and new ink cartridges would run over $40. It was more cost effective for me to throw away the printer and buy a new one instead of replacing the ink.

I bought one because I was ignorant and I just wanted a cheap printer. I mean, printing a paper, how problematic could it be?

I finally got fed up with it a few weeks ago and bought a Brother printer.

They're the reason why I sort my potential new printers by refill price before buying.

Because Wirecutter said a specific model was “less worse” than the rest of them and that’s all a lot of people really care to research.

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