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Comment by sacnoradhq | Hacker News Reader

Even if you only print things once a month, a laser printer is far less wasteful in time, money, and bullshit than ink that's perpetually dry or consumed.

Rather than an entry-level laser printer that cannot be economically repaired, a used mid-level enterprise printer is often the cheapest option long term and saves useful electronics from becoming e-waste. Office furniture rental/repo places and secondary markets like eBay have these.

In large enterprises, a printer's cost per page tends to be inversely proportional to (increased) initial acquisition cost and availability of repair parts. Put another way, giving everyone an entry-level printer would be far more expensive in acquisition costs, per-page costs, and an inability to repair them. (hitting TCO 3 ways).

I had a HP LaserJet 4 (released 1992, purchased new ~1994) until 2013 with a used JetDirect card. It had expansion options with cartridges and SIMM RAM and font options, but they weren't strictly needed.

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In the 1990s HP was a great brand. Nowadays it's a nightmare. My neighbor asked me to troubleshoot one. Obviously the whole printer cannot be used without WiFi and a connection to HP cloud nonsense. Only that the cloud and Windows driver could not agree whether the printer had been set up or not. And the neighbor could not remember their HP account. It took me 2 hours to figure out how to do a factory reset.

1990 a printer was a peripheral and if you had a driver it worked. Today it's a spyware, ink-selling nonsense.

This underscores why libre software is so important: if you don't control the software running on your devices, then somebody else does. One day, that somebody /will/ work against your interests.

Don't let that happen. Apply the (A)GPL and put an end to the bullshit.

Didn’t the whole GNU think come about because RMS was pissed off at the locked down printer? Or is that urban legend?

It’s real. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt

Buy their corporate line of printers, which work as you expect (at least the ones I've seen).

> 1990 a printer was a peripheral and if you had a driver it worked.

LOL no.

Printing and scanning have ALWAYS been terrible. A fortune cookie somewhere: "GNU is a printer driver gone horribly wrong".

I have a theory that printer drivers are somehow produced by aliens, who are hellbent on destroying the Earth's infrastructure.

There was a brief golden age where it wasn't so bad, banded on both sides by dark ages. Some time in the 90s. Trying to remember the last time you could get away with just printing in blue if the black ran out.

Or printers that would accept refilled cartridges, good times.

My favorite machines were the Tektronix / Xerox printers. Solid ink, amazing prints.

No driver needed. If a person wanted to, they could ftp a postscript file to the printer.

The machines took an anon connection. From there, simply using the put command resulted in pages coming out of the printer.

How a postscript, or encapsulated postscript file was up to the user.

Handwritten files to print fractals were fun too.

"Why is the printer taking so long?", lol

Proprietary printer drivers directly contributed to the open source revolution.

Richard Stallman started his journey of free and open source software development because he got triggered by proprietary drivers used by his laser printer

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt

Not just his, it was shared between people on the time-sharing system in the MIT AI lab.

The change he wanted to make, that he'd made to the prior printer, was to shoot off a message to anyone with jobs in the print queue when the printer jammed because that was the quickest way to get it fixed.

I'm amazed xerox didn't think of this usecase themselves, unless they expected the printer to be attended all the time. In hindsight, it's good that they didn't.

I still remember moving from raw printing over LPT to USB+drivers, and feeling it was a step back. How naive I was...

I followed this advice and it's been great. I have a $350 laser Brother printer, my iPhone can find the printer without fiddling with drivers, it wakes up, print, goes back to sleep. Works fine even if I go months without printing. After my last 'free ink forever' HP inkjet that never worked, a working printer is a blessing.

Which brother do you have / recommend? I have been quiet happy with my OKI but the phone connection is the only letdown so far and I might change for a brother in the future.

I don't think you can go wrong with any Brother (or laser printer) as long as you don't need color printing. I have a DCP 1612W only for light printing. It works with Ubuntu, no special drivers required. I've had it for a few years now and I'm still on the toner the printer came with.

If you need color printing, it tends to be expensive.

I have one of the same model. WiFi connection doesn’t seem to work. I’ve tried every troubleshooting article I could find, to the extent of setting a static IP for it in my router. Otherwise a great printer, but that issue did leave a bad taste in my mouth

> Which brother do you have / recommend? I have been quiet happy with my OKI but the phone connection is the only letdown so far and I might change for a brother in the future.

I have a brother HL-2270dw that I've been using for more than 10 years that I'm happy with. I don't think they make that exact model anymore, but Wirecutter recommends the HL-2350dw (I don't know what you get for the extra $10 to get a HL-2370dw):

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-home-printer...

I've got it hooked up to my wired network, and have never had an issue with it. I really like the duplex printing.

I prefer my devices to do one thing, so I've avoided combo devices.

For me, I ended up with the MFC-L3770CDW because there was a big sale on it, not from any particular research.

Also have a MFC-L3770CDW, it's perfectly fine but you really have to pay attention to consumable cost when selecting laser MFC. A cartridge of TN227BK (high-yield black toner) for the MFC-L3770CDW is ~$80 for a ~3000 page yield, while a TN433BK cartridge that fits a MFC-L8900CDW is $85 for a ~4500 page yield. That's a (toner-only) cost per page of ~2.5c vs ~1.8c, or nearly a 30% reduction in toner cost; the difference between which is amplified for the color cartridges (TN227 color is $100/ea for ~2300 pages, TN433 color is $136/ea for ~4000 pages or ~4.3c/page vs ~3.4c/page).

Considering the price difference between these units, I opted for the MFC-L3770CDW because I do not print that often and I've spent far more over years on wasted ink from dried out cartridges and destroyed print heads; but it's still an important factor to keep in mind.

Thanks for the tip. I hadn't looked into it since I'm still on the original cartridge. When I value my time debugging janky inkjet printers I think even a 4.3c/page printing cost is still acceptance since I have low volume, rare printing jobs.

Realistically if your volume is that low the break-even point will be long after the machine becomes unobservable anyway, but I'd still always recommend people take a look at $/page metrics for consumables before they buy just so they avoid getting stuck in the same shitty situation as cheap inkjets.

Can confirm the Brother series is great. I have the HL-L2375DW.

I got accused of being a shill last time I posted about it, so I'm preempting this by calling it out. :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006705#37007593

However it just sits there asleep at an extremely low wattage most of the time, then pops instantly to life the moment a page is sent to it - as bgirard pointed out, without even needing to install a driver - and then back to sleep. And this is on wifi.

Loved it enough to buy another one when the first one went to my ex.

I'll use the full duplex occasionally, it's worth having years down the track from purchase time for the tiny price bump over the base.

To be fair on your accuser, it's only been 60 days since your last Brother Laser promotional post. Last time you included details about price, and a note about "supporting Brother" by not using third party toner.

I own an Epson eco-tank inkjet and happy with it, but I'm not invested in convincing others about it. I wouldn't put a laser printer in my house. Regardless of whether it's actually a proven health risk, I don't want my printer emitting tiny particles. And I want the option of good quality colour prints using different paper types and thickness.

HL-L2350DW checking in here. Zero complaints, zero issues. Just works.

Same.

Same

Another happy HL-L2350DW user. So happy in fact, I've bought one for my mom and one for her aunt and they too have zero issues and I've never had to hear about it again after setting it up. This is how printers should be.

Yeah, recently also got a Brother laserprinter on sale. Love this printer. Works great. It’s big but better than fighting with a HP printer

Not a Brother printer but I would like to recommend the Canon MF240. I bought it at Walmart for $99 - and it feels like I practically stole it with how good it's been to me. Has both Wifi & ethernet, automatically wakes when sent a print job, scanner works great, etc. Works perfect with generic toner cartridges from Amazon, no funny business with DRM.

Canon in general have been good printers in my experience. I recently bought one of their low end inkjets because I needed to print some photos. That printer also works great & has a highly customizable web interface built in - I didn't expect it to be that feature complete for $45.

I've had 2 brother printers over the years & they were fine - for whatever reason though one of them would refuse to print from a Chromebook. Every other printer I've used in the last 10 years has essentially 'just worked' with any device capable of speaking to it except this Brother. Known issue & they never released a firmware update to fix it.

Bought the same in 2020 Black Friday for $49, and intro toner had about 1000 pages, lasting me for about 2.5 years. Then I bought a full toner for $49, going great.

Canon business printers and scanners are also super solid. Every business line Canon I've encountered has been great.

I've got a Brother DCP-L2540DW. The only feature I wish it had was duplex scanning from the auto document feeder. Otherwise its been an immensely solid printer.

I gave up doing photo printing at home. These days I'll just order prints online. If I want it quick or save on postage I'll just pick it up at a convenience store close by. The break even on a new high end photo printer is after thousands of photos by comparison, and even then its only marginally cheaper per print. Once my last photo printer had some assembly fall apart inside from brittle plastic cracking I moved on to this Brother.

I agree the duplex scanning from the feeder is a big miss for my model as well.

We've had the Brother HL-L2340D for a few years. It's been rock solid. It's so much better than the HP inkjet printers we had in the past.

I will never buy another Brother device. In rural areas you cannot find a service center and they are not self serviceable.

I paid $350 for a multifunction multicolor device like others are mentioning and it lasted 13-15 months before failing to power on and Brother refusing to help make it right. There was a rash of these models having this issue where it just bricks and wont turn back on so maybe they learned but they lost all goodwill with me.

Happily printing on a Canon now.

The price range here is in the toss it if it breaks category

Brother 9130 is great

I bought a new Brother HL-L8360CDWT color laser printer in September 2017 for $349.99 and it still works great after 6 years of heavy use. I am extremely impressed with this printer. I used to run it with cheap 3rd party cartridges, which worked fine, but this year I finally had to break down and buy official ones.

I also have a Canon MF6160dw black and white laser printer, scanner, copier, fax that is a bit older and it's had even more use. It's great, and I use it to scan to my Synology NAS all the time as well.

I'm very, very happy with these two printers.

I’ve only have two printers in the past 13 years, a Brother MFC-7840w, which worked perfectly and I only gave away because my family wanted a color printer. The upgrade was an HL-2170CDW. I have no complaints with either. I’ve even gone through my starter toners on the color laser and bought a knockoff set for 70$ which included two black toners with all the colors, and have been quite surprised at the quality. Both have had wireless support and print from phones without issues.

> HL-2170CDW

I can vouch for the HL-2170DW (B&W only version) as well. Costco has been selling it for years.

The only downside is that it takes some trial and error to figure out which instructions actually reset the cartridge EEPROMs

The cheap ones are great too. There are a few models at $150 and under. There are minor differentiators for them like Airprint and double-sided printing.

I bought one a few months ago. Best computer-related thing I've purchased in ages. It JUST WORKS.

As the review says,

    Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser 
    printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it 
    and just buy one. It will be fine! [...]

    The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels 
    for online shopping, never run out of toner, and 
    generally be a printer instead of the physical 
    instantiation of a business model.

https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...

Heh.

From your link.

""" ... And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again. 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.”)

Laser printers are popular choices for home and office use because they offer fast printing speeds, h... """

I have a Brother MFC-L3750CDW after getting annoyed with cheap inkjets. Great printer with scanner. I regret not getting a Brother MFC-L3770CDW instead though. The 3750 has no automatic two-sided scanning, unlike the 3770.

Brother have started going down the cartridge DRM route now too, so they're no longer a good brand. :(

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

There are ways around their particular DRM - for now - but who knows how long it'll be until they're as bad as HP and friends:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzaRVEzYuz8

I'm happy with my Samsung laser printer and would recommend it except HP bought the company and discontinued the good ones. I think their strategy is to own all the things and then extort us.

I generally like Brother printers but sometimes the software is less great.

I have a Brother DCP-L2550DW which is very good but for some reason the scan to PC function no longer works over the network. Printing still works as expected in all cases, but ControlCenter4 can't communicate via the network anymore. It works fine if I connect a USB cable so I just do that when I need to scan.

Did you disable SNMP? I used to have that disabled but recently control center always wants to check the status from SNMP so I ended up re-enabling it and now it works just fine again.

solving or working around software issues is for some reason more satisfying than fighting intentionally disabled, non documented, functions.

Absolutely. I have a laserjet 4000 I've had since I was given it in 2002 at an office clearance. It's printed about 10000 pages while I've had it,and in that time I've had to change the toner once. And I was given two original HP cartridges with the printer,and installed the first one a full 17 years after getting it.

Worked perfectly,and is still in there.

Works with windows, mac os, chromebooks without issue, all over the network. I even got a duplexer from gumtree a few years ago as it was going for nothing. One day it will die and then I'll have to deal with all the current printer grief!

RIP my laserjet 4000. So many plastic pieces became brittle and finally broke, but it kept on working. Finally a few things went that could not be readily replaced/repaired and I finally gave up on it. It was a sad day. Of today's options, Brother is fine, but nothing compares to the GOAT.

HP laser keys are still difficult to replace the transfer belt.

Go brother if you want a laser. All the consumables are easily replaceable.

There's no belt in a Laser Jet, at least not modern ones.

Oh? What’s modern?

Transfer belts are still used in high volume enterprise grade printers and print shops because of the speed advantages. But I haven't seen a transfer belt on a consumer laser printer in 20 years. I don't think they've been used on consumer laser printers since the early color laser jets in the late 90s.

I recently purchased an Epson Eco Tank printer (their budget mono without a scanner) [1], I'm quite impressed so far. The first thing I did was print 200+ pages, and it kept up well. My biggest cost now is the price of paper (as it should be). I would suggest ink jet still could be useful, especially with cheap refillable ink rather than this expensive cartridge bullshit.

I remember years ago wanting to buy a new ink cartridge for my HP printer. In the shop the printer was something like £25 (printer + scanner, black + colour ink) - or - I could pay something like £20 for black and £25 for colour cartridges. I explained to the service person "so you're telling me, it would be cheaper for me to buy a new printer, throw the printer in the bin and just take the cartridges out?". They answered "yeah". I tried to refill the ink cartridge manually with a syringe and an online guide, but never could get it to work due to their "smart secure" cartridge lock-ins.

HP time and time again prove to be a massive problem in the printing industry. I think I have said on HN a few times that I would be very much interested in building an open source ink jet printer (including head) - it can't be impossible.

[1] https://www.epson.co.uk/en_GB/for-home/ecotank

This. About 5 years ago when my wife started her doctoral program, she started printing a ton of resources (and still does). We were constantly buying expensive ink monthly. I did some research and bought her a Brother laser printer for something like $300 and never looked back. You do have to buy toner about once a year, but it’s far more cost effective and efficient. Now if I could somehow convince her to use PDFs instead!

I swear by the lowest end brother duplexing monochrome laser printer. Mine is the dw2270 which was <$150 at the time. Rock solid. No fuss ever.

I’ve praised it here before. It’s the sort of printer that I wonder they stay in business selling because each customer is a customer for life but only buys one item.

Most inexpensive (ie, $200 or less) AirPrint (or google/MS equivalent) enabled BW laser printers are good solutions. I have a Canon that's lasted me several years of moderate printing (I hardly print but my kids love to print stuff out).

Every year I buy a 2-pack of off-brand toner from Amazon for $30. When the printer complains, before replacing toner, I just pull out the existing toner, shake it, and get probably 10-50 more (faded but usable) prints.

>Even if you only print things once a month, a laser printer is far less wasteful in time, money, and bullshit than ink that's perpetually dry or consumed

Especially if you only print things once a month a laser printer is better, otherwise as you said your ink will dry out or you'll consume more ink in cleaning cycles than in printing.

My wife has an office size inkjet printer that she uses nearly daily (prints ~500 - 1000 pages/month for work) and it works flawlessly, ink is cheaper than toner for her old laser printer. If she was only printing once a month, I'm sure the inkjet would be less reliable or economical.

Consider standby power consumption though if you aren't going to manually turn it on and off. The old printers may be very expensive in that regard.

I was annoyed to find that a laser printer I've had for a decade used 30 watts just to keep the network link up, while the manual claimed it used 0.5 watts while on standby.

30 watts over 10 years is about $500 where I'm at...

100%. I have a 5–10 years old business HP laserjet and it just works. It’ll happily take third party consumables that cost around 25$ for 5k pages. It’s firewalled off the internet just in case. I paid 30$ for it on the classifieds.

HP’s consumer stuff has been hit garbage for a while now. I don’t know about their more recent enterprise stuff.

I just installed a new NOS toner cartridge in a 20 year old HP 4050n. The big caveat with those is that the old cartridges have long been out of production and the dried up rubber seals on them crumble into bits after removing the OE sealing strip. You need to fill in the opening to prevent toner from vibrating out into the machine.

Be aware of two things:

Modern HP is not the HP of the LaserJet 4. The new printers, also the lasers, are crap.

And second, these old printers are workhorses but they waste energy like crazy, the standby mode still uses a lot of power so unless your electricity is free it very quickly makes sense to replace them.

Agreed. I have an HP Color LaserJet Pro and the toner is expensive, but lasts forever if I don't print and the quality is fantastic as well. Plus, they have automatic duplexing which is a must have feature for me.

Newish ones like mine even support AirPrint and NFC printing.

Buy color toner refill kits. Melt a hole in the cartridge with a soldering iron, refill it, and seal it with aluminum tape.

Better to spend $70-150 than $300-1200 on new cartridges.

PS: I'm currently in the market for an 5-15 year old HP Color LaserJet but still assessing which model tends to be more reliable. There were a lot of lemon SMB Color LaserJet models. Suggestions welcomed especially by staff IT people who support these things.

It's expensive, but like $295 to replace all the color toners (high capacity), not $1200 or $300 each.

I bought a first price laser printer few years ago, it was twice the price of a inkjet printer with the same quality, and B&W only but it paid itself by having more ink in the package and not having ink drying when I'm not using it

>Rather than an entry-level laser printer that cannot be economically repaired, a used mid-level enterprise printer is often the cheapest option long term and saves useful electronics from becoming e-waste. Office furniture rental/repo places and secondary markets like eBay have these.

My print volume is extremely low, my 70 euro Samsung has lasted me over a decade. I suspect i'll be dead before i see any savings on a mid level enterprise printer, assuming the thing lasts decades without the rubber inside it disintegrating. If i have to service it my grandchildren will have to reap those savings.

I decided to go completely printerless. So far i've gone about a year without printing anything. I don't think there is anything in my life that still requires a printer.

You must be lucky.

Some places are still cursed with enough antiquated forms of red tape that it becomes impossible to do so...

Back in my university days some students owned (used) business color lasers solely for printing bootleg textbooks. 3rd party toner is cheap and a couple books already paid for the price of the unit.

Parts and consumables are still available for the LaserJet 4.

Nowadays there are inkjet printers that are cheaper (cost per page) than laser printers. I would only get one if i were to print regularly, however.

And never again HP of course.

Examples?

My research showed some inexpensive inkjets had reasonable cost per pages, but when you’re talking 10+k pages per month lasers easily win. They also win at the ultra low, 1 page per month side of things.

I haven’t done the math to see if they’re right, but they’re likely talking about the various ink tank printers that exist, such as the Epson EcoTank series. Refilling the ink is supposed to be quite cheap, especially if you don’t care about the ink being name brand.

Personally, I print like 5 pages a year, so unless I get into photo printing… the cheapest AirPrint-enabled Brother laser printer has served me well for like the last 5 years.

The nominal cost per page on those edge out many home office laser printers, but the printers themselves don’t last very long which then bumps up the cost per page.

It’s like the razor blade model of inkjets use high ink costs and the unsubsidized bulk ink versions use planned obsolescence. Though it could just be the basic mechanics of inkjets as moving around the ink + print heads involves significant mechanical stress per page and EcoTank style inkjets prints lots of pages.

> the printers themselves don’t last very long

A high quality citation is seriously needed for a claim like that.

That’s not a complaint I’ve ever heard about the EcoTank printers, and googling it didn’t turn up anything. I strongly doubt this is a characteristic of EcoTank printers. That unsourced claim sounds suspiciously convenient for your side of the discussion.

Epson also makes a dedicated line of business EcoTank printers ("EcoTank Pro") which are clearly intended to print very large numbers of pages. But again, even the very basic ones seem to do a great job, with very high reviews across the board when I look at retailers.

By not lasting very long I mean I’ve seen 3 die between 2-3 years of heavy use. I have heard they last longer with moderate use, but that suggests a lifetime page limit.

Honestly, I don’t have high quality sources which is why I was interested in the first place.

If you've seen it first hand, then fair enough. It just doesn't agree with the consensus I have seen online, so I find that confusing.

As I've said previously, I have the most basic laser printer at home, and rarely use it. I just happen to have done a ton of research into printers lately because I've thought about getting a photo printer, and I really like what the ET-8550 has to offer. But, for the time being, I've decided I probably wouldn't use it enough.

Cool, I don’t have a large sample size so I could easily be wrong here. Something I just came across is various models have different monthly page expectations for their 2 year of ink promotion:

“Based on average monthly document print volumes of about 150 pages (ST-C2100), 200 pages (ST-C4100), 300 pages (ST-M1000/ST-M3000/ST-C5000/ST-C5500/ST-C8000/ST-C8090) and 750 pages (WF-M5799 Supertank). Promo applies to ink only. Printer covered by Epson 2-year limited warranty.” https://epson.com/supertank-ink-tank-printers-for-business

I don’t remember the model numbers but those where way past 750 pages per month if that’s helpful.

I would assume a free ink promotion would explicitly choose not to cover heavy users, but it's not necessarily an indication of what they think the printers are capable of.

But, it is an interesting set of numbers, and could indicate something.

Yeah, I'd highly recommend doing a comparison to even getting online prints mailed. When I did the math on a number of prints including all material costs the savings per print from a lot of local printing services was only a few pennies per page. A few pennies per page versus a several hundred dollar upfront cost to get the same quality meant tons of prints before I broke even and even experienced any savings.

> By not lasting very long I mean I’ve seen 3 die between 2-3 years of heavy use.

YMMV. I have EPSON ET-2850 EcoTank all-in-one for about a year with moderate to heavy use and so far no problems. Being able to refill ink by simply pouring it over from an ink canister is so refreshing. No DRM, no chips, no nonsense.

Canon Pixma series with built-in toner tanks that you can refill yourself with cheap ink. Using it for years, print everyday, sometime I print full color books. So far I spent like $15 on ink.

Same thing. I have laser Xerox B230 for printing, because constantly dried up ink, especially when you need that printer NOW, was driving me crazy.

It might very well be the better option but the printing execs want their subscription pricing dollars.

if you print things once a month go to your nearest staples and print it there for a couple bucks

yeah same, I ditched inkjets for a canon laserjet

you just have to value your time and then it all makes sense

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