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Comment by ajb | Hacker News Reader

Because of this kind of thing I haven't actually replaced my printer, since it broke, and have been actively looking for ways to avoid doing so.

- In the UK, Royal mail will now print the label for you, when you order a collection. DPD claims to do so when you drop off but the shops often turn out not to have a printer

- Libraries print more cheaply than shops, neither are suitable for printing where confidentiality is required (your doc is likely to hang round on some random insecure PC)

- They don't advertise it, but some print-to-mail companies (eg CFH docmail) will do print runs down to a single copy. This is considerably cheaper than your local shop, for more than a couple of sheets at least, but has a latency of 5 days. It's suitable for confidential prints (for most plausible threat models), due to their scale. Also, if you intended to mail the doc anyway, you can send it direct from them.

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Buy a brother laser printer. Anything that's not a laser printer is not worth it except for very very very specific use cases.

Because of this laser printers are actually profitable to sell. So they don't have to loss leader their income from you.

+1 to Brother laser printer. i had mine for over 5 years and it still works great (i had to replace the original toner cartridge once). i recently had some smudges on printed paper and a quick chatGPT search later i was following Brother's troubleshooting guide which helped me get rid of the smudge (essentially showed me how to clean the print header). i even bought an updated printer for my parents whose old hp laser printer died after a firmware update (there are posts about it in their support forum).

I bought a Brother HL 2130 in 2011. It's a cheap monochrome laser printer-only. I works well under Linux, Windows, MacOS. Toner cartridges last forever, drum lasts even more forever, I never had any problem with it, and it still works like a champ.

So a big big +1 for Brother laser printers !

I also find that laser printers are somewhat better at not printing. They're less reliant on daily print jobs to keep their insides from clogging up.

I have a Brother HL-2170W that's almost old enough to drive.

I have mine since 2006 or 2007, easily one of the most perfect purchases in my life. I used it rather extensively for a while, had to change toner then, but by now I print maybe a bunch of sheets per year, and can't even remember the last time I had to change toner. Before that I used ink printers which broke all the time, not to mention ink getting dry.

Anyone who hasn't had the pleasure yet, there is a reason this gets brought up without fail when talking about printers. I have no idea if it's particular to laser printers, Brother laser printers or both, because that was the last printer I bought so far, I have no other experience other than the horrors of ink printers.

CHF docmail is actually competitive with a laser on cost - if you're posting too, of course. Which is usually the case for me - I very rarely print anything to keep.

Firmware updates for Brother laser printers routinely brick third-party toner cartridges. Downgrading is possible only if you download old firmware from sketchy sites in languages you don't read.

They work great when they work, but you can never update your firmware.

My Brother HL-5170DN has been my daily driver since I bought it new. I don't know how old it is, but the web page says "Copyright(C) 2000-2003". 25k pages printed, so that's about three pages a day, every day.

> Libraries print more cheaply than shops

Highlighting this. My local library lets you print 100 pages per month for free (color printing counts for three pages), which is more than enough for my needs these days.

I bought an OKI colour laser printer. More an enterprise model and definitely overscaled for my use but the market of colour laser printers is rather narrow and Oki seemed the best value/price ratio. Quality is good and the thing can print also some absurd sizes and formags.

I'm also reasonably happy on quality, results, speed. Annoying is just that this model (MC532) is too rare to be in common printer libraries (notably for Linux), so for each setup I have to first visit the manufacturer site and download the drivers, and even then it's not smooth. Nonetheless got this to work for win 11, Manjaro, Ubuntu and chromebooks.

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