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Comment by Justsignedup | Hacker News Reader

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.

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+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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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