Cartridges last for thousand of pages; no strange cloud requirements; the FritzBox registers the printer immediately and all devices in the local net can print.
Non of this was the case for my previous HP or Epson printers…
Well it doesn’t work! Ink needs to be flushed to keep the lines clear. Inkjet printers need to print regularly for optimal performance and low waste. If you need a printer to sit on the shelf for 4 months between print jobs, laser is the only game in town. Toner is a solid powder and it lasts forever without issues. No clogging, no mess.
You still have the problem at the print head, though.
People were buying second-hand 1995-era Laserjets in 2010 because they were simply better than anything you could buy new. They... Just Worked.
That's not completely true.
Those printers sucked so much power you could brown out your local substation.
And the amount of ozone they kicked off could be smelled in a cube farm--I don't want to think what they would do to you in a home office.
So now I bought a color laser instead, and I couldn’t be happier.
Additional software is needed for photo prints (color management and stuff like that) and (maybe?) scanning. I didn't try scanning without additional software, as I installed it with the photo print software. And since that software inly works under Windows anyway, I never bothered with scanning under Linux.
Printing works just fine so.
(Seriously, GNOME, whether to scan one side or two sides is actually important and the desired mode changes all the time. Would it kill you to dedicate some screen real estate to it, instead of filling everything with empty post-modern white space?)
Had an HP color inkjet before that. With that I felt like I did not have a printer.
Consumer garbage printers are consumer garbage printers.