My Brother laser is so old that it also has a parallel printer port.
Microsoft’s USB drivers turned to shit, so I stuck it on a Pi and can print from anywhere, including my phone.
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I don’t know why people still buy inkjet printers. Photographs? Unless they’re pretty high end, they churn out mediocre photographs. Just take your memory card to CVS and get a glossy print for 69 cents from their professional photo printer.
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And unless you’re churning out color images on a regular basis, the heads clog, you waste ink trying to unclog them, wash, rinse, repeat, (profit $$$)
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Because they appear to be so cheap, due to razor blade model. You can literally walk into Best Buy and come out with a $49 printer, and it even comes with a crappy half-filled cartridge!
Lots of people fall for that at least once, until they realize that the cartridges cost more than the printer, and it’s constantly crap.
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Bought the one in the article picture to replace an inkjet that I had previously. Have never looked back! Definitely recommend them to anyone who’s looking to get a new printer
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An elementary school near where I live did renovations and threw out an old putty grey HP 1505. It ran for about a year before I needed a new cartridge. That was 2 or 3 years ago. https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-laserjet-p1500-printer-series/3435666/model/3435667
Sometimes good luck is just waiting for you in someone elses trash.
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Agreed. Color printing is one of those things that are surprisingly money and time intensive if you want decent results. And now that all I ever print are letters to cancel stuff I should be able to cancel online, crappy color just isn’t worth it.
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I’ve had a Brother B&W laser printer for the last few years and I’ve been happy with it. I can forget about it when I don’t want to print anything and it doesn’t run down the toner on its own. It also errors much much less and hasn’t jammed yet.
There is a tiny annoyance with the page counter chip on some of the cheaper 3rd party toner cartridges where they don’t have one so you’d have to pry off your old one and glue it on. But it’s not proper DRM, it’s a pretty simple circuit. So nowadays they make ones with them already on for a couple bucks more.
Heck even Xerox sells their own brand of discount toner with page counter chip preinstalled for Brother printers now. You pay a slight brand premium but it’s like 45% less than 1st party toner rather than half price.
As @gracchus (more or less) said, you want color prints, you go to the print shop or office supply store (my drugstore doesn’t do color printouts just photos). I rarely find I need them.
Only thing I would have done differently this time around was get a model with dual sided scanning through the document feeder because sometimes I need to scan or copy a larger double sided document and it would be a lot easier to put it in the hopper and press a button same as with single sided stacks of material, than manually use the scanner glass and scan flip scan for every page.
But it’s rare enough an occurrence for me that it doesn’t translate into a major slowdown overall.
Before then was an HP Officejet which would constantly clean the print nozzles when not being used meaning I’d be out of ink eventually while printing nothing.
Ok so just shut it off when not using it right?
Sure but everytime I’d turn it on it’d take 5-10 minutes to check itself, including a mandatory nozzle cleaning.
I do not miss going to print B&W and being told it can’t because the yellow tank is empty.
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My little HL-1440 has been going strong since 2004. I had to replace the toner cartridge in 2014 but I’ve had no other trouble with it. I’ve got it plugged into my router so I can use it from any device in the house.
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OK, but yes, Brother will absolutely brick your printer also.
I have one, and they did. The solution is to buy only Brother cartridges (at 5x the price of generic ones) and enter their secret key combinations to restore usability.
Writing an ad for Brother does not actually change the truth. It just damages your credibility.
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I rarely print. That’s already not good for Inkjets, but I got in on HP’s “instant ink” program, where under 15 pages a month was still free, and they grandfathered me in. As a result, I’ve had the same HP printer for five years and only paid for ink the few times I needed to print more than ten pages in a month. In total, perhaps $10. Not bad for five years.
If I weren’t grandfathered in, I’d have paid $70-ish over those same five years; not as compelling a solution, and probably cheaper with a laser printer, even a colour one, considering the original cost of the printer.
The problem is what I use my all-in-one for isn’t printing. It’s scanning. The amount of paper I have to deal with in our “paperless” modern world is depressing, and having a feed-scanner in my printer that “just works” has been welcome.
If this thing dies, or if HP un-grandfathers me from their ink plan, that’ll be the difficult decision - how to solve the scanning and printing conundrum (and the additional space both devices would take up) efficiently.
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Quick “Wow!” update. I just received the HL-L2370DW I ordered, which is basically the cheapest one, and realized it comes standard with the 12,000 sheet drum and not a feeble little 1,200 page cartridge. I’m kind of amazed.
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Another satisfied Brother lover here. I bought two of them about a decade ago, one for home and one for a writer’s residency program my wife runs. The second one has gotten a lot of use, and both have been trouble-free, whether we’ve used Brother or third-party toner cartridges.
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That’s my kinda nerd! My favourite projects in Make magazine and the like are always the ones that solve practical problems like this, preferably with a strong “stick it to the man” or “I did this out of spite” component.
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Oh, damn! I didn’t realize they had resumed publishing as a quarterly. Subbing now.
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Brother Laser Printers was considered one of the most boring monks at the monastery. Nevertheless he was handy to keep around.
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Mine didn’t brick but I do need to use the secret key combo when it decides I should replace the toner.
My other complaint is the linux drivers are binary blobs for x86, which makes an rpi print server very difficult.
For my RPI server, I used CUPS. The only trouble was finding a (text) PPD file for the HL2040, but a HL2030 one did fine.
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I once bought a Brother printer at the thrift store for $5. It ran for about ten years. Bought a new Brother 4 or 5 years ago. Works like a charm.
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Thanks, I should give it another go. It looks like there are some alternate brother cups drivers ( which was what I was missing last time) … GitHub - pdewacht/brlaser: Brother laser printer driver
