Ah, right. I guess I was tunnel-visioned by my almost printing nothing but text.
Ah, okay, thanks for explaining that. My inkjet Epson prints photos so poorly that if I ever want that, I email the images to a local pharmacy. They have better paper for that too. Again, that was my own tunnel-vision problem, since I don’t even think of that as “printing,” but of course it is.
DERP!
I used to have to regularly work with a ridiculously expensive A0 colour printer, shared with a dozen other people, but my default is still old-fashioned ink presses.
(You can kick them if they fuck up 
)
It’s not a good reason; but “there’s a nest of SaaSholes involved” is a depressingly common reason.
If you kick something like a Heidelberger Tiegel you’ll end up in casualty.
That’s very true, but you often only get into trouble if you break equipment, not yourself.
We moved recently but were 1 block from the library before. I could take the littles and set them up in the kids section while I did whatever printing I needed. It’s a very small library, so I couldn’t help but keep an ear on them; I treat libraries with the reverence most reserve for church.
Due to the aforementioned move, I had to recently get a printer for the home and based on recommendations here got a monochrome Brother. I was going to buy a spare cartridge out of the gate to avoid the frustration of running out, but when it arrived I realized that it ships with the highest-capacity cartridge available! I was shocked. The last printer I got was free via my company buying an HP laptop that was bundled with a free printer had a cartridge that lasted, like 20 pages. I didn’t even bother replacing it and gave the turd away.
Institutional sales for them are massive; schools, large businesses, government offices, etc. It’s how I got that shitty printer.
Ah, guess I missed that last part. In that case an online service would indeed be the obvious choice. Or possibly one of those ink-free photo printers if all you want is postcard sized prints. Inkjets are incredibly poorly suited to infrequent use - unless you really enjoy running repeated cleaning and calibration cycles, replacing dried up ink, and so on.
That’s an explanation, not a reason in my intended sense of the word. It is indeed the reason why things are they way they are, but it is still not a reason for them to be like that.
Oh, I think you mean a good reason?
Our Brother laser printer is old enough that it doesn’t do networking.
Fortunately, there are these:
Works great, and doesn’t go through anyone’s cloud.
“networked printing” and “directly hooking the printer up to the network” are different things.
We have USB printing, with an old computer set up as a print server.
ETA:
See also
ETA^2: For @joed
My $80 Brother Laser printer turned 20 years old last month, and last week it perfectly printed my new car insurance card. It’s only on its third toner cartridge. I hope it lives forever.
yeah, sporadic printing and ink jets don’t go well together. I think a cheap b&w laser printer (Brother) fulfills most people’s needs and on those rare occasions when you really need color, visit a Staples.
FFS! I’m into retro computing as much as any other geek but I never expected that to include printers! Bad HP bad!
Screw Photoshop and everything else Adobe makes. It’s another subscription scam from top to bottom.
That doesn’t disprove what I said. Don’t complain to me, I don’t work for them.
Unless that server is also doing something else useful, you’re then using - depending on the computer and its age and configuration - something like 20-100W of power 24/7 just to keep your printer available. (20W would be an extremely efficient SFF PC of some sort, 100W would be something like an old Core 2 desktop) (you could also get that down to a few watts using something like a raspberry pi). Unless you’re running purely off renewable and can use the heat I’d call that a pretty bad solution.
Also that solution is dependent on being able to place the printer within ~5m of where that computer sits, which won’t be practical for everyone - nor will setting up a solution like that be feasible for most people. Of course, most routers support usb printer sharing, but that again requires the printer to be within a 5m USB cable run from the router, which often won’t be feasible. Having a printer with ethernet is by far the best solution, but even wifi is fine.
Nah, just a reason that actually logically applies to the item in question without first applying a thick layer of corporate greed.
… Brother has always had an interesting no-bullshit just-get-it-done philosophy
I’ve had great experiences with Brother laser printers too. The one I shared with my ex (both academics working from home during the pandemic, so lots of printing) was reasonably cheap, worked flawlessly, printed double sided b/w pages quickly and had a rock solid connection both over wifi and ethernet (the version with ethernet was something like $20 more than the wifi version), and made zero complaints about third party toner cartridges (which were also monitored just fine in their bare-bones but functional software). Would definitely go that route again.
Sorry, not complaining to you, just adding to the list of ‘pay to play forever’ companies.
