Finding a reliable source of 3rd party supplies that don’t foul up your printer is a major pain. It seems like the Brother printer is holding / tolerating the non-Brother supplies alright.
As for me, after messing up several inkjets with 3rd party supplies I surrendered to HP and have not looked back. I love my color LaserJet All-In-One (I need scanning and copying) and even though it is a bit pricier, it’s a reliable printer.
UPDATE: Costco’s September flower had this printer for $280
I own the plus-scanner model of this printer. It replaced an older Brother laser I’d owned for 10 years+. Total workhorse. Would buy again.
I’ve been using a Brother MFC-8860DN, full scanning, duplex printing, faxing (not used in ages and ages) and the sucker still keeps running no matter what. Who needs color prints? I used to have a color inkjet for photos, but CVS allows me to upload them and get them printed cheaply and I can pick them up and they look great, better than I could ever get when I did it myself.
I think Laser is the only way to go, and when my Bother dies, I’ll seriously look into getting a color laser, and then turning off color so the kids don’t waste it on me.
John
I bet it’s still evil. All printers are evil. It’s biding it’s time, is all.
I prefer to cut out the middlemen and have hand-painted reproductions made by Chinese slave labor. It’s less polluting and takes up less of my precious wifi bandwidth.
My HP4050 laser has been biding its time for over 10 years now. Still on the original toner cartridge.
I concur completely. A few years ago, I switched to one of the cheapest Brother laser printers (HL-2240, $65), and have never looked back. No more empty dried out ink cartridges, clogged jets, paper jams, endless fiddling just to print a page. The laser printer simply prints fast and reliably every time. To refill the toner cartridge takes a $5 bottle of toner poured in through the end cap, and a minute with a Philips to reset the counter gear. The drum is replaceable too. This was perhaps the most time and hassle saving technology abandonment of my life.
just out of curiousity what does it the toner cartridge cost & what do you figure it is per sheet?
Also what is the largest sheet size?
I’ve had many Hp products but in the early 0’s I bought a quite expensive ($5000 range) HP inkjet proofer for my print business and hated it. It always had to check on the internet whether you were authorized to use the software for it, which wasn’t anything special. It was supposed to be a colour accurate proofer but that was only if you used the proprietary imation paper which was $5 each at 11x17 (and was never all that accurate).
You had to keep constantly using it so that the print heads didn’t dry out, and the final insult was that the both the ink cartridges and the print heads expired in six months (and they were $50 each). Not surprisingly the experience turned me off HP products.
At some point, I dunno, maybe around 2000, I realized I could finally afford a luxury item I had always thought of as unattainable. Like a 40 year old suddenly realizing he could afford that sports car he loved as a kid, I was delighted to discover I could pick up a Laserwriter 300 (or maybe 320) for something like 75 bucks. Made me feel like a millionaire printing on that thing.
Like a lot of people I got suckered into thinking I would want to print my own photos, then realized what a terrible deal inkjets were, how lousy the quality was, and never ended up printing photos anyway. Laser is the only way to go.
I have that one as well, and like the kids say - +1
I serviced those printers in college and when they go bad, it’s a stripped gear disaster. Luckily, those that did break tended to do so in the first 6 months.
Many years ago I bought a surplus HP Laserjet 1200 from an office that was being shut down. It is built like a tank and so far just keeps working.
No experience with HP injkets, though. The Canon ones I have tend to suck.
Just don’t drop the bottle of toner. We had an accident in the office supply warehouse I worked in and one of my coworkers got turned completely black. He was blowing that stuff out of his nose for weeks.
Good that nobody of the Sensitivity Brigades heard about it. He would be hunted as a “blackface” all over the Net.
I used to helldesk for Microsoft back in the XP days. Major cause of calls to tech support? Norton products and HP printer drivers b0rking everything.
I hate to say this, but the older stuff is better and longer lasting.
In most big offices now days, you’ll find those HP’s around in cube areas, still chugging away, but when it’s time to buy larger document center stuff and new printers, most are going with Ricoh, now.
HP really only does one thing well at this point - data center infrastucture gear. Rack and blade servers, blade chassis, storage, fibre switches.
And even then, if starting from scratch for a new virtualized environment in a data center (or replacing old) I’d go all in with Nutanix. Way more scalable and easier to set up and manage.
Don’t get me started on HP end user compute - it’s all garbage.
This has to be the greatest piece of native advertising ever. Literally minutes before opening boingboing.net, I had added the DCPL2540DW to my Amazon cart.
I wish I could say I had a similar experience. I tried, but the toner cartridges outlasted the printers. After the third Brother laser printer in a year, I bought a Xerox Phaser color laser, and couldn’t be happier. It was not that cheap, and toner is not cheap at all, but the color is good enough for proofs and one-offs.
regarding the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M277dw:
Legal size (8.5" x 14") for both printing and ADF scanning
black-and-white jobs cost 3 cents per sheet and color jobs cost about 15 cents per sheet.
That price can be reduced slightly by shopping around and paying less than MSRP.
Also, if you are printing for professional / sales purposes, brochure paper (from Staples or anywhere) runs about 10 cents per sheet, so full page color on brochure paper: 25 cents per sheet, but hey, you want to make a good first impression, right?
