I absolutely love my brother printer. I’ve had many third party ink salespeople cold call me to sell my business ink at discounted prices and not once have any of them been able to beat the prices on amazon for my LC-75. I once even had a sales manager hang up on me when I told him the price I’d last paid for toner ink.
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Bonus: You can get your cheap custom-tailored throw-away clothing from the same vendor.
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On the rare occasion I absolutely must print something I use the printer at the office. I don’t know what model it is but it prints things for me.
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well… i had a 5 year old HP 6500A die on me a couple of months back. went thru an absolutely hellish experience with HP’s support. after buying a newer replacement direct from HP, they would not exchange my ink cartridges because they were “expired”. so i returned the printer without opening it, but they lost it - never got my money back. after a month and 3 calls i was finally escalated to someone who finally took care of the problem and refunded my credit card.
by that time i had bought a new epson @ costco. while i’m sure there is an epson owner out there who went thru the same experience and now only buys HP, i can tell you that i’ll never buy another HP printer as long as i live.
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Toner is seriously horrible shit on the skin, in clothing, just horrible.I’ll add that anyone whose had the pleasure of playing with fly ash or various other concrete enhancers–Concrete Production and Distribution!!! Lemme hear ya holl…
ahem
Particulate so fine it can barely, if at all, be pinched between one’s fingers, and in any breath of air an open container of it…just horrible stuff.
Also, vacuuming spilled toner can lead to explosion of the aerosolized particles. Common vacuum cleaners aren’t designed to suppress the static charge buildup.
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Dust explosions are vastly underrated by the non-pyro public.
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I’ve purchased nothing but Brother printers - both inkjet and laser - for years. Great value, great lack of anything close to DRM. As we say: “Beau, bon, pas cher.”
Every time I see someone with, say, a HP printer, I ask them “why?”
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Dust, vapors and gases. Few realize that a couple ounces of evaporated hydrocarbon contain enough energy that can propel a ton of a vehicle for a significant distance, and that the energy can be all released in a single moment.
A few pounds of propane can blow up a heavy distillation tower and propel the pieces quite far away. (Trevor Kletz - What Went Wrong. Beautiful book full of bedtime stories.)
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We have 4 Brother’s, including the 2340 mentioned here and an HL5050 that has been in continuous use for over 10 years, and they are great as long as you buy the ones rated for office use. However, the cheap Linkyo cartridges praised by Mark are hit-and-miss; they are generally as good as most aftermarket cartridges, and we haven’t had one self-destruct, but the print quality is a visible step down from the ones Brother make. We have one in one of our printers now, but mainly use that for printing drafts.
The plebes don’t watch the Chemical Safety Board (US-CSB) youtube videos for fun. What else to expect.
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Laser is the only way to go. Ink jet is for suckers!
I have a brother laser all in one at home and my experience has been generally positive. I’m spoiled by my office printer (Canon Imagerunner bought off lease for ridiculously cheap) and so when the brother advertised “scan to email” I pictured what I’m used to which is SMTP send of a PDF straight from the printer to an email address. Nope - it requires an application running on a host machine and it opens outlook express (ha!) with the PDF attached. Uhh, thanks but no thanks. Just scan to file then my bro.
I found the Canon Fake Cartridges detecting software seems to be pretty effective.
Half the fakes I have bought have ending up failing. In the end I buy the real thing because it saves on headaches.
But, nowadays the paperless office is becoming more and more real. My kids even send their homework to the teacher using email. Paper matters less than it used to.
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Fun story: I actually recycled my drum on accident yesterday. Fortunately I recycled it where I work and so I just dug it out the next day. I know better, I was just in a big rush. Other customers have not always known better, and have had us recycle them only to come back livid about it. Sorry, not sorry. RTFM.
I love my Brother and highly recommend it to most (non-art, non-photography, etc.) students. They never listen and buy HP inkjets that die or stop accepting cartridges after a couple of years. I honestly don’t know why people buy HP anything. I’m not a brand whore. If it works, it works. A lot of unsophisticated technologies these days will just work forever regardless of brand. But HP has failed me so many times I’ve had to swear off them. I rank them above Dell. That’s not saying much.
Full color printing is overrated for home use. Like you’re really going to print ALL your selfies and pictures of food someday. If you have a business, or if you’re some kind of color junkie, maybe. But for the vast majority of tasks people ask their printer to perform, the color cartridges just sit there.
You won’t regret it though.
Cremora fireballs!
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We know what you were printing.
(Did you know about those little yellow dots the good quality printers have nowadays?)
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Many years ago, my wife spent what I thought was way too much money on a color HP LaserJet 5. She did enough printing back then that it definitely paid for itself in ink avoidance, even though I’d have gone with a black&white, and while it was built like a tank, it eventually died and we replaced it with a newer HP tank. One problem with the newer ones is that they “know” how many prints they can make from a given toner cartridge, so they’ll start whining about it long before they’re really out, or they’ll run out of one color and insist that you replace all the others as well, but we’re not printing as much as we did a decade ago.
The only time I’ve spilled toner was back in the 80s, when laser printers were new. It was a wet-process Imagen printer, so the toner was basically kerosene with carbon black in it, and sometimes it would gunk up and overflow when you were refilling it. Fortunately, the printer lived in the lab, with raised-floor tiles that were much easier to clean than carpet would have been.
