At least you can still buy parts to service HPs without having to pay for some Authorized Service Center certification, and the business-class models are fairly modular, so you can replace just the fuser or roller or gear you need instead of the Everything-In-A-Single-Part-Number assembly. Last time I had to work on a Brother laser none of that was possible. It’s the one thing that keeps me buying Laserjets.
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Last I knew that was copiers only, but things change, maybe it’s in printers now as well? I know that Photoshop and such look for certain shades of green, they could do that as well.
Never understood why local counterfeiters bother. It would be one thing if you were in a foreign country with a good set of plates, but at small scale the risk/reward equation just doesn’t work, and the larger the scale the greater the probability of getting ratted out. (Artists are bad at math? 
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I’ve got a Samsung color laser printer. Usage over wifi is a breeze, and I thought prints looked good, but I almost always print b/w. After printing something with large patches of a single colour, I discovered big patches of blue in my green. And this is with official Samsung cartridges. So even official supplies don’t guarantee quality.
It’s true. I’ve got a colour printer and I primarily print in black and white. Still, it’s great to have the option to print in colour when I need it.
Unfortunately I recently discovered the colour prints are actually pretty bad in quality. The green gets bluish to one side, and what’s light green on the screen comes out almost as dark as the dark green.
I used to do that too, until I became a freelancer. Now it’s essential that I have my own printer and scanner. The first few times I went to a print shop, but that’s just a pain.
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Last year, I switched from a Canon colour inkjet to a Brother mono laser. The Brother works great; the only downside is the software, which is very very bare bones. Definitely worth it, though, for the money I’m saving, the speed of the laser, and the quality of the print.
Two more major arguments for opensource printer firmware.
Whether DRM or tracking or this crap, the cops should be evicted out of our equipment.
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Scrolling thru when I saw a pic of my printer. Very helpful, thx.
Switched to a similar model laser when I realized that 99% of my printing was BW anyway. And though it started telling me the toner was low almost immediately, I learned to ignore it. Great, cheap printing.
Half price cartridges of the already below market prices is an extra bonus.
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I bought an Epson WF-3540 inkjet in April 2013. It’s still pretty great. Fast, cheap, and looks good. We have not yet replaced any ink cartridges, though I did get a new one a few months ago. I probably don’t print as much stuff as some people, though.
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Add my vote for this Epson. I’ve got one too, and I like it. I do print quite a bit, and I’ve replaced the cartridges a couple of times. I do recommend the extra-high-capacity #127 cartridges-- they last quite a bit longer than the smaller #126 cartridges.
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I’ve had 3 Brother laser printers, 2 HL5250 and one 5275, and all eventually had drum progressive drum trouble. They were fine for a year or so, but then slowly started to mangle duplexes. I print a lot if manuals for my business. I switched to a Canon LBP 6670DN which has been flawless. The cartridges replace the toner and drum, and linkyo replacements are $30. The toner save mode is better than Brothers, the cartridges seem to last longer as well.
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We bought a Brother scanner/printer, because it allowed for scanning 11x17 documents. It prints okay, but the driver software is lousy, the WiFi connectivity is a pain, and the customer support was awful.
You install a great whack of software that constantly chats with the printer; the software lets you know that the printer is out of ink (especially when it isn’t), but won’t tell you if the WiFi connection has failed or if the printer is off; both of these are important when the printer is on another floor of the house.
To connect to WiFi requires that you determine what the printer’s IP address should be, and enter that, the WiFi network name, password, etc… That by itself isn’t such a bad thing if it happens once, but when the printer loses its mind and you have to reenter everything, it gets old fast.
The manual explicitly says that you should use a power bar or similar to turn the printer off if it won’t be used for a few days; minimize parasitic power use, all that. But if you leave the printer unpowered for a couple of days, it loses its memory of its configuration, IP address and all, and you have to re-enter it all from scratch. When I asked Brother’s tech support about this, they went to great lengths to prove that this was explained in the manual and was normal behaviour. The impression I was left with wasn’t anything like sympathy; it was that they had to prove that I was wrong and they weren’t.
I spent most of an hour yesterday cleaning contacts and nozzles (again), doing soft resets, factory resets, and checksum resets (again) to try to coax the HP inkjet into actually printing a page (other than its own test page). I was not going to buy yet another set of ink cartridges (that would fail after a couple of pages) just because it suddenly decided that the ones in it have mysteriously become incompatible since the last time I printed something.
Reviews led me to this Brother, but I need a scanner and because I use it in my art workflow I wanted color, even it it’s not perfect. I got the MFC-9340CDW on sale and it was super quick and easy to set up. Unlike the HP, it seems to just work with everything we’ve tried so far (PC, chromebook, android phone). No more need to forward email attachments to the only computer where the printer drivers work and then go boot that up to print. Although it’s not intended for photos, we did try printing one with it, and were surprised that it actually looks better than photos that we’ve printed from inkjets in the past.
Of course, I can’t comment on longevity, but the fact that it just worked so much better out of the box was a pleasant surprise. The only negative was that I decided to buy toner with it for when the starter cartridges run out and accidentally got the ‘high capacity’ cartridges, so ended up spending more than double what I had planned. But if what people say is true, that laser toner does actually last awhile, then it will still turn out to be a fraction of the cost of buying a new set of inkjet cartridges for every few pages.
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Random thought. How much of the problems with drivers can be worked around by using a linux-compatible printer and running a Postscript printserver on a Raspberry Pi or similar board?
Same for scanners, via the SANE system.
Could that work? How well? Where are the snags?
Those things run like tanks. I always recommend Epson inkjets over any other brand, especially for their economy with ink. If you really want to do photo printing, get an Epson.
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