They are no doubt the best printers in your company's facility. Most printers for enterprises are garbage now without a service contract or managed print deal.
For personal use, the brother laser devices <$100. Are the best bet. Simple, reliable and most of the things that break are either field replaceable or you can ditch the device.
> For personal use, the brother laser devices <$100.
Rarely do I fanboy over a piece of electronic device, but this rings so incredibly true. I get thousands of pages out of my Brother laser printer per toner cartridge, it duplexes, the wireless just works. If you absolutely need a printer, get the sub-$100 brother laser printer.
looks under desk HL-2270DW, but that version appears to be an older model now (I've had it for about 5 years). Check out the newer version on Amazon for $80, its the version I bought for my Grandmother and it is just as reliable.
I have two HL-2040s and they've been bullet proof. What I'd really like now is a simple way to make them IPP Everywhere or Google Cloud Print printers to make all the cross platform usage identical.
Yes. Those things would survive a nuclear war and still print. Realistically, you need to replace the drum every year or two, depending on how much you print, and then just fill it up with the cheapest toner you can find - it will work no matter what.
You laugh but I only buy laserjet 5500 or 4700 printers now for home and work. They're cheaper to own and operate than most new inkjets if you are patient for toner deals on Amazon or ebay.
GPIB plotters. I still have one of those. It still works. It is the only "printer" I never had a single problem with. It runs on a now over 50 years old computer bus.
Canon 6030 was surprisingly good. It didn't have any driver issues (unlike other Canon printers that dropped support after 2000/XP) it just works on any Windows version, it doesn't need to reset chip in the cartridge to simulate new cartridge. And it worked for 1.5 years in hellish environment and is still going on - in extremely dusty tent (amount of dust that accumulates in an apartment in several months in one day), in plus 30 and in minus 20, in very high humidity. Basically field army conditions. And it continuously prints about 500 pages per week, sometimes up to 1000 per week. Personally I was amazed with its performance, taking into account that it is a budget printer. We just bought several cans of toner to refill manually and changed photo-drum every 2-3 months.
Printers are a bit like cars, not enough genericity. It used to be worth it in the 90s when there was innovation but now it's going backward every time. Everything is coupled where it shouldn't. Fat proprietary drivers, bad interfaces physical and software, coupled network links, cheap tricks to ensure regular costs (ink drm etc); bad mechanics (HP printers are more and more noisy)...
It's mostly a social problem, maybe it's useless since the printing industry is a remain of the xerox administrative era. The amount of prints is very low nowadays.
I'm sure there a nice void for a more humane printer kit, cheaper ink, acceptable open drivers, and more creative usage.
I'm sure there a nice void for a more humane printer kit, cheaper ink, acceptable open drivers, and more creative usage.
Industrial/commercial printers qualify at least for the "cheaper ink" part, and you can actually buy individual parts like printheads, complete with documentation; however, they cost at least an order of magnitude more and tend to have much lower resolutions.
Understood, maybe it's time for something or someone to put that market at rest so everybody can use their time for better thing, users and companies engineers ?
Stop presenting it as a tech/muchprofit product, make it like wires. Also kind of Google webm.
ps: also, and it's a bit off topic, slightly; you said non genericity is how they make profit, maybe (just a thought) it's not the only way. People seems frustrated and disenchanted by printers; it's a cool device if you allow user to take control and not obscure everything in the alleged purpose it's to make it easier. Potential new applications, usages; better ergonomics and repairability, longer lasting things, that's something people would pay for. The trend is around cool device + quick renewal but high freqs are harmful IMO companies should invert this business model.
My HP inkjet multifunction printer of 9 years still works great but it always has given me issues with re-filled cartridges and it loves wasting ink when you install a new cartridge by printing a test page.
I have a non wireless brother laser printer (hooked to a raspberry pi for wireless printing). I can't say enough good things about my brother printer.
I have though about buying a scanner and a color laser and wiring up a copier through the pi (scan then print at the push of a button) --- but finding a stand alone scanner that will do 11 by 17 has been a chalenge
I was dreading to buy a printer for a few years but a month ago I finally bought a small Brother HL-1110 laser printer. The instalation on Linix was completely hassle free and it worked perfectly fine. At least until I tried to print a gray-scale picture... For some reason tje printer refuses to print if the image covers more than roughly 50-60% of the page. Instead of giving any error it just blinks a few times and does nothing.
People just don't seem to realise that moving parts are hard. Phones are incredibly complex but (mostly) just keep working until you drop them on a hard floor. Cars have lots of moving parts and need maintenance. Screens use complicated technology and (mostly) just keep working. Printers have moving parts and break a lot.
Moving parts are inherently unreliable. We've just got really used to the incredible reliability that you get from solid state electronics.
My point is that you may well be right. Fusion power is an easier challenge than mechanical things not breaking because you can do it without moving parts (give or take a turbine).
My iPhone 4S has 0 moving parts, yet it had failed WiFi after 1 year. My Macbook has 0 moving parts, yet it had failed SSD. My Renault Logan has quite a lot of moving parts, yet I use it for a few years and almost 100 000 kilometers (and that's quite a lot of movement in extremely different weather conditions, from -40 to +40) and I had very minimal maintenance outside of regular oil change.
While I generally agree, the point is, even when there are no moving parts, there's a lot of failure points (temperature, vibrations) and manufacturers will create faulty devices, no matter what. If device is too good, they will cut expenses, until it'll be "good enough".
The MTBF is way lower. I've done this analysis for racks of server equipment and client devices. Failure rates are way lower -- low enough at scale to spend extra money on desktop SSD for low end use cases.
That said, environmentals are important. Hot solid state electronics fail.
The iPhone has a home button, power button, and volume buttons that all move. The Macbook's keyboard is comprised of moving parts. There's also the screen hinge which used to be a very common point of failure in laptops.
I didn't meant it as a mean time before failure. I don't mind thing breaking with usage, at all. I meant it as headache free tools. These products are bending backward to provide useless crap while ignoring more basic features. Also driver support is short lived now, I had to do ninja stuff to make a 2014 HP printer work on Win10. This kind of things.
To get back on the build solidity point, I've yet to have a mechanical failure on a printer. Problems are often fluid dynamics (clogged pipes, heads). Outside of these parts, a printer is pretty simple device, geometrically speaking.
It's often connecting to the printer that's the hard part. In my office we have two printers because some pcs can't connect to one but can the other. It's inconsistent as to who can connect to which.
Airprint actually works really great. I have a Samsung printer with Airprint + Google Cloud Printing - set it up once, and it just works all the time. Just have to do your research.
Good point, that said forgive me for not including Apple things in my quick research since I have zero Apple device. I always assume anything Apple is Apple only.