[wazanator]

Personally I would recommend Brother every time for a printer. They're not fancy but they are well built and don't require you to install a software suite. Roommate and I are still using the same laser printer from college. It's not wireless but if we really wanted to we could attach a pi and setup a printer pool but for now a long cable serves us just fine for the few times we need to print.

[rootbear]

+1 on Brother printers. I'm on my second Brother laser printer and It Just Works. I also have a Canon Ink Jet that is mostly harmless. My sister's HP printer, however...

[GordonS]

Another +1 for Brother here - I finally switched away from inkjets hell around a year ago, to a Brother laser MFD.

It always worked completely as expected, zero issues. Price was good too.

[ehsankia]

+1, I struggled with many printers until I saw the light and finally got a Brother. I still have it a decade later and never had any issues.

[pilsetnieks]

A tangent but still - what does make a printer fancy? Brother has models with every bell and whistle everything else has as well - color LCDs, wifi, airprint. What else is there that would make it fancier?

[privateSFacct]

Some systems require a big software suite or make it very hard to download basic drivers, so you end up with a "fancy" bunch of software - yes it let's you do a few more things, but not a ton. You can have stuff where you pay by the page now - with full telematics back to the printer owner. The one issue - you stop paying and the printer stops working. It's pretty cool - but the overhead (everything has to be working including internet, credit card not changed etc) means its more brittle.

[mrec]

Thanks, I'll be in the market soon and this is exactly the sort of info I was looking for. Since you mention "the few times we need to print", is it safe to assume that their kit is fine with very very infrequent use? Inkjets really didn't like this, and I don't know much about lasers.

[nwallin]

Inkjets use liquid ink, and if the ink dries on the spray nozzle, it's dead. This process takes about a month. If you're lucky, the nozzle is part of the cartridge and you need to spend $100 (or more) on new cartridges. Otherwise you need to buy a new printer. Some printers have a mode where they'll spray a little bit though the nozzle if you haven't used the printer in ~2 weeks, but they need to be plugged in.

Laser printers use dry ink that never... gets more dry. I pulled my Brother out of storage after 2+ years and it worked great.

Toner is also considerably cheaper than inkjet ink, and lasts significantly longer. I haven't bought new toner in 8 years.

Personally, I use a black and white laser printer, and if I really, really need to print in color I'll do it at work. (happens basically never) I recognize not everybody has this luxury, and some people have far more need to print in color than I do.

If you need color printing volume is high enough to keep the nozzles in good shape, you're probably better off with a color laser printer because the ink is so much cheaper. If you don't print in color that much, it's a terrible, terrible idea to buy an inkjet printer.

Don't buy inkjet printers.

[magduf]

Sorry, but a bit of a pedantic note here: laser printers do not use dry ink. They don't use ink at all; they use "toner". Toner is really nothing more than microscopic particles of colored plastic. The printer uses electrostatic attraction to put the particles on a sheet of paper in a pattern, and then a "fuser" (a small heater) to melt the plastic so that it binds to the paper, without catching the paper on fire. So toner never goes bad because it's really nothing more than dust.

As for your B&W laser, it used to be that color lasers were horribly expensive so only companies had them. These days, color lasers have gotten pretty cheap, and aren't that much more than the B&W lasers. My Brother was about $200 IIRC. Of course, you can get a small B&W for under $100 now, but still, $200-300 is not budget-breaker for anyone in the IT industry. So even if you don't really need color that much, if you're in the market for a printer, I'd advise just spending the extra money and getting the color model, unless you really want your printer to be small (the color models are usually a lot larger, because of the separate toner cartridges).

I would never advise using an inkjet unless you really need to. They're a terrible deal financially; the only thing they're better at is costing less initially, but the consumables are very expensive and don't last long. They do make sense for some high-end high-volume applications, but those use more industrial-sized printers with continuous-flow ink, not small consumer printers with overpriced ink carts. Honestly, consumer inkjets are probably the biggest scam in all of computing history.

[simias]

I bought a cheap (<100euro) wifi-enabled black and white Brother laser printer a year ago and it works great.

[tasogare]

I recommended it as well. I had no issue in 10 years with mine at home, and the ones at work are reliable too.