[sorum]

People are tired of two things in general: lousy business practices around ink cartridges and the damn printer not cooperating.

Two birds with one stone: buy a Brother b/w laser printer or a scan/fax multifunction one. You’ll never look back.

If you for some reason don’t like Brother, you have two other brands to choose from: Ricoh and Epson. Yes, your only 3 good choices are from Japan; they seem to be the only ones who know what they’re doing.

[JasonFruit]

Exactly! I want a printer, because my Brother b/w laser printer is a solid piece of equipment that prints many, many pages on a reasonably affordable ink cartridge, and it will last for years. What I didn't want was another crappy inkjet that was made as cheaply as possible to sell overpriced ink cartridges, and will have to be replaced in December.

[acdha]

Nth-ing the Brother laser printer recommendation. I bought one from Costco during the pandemic, hooked it, and everything just works - laptops, phones, etc. - and toner is dirt cheap and lasts for years. My wife is a teacher so she’s probably been responsible for 99% of the total page count and we’re still barely on our second toner cartridge 3 years later.

[burkaman]

This is good advice, but I don't think this is why most people with printers don't have them. I need to print something approximately two times a year. I would rather go to my office or the library when that happens rather than have even a very functional appliance taking up space in my apartment. I have never in my life needed to print something so urgently that I can't wait until the library is open.

[sorum]

Maybe it's the combination of living in the US + having kids, but I'm finding myself printing a LOT. Not a week goes by without a couple of forms to print, fill out by hand and (perversely) scan and email back.

Main culprits are schools, doctors, dentists and extracurricular activities.

[vikingerik]

Canon is also fine. I have a Canon laser that's worked fine for 10 years now, even with generic toner cartridges. (I don't know if newer Canons behave well in that area.)

I thought Epson was notorious for playing lockout games with toner cartridges, almost as bad as HP, although the info I've seen is only anecdotal.

[Fred27]

Canon is off my list. Not only did I have the usual inkjet issues with my last canon multifunction printer, but it refused to scan when it was out of ink too. That's just inexcusably and intentionally bad behaviour.

[sshine]

> buy a Brother b/w laser printer

This.

People don't want crappy inkjet printers that are expensive to refill, the ink dries up, the machines break.

A medium-sized Brother laser printer is worth its own weight.

The only reason you may not want it is the space it takes.

Let's mostly have good printers and share them.

[sorum]

> The only reason you may not want it is the space it takes.

Having a separate scanner, I'm really liking the size of Brother's smallest models: 14 inch long, 14 inch wide, 7 inch tall.

[etrautmann]

What do you scan? I haven’t needed a scanner for 10 years and if I need receipt scanning I just use my phone camera.

[sorum]

Two use cases for scanning:

1. Forms that can't be filled out digitally

Forms that can only be filled out by hand are annoyingly common. Surprising amount of PDFs to fill out that are just a scan of a hardcopy, where they haven't bothered marking up the fields so that you can fill it out in a PDF viewer. It's essentially an image, so the infuriating process is Print --> Fill out with pen --> Scan --> Email

2. Documents I want to preserve

Financial, tax, medical, legal, school-related, receipts for major purchases etc. Trying to go paperless, so +80% of incoming paper gets thrown away. Remaining 20% gets scanned. After being scanned I shred or throw away the hardcopy. Only a tiny fraction of documents do I keep the hardcopy, where it would be important to show that you have the original (think certificates, notarized stuff etc).

[bdw5204]

I've never had any issues with my HP color laser printer. Bought it about 3 and a half years ago and have never had to change the toner. It just works whenever I need it and whether I need it to print, scan or copy.

I think you're probably fine with printers as long as you buy a laser printer. Ink printers are junk and unless you use it constantly the ink cartridge will die every single time you need it. HP's InkJunk printers are cheap because they know they'll recoup the price selling you ink cartridge after ink cartridge.

[dehrmann]

To elaborate, toner doesn't dry out.

I've had a few cheap Brother laser printers. They've both been good enough and cheap enough to operate, but neither did graphics well.

[verisimilitude]

Yours is the correct answer (B&W laser). Ours reports 8,620 pages successfully printed. The laser cartridges last an absurd amount of pages, and they don't dry out. I've had to replace our Brother printer's feeder cam lever (part #LY2579001) twice. I expect I'll have to do that a few more times before I'm done with this printer. But, what do you expect after 12 years?

[dgacmu]

Brother DCP-8155DN multifunction, 10 and change years old,

- Pages printed: 18151

- Total Paper Jams: 5

- Toner replacements: 3

Working like a charm EXCEPT that on the last toner replacement I must have spilled some toner and haven't finished fixing it, so I have a few speckles on the first page that prints. But happy other than that and has been going strong for years.

Five paper jams in 10 years is simply amazing to me (and it's accurate).

[irrational]

We have a Brother printer, but recently AirPrint has stopped working (despite working fine for years). I have not been able to figure out why and have come to the conclusion that it must be a hardware issue. Has anyone had any experience with this? I haven't tried opening it up to see if maybe there is something I can replace to get it working again.

[x0x0]

Quick question -- do they keep the drivers updated for Mac?

Canon basically deprecated my perfectly working all-in-one laser + scanner by refusing to update the drivers for new MacOS versions.

edit: specifically, the scanner, esp the autofeed scanner bits

[sorum]

I'm using a Mac and the default AirPrint drivers. Don't have any of the Brother software installed, even the scanner works perfectly through the native macOS settings.

[irrational]

Brother? No, they do not. Recently Airprint stopped working on our Brother printer. I have tried everything I can think of to fix it, including updating drivers, except... they no longer have mac drivers for our printer.

[NovemberWhiskey]

Do you mean AirPrint? That's printer-side functionality that explicitly doesn't depend on any drivers; that's literally its entire value proposition.

[irrational]

Sorry, yes, AirPrint stopped working. I know it is on the printer, but I was getting desperate after trying everything else and figured updating the drivers couldn’t hurt. Though, that did lead me to find a Brothers program that allows us to continue using the printer using a cable. Though it is an extremely barebones program. Everything has to be converted to a pdf before it can be printed.

[germinalphrase]

I have been using a Brother b/w laser for approx. three years and have had zero issues or headaches. Just works.

[matthewaveryusa]

I’ll second the brother bw laser printer. It’s been a family workhorse for a decade. I’ve hooked it up to a cups server and it pretty much worked out of the box as a network printer.

[raincom]

I’m also tired of refurbed cartridges for brother laser printers. What do you suggest? Buy OEM cartridges?

[lliamander]

I bought a Brother printer based on the review from rtings.com and I haven't looked back.

[AlanYx]

What would you recommend for a color printer?

[kevstev]

Just one anecdote, but I bought a Canon in either late 2014 or early 2015 and it works great- it looks like I have printed about 6000 pages on it- mostly academic papers. IIRC it was a clearance that was selling for $300ish when it originally listed for about $700. I use off-brand toner replacements which work fine, from what I recall I have only bought one set of replacements. My only real complaint with it is that its large and weighs about 80 pounds, not that I move it often, but it takes up a significant amount of room.

Its a Canon Color ImageClass MF8580CDW, its well past its sale date, but it looks like this line of printers still exists: https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/printers/multifunction-printe...

[j_not_j]

Perhaps surprisingly, the HP ink tank printer ("Smart Tank 510 series") is not too too bad, we are about 300 sheets in and still lots of ink left. (This is impossible on an HP cartridge inkjet).

Print quality is good; the image does not bleed and the paper does not warp from "wet ink" syndrome.

But it is expensive.

And it has the oppressive "login to HP website to print". Nope, I avoid that.

Pro tip: decline auto upgrade of the "HP Smart" software; one day HP will "update" your software to require login before printing. The workaround is to remove that software and load the "enterprise" class packaged software.

[JoshTriplett]

> we are about 300 sheets in and still lots of ink left. (This is impossible on an HP cartridge inkjet).

Generally, the cartridges lasted well over a ream of paper (500 sheets) for me, often closer to two.

However, the "setup" cartridges that most of their printers come with are much smaller, and don't last as long. This fundamentally seems like a bad marketing move, giving people a poor initial impression of how long ink cartridges last.

(My personal reason for always going for HP is that they reliably work with Linux, even over the network, for both printing and scanning.)