[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).