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Get a Brother laserjet.
I was highly considering a Brother, now I definitely will get one.
Epson Eco Tank is the cheapest best printer I’ve ever had.
Do you use a model with pigment inks or dye inks? I currently use a pigment based hp inkjet. I thought about switching to ecotank but the pigment refills are comparable to hp pigment cost. I assume the ecotank would get a higher page count from the same cost of ink? The pigment based ecotank models I shopped around were quite a bit more expensive than the entry level dye based models.
I use the cheap Eko tank that doesn’t auto feed…wish I had done the auto feed. It just takes a 15 dollar bottle of ink for each color. In 4 years I’ve used one black bottle and 1/2 the colors.
I’ve had two in the span of about 16 years. Only reason I got a new one was because I couldn’t find decent drivers for it for Windows 8. Considering with HP and Epson inkjets they wouldn’t even last 2 years, 8+ years is a good deal. Brother printers are excellent.
Mines been good. Light to medium duty use.
I’ve had my brother for 11 years, still going strong
I’m at five years for ours. We used the included ‘teaser’ toner cartridge for almost three years. After the first year, it warned us the toner was low. We laughed and turned the warning off and it just continued to provide toner for nearly another two years.
We now have an “extra large” toner cartridge. Like owning a parrot, my wife and I expect it’ll outlast both of us and our children or grandchildren will get stuck with it. We’re both 35.
I got a huge office printing center thing from government liquidation out of my nearby military base for $55. It came with more toner than I could ever use in my lifetime.
Sadly, they are also evil now. Latest firmware (~2020) outright blocks third party cartridges or, even more evil, accepts them and then secretly and intentionally, prints like crap:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
Everything until ~2019 is awesome, though. Just disable firmware updates.
Brother printer gang printing with their tears of joy.
I got a Brother with the big chonker carts, I usually only print once every 5-6 months and I’m still g2g like 5-6 years in.
I gotta run a cleaning cycle each time usually but that’s perfectly understandable haha.
Here too, just don’t update your firmware (and turn off auto-updates). Brother went evil around 2020, too.
What !! Really? That’s sad
Easy. Never buy HP. Their printers are shit and so are their laptops.
It amazes me that there are so many people who buy a printer, are offered this “pay $x a month for Y pages” type of plan, and say yes. I mean, sure, HP sucks, but they wouldn’t be able to get away with such slimy business practices if there weren’t so many people willing to pay.
I am obligated by my work to offer this to customers when they buy an HP printer and I make it really clear that it’s a bad deal for most customers. There are some edge case examples, like a lady with a small business who always prints exactly like 3 pages a day. The other customers who agree to buy it are almost always the super old people who don’t want to have to come to the store to get more ink. I think it’s a shit program that should be scrapped entirely, but some people really don’t care if it’s a bad deal as long as they get the convenience. No different than 7-11 up charging shit because it’s easier to buy it at the market down the street than the Walmart a few miles down the road.
Spend a bit more and get a laser and have it last exponentially longer. That’s how I’ve been rollin.
I keep saying it around here - my 1996 Lexmark laser just died in July.
Almost 30 years old. And I think I can fix it.
My cheap 300$ laser died after 8 years, so replaced it with a 600 better one. Let’s see how this goes 😂
Breaking news: Printer company behaves like printer companies always have. User hostile.
This just in: Capitalism works
If you still own a HP printer, it’s your own fault. Sorry. Got an Canon with liquid refill, loved it, equipped my company with it & recommended it to everyone I know. It’s not even expensive & the quality is impeccable. Plus: no problems whatsoever over Linux.
EDIT: CANON, not Epson. I’m distracted sometimes. Canon PIXMA G4511, sub 300 Eur.
Wait till you find out it purges the lines every print, and while you can replace the purge sponge, the system doesn’t always have a “reset the purge sponge” option. And the ones that do use a rather unknown button combination that may or may not work.
I have an ecotank, no linux support.
Sorry, that happens when I do too many things at the same time. Canon. I’m talking of the Canon G4511 liquid refill.
My epson ecotank l6490 works like charm with Linux…
For me too with wifi, and the standarised network printing 🤣 but not when directly connected to pc with usb.
My FIL owns an HP with a subscription. I’ve given up on the things he wastes money on; most of them he’s not really technically savvy enough to implement anyway. (And, yes, buying a printer and getting it installed may exceed his technical abilities)
I have one of those, it won’t work with my Linux though :/
Now I fucked it up, my finger wrote "Epson x while my brain thought “Canon”… I was talking the Canon G4511.
I only use it for scanning now. I was mad when my parents bought a new one.
Education is the key.
Being boycotting this shitstain company since Carly Fiorina turned it into a perfect example of peak 1990’s MBA management style (the kind that killed companies like GE) and, once again, I get to pat myself on the back for it.
Almost 20 years of regular smug self-satisfaction for free is a pretty good investment.
Any reliable recommendations for ink jets, in that case?
Last time around I needed a new printer a couple of years ago, I looked around for decent inkjets and couldn’t really find any brands which weren’t undergoing enshittification, so as I only really need B&W I decided to pony up the extra money and bought a “cheap” Brother laser printer instead.
Thanks, I share the same opinion, but don’t want a particle source at home for small/mid-volume printing.
None.
Go laser. It’s worth the difference in price.
I have a 1996 Lexmark laser that just quit on me in July. It’s 14" wide, about 9" tall and 9" deep.
I prefer lasers in special ventilated environments, but not at my home 😀
If like me you don’t print much but still need a printer occasionally, get a laser printer (possibly a scanner multifunction, since it can be handy to scan your receipts), and just buy your cartridges normally. Laser toner won’t dry up like ink does, so you end up paying less for your infrequent prints in the long run.
Go to your local goodwill/thrift store and check for laser printers.
Get a laser printer, with toner cart, for less than 20, often less than 10, bucks.
Yeah but, how big are they?
Old ones can be big, yeah.
Depends.
Though I suspect what you can find used for a good price will generally be larger.
You have a scanner in your pocket, just a reminder.
It doesn’t do as good a job, unless there’s something I could be doing better.
Tiny Scanner for Android
Adobe Scan works as good as a scanner if you use their cropping system to square up the page afterwards.
It’s probably down to the scanner app. I’m using CamScanner.
Ink subscription is a bad descriptor
You pay per page, if you have extra ink leftover then you don’t have access to it
Isn’t that worse? It’s hard to say at these levels of corporate nastiness but I was surprised they could go lower
Yes, the ink subscription is their corporate speak
At this point, I am positive the HP printer marketing department, have lost their collective minds.
Most marketing departments are retarded, but this seems to be a new level of dumb. Bricking printers, blocking 3rd party, messing with firmware, price gouging…
Brother are simple, reliable, low cost and dependable. Every one I have used in commercial or watched in home use have been straight up boss. I don’t own one, but it will be my next printer when the Epson runs out of ink, mark my words!
They do it because they can get away with it. Zero consequences, and they still have a legion of customers who are happy to piss their money down the drain on egregiously overpriced ink.
I totally agree with you: Brother laser printers all the way.
As a satisfied owner of a Brother laser printer, I can safely say I would never want anything else.
People keep buying them and signing up for an ink subscription. If people are that dumb, they’d be insane NOT to milk them for cash
This. Just like Apple users.
Seriously, fuck HP.
HP actually has a brilliant business strategy.
-
First get a huge customer base via cheap ass product
-
Remove the customers who care about quality
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Remove the customers who care about reliability
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Remove the customers who care about price
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Remove the customers who pay attention to their monthly bills
voila, you have like 3 people left who you can charge infinite money for a lump of shit. Infinite profit margins
-
I’ve seen a lot of recommendations for Brother, I want to add one for Ricoh.
I bought a B/W laser printer from Ricoh (213w IIRC) a decade ago for under 40 bucks and a new generic, no-name Amazon toner refill for 25 like 5 years ago. Printed thousands of pages, just sitting in a corner under the stairs.
Bonus: it uses Wi-Fi (so anyone in the house can print) and is compatible with generic PCL drivers in Linux.
Any laser printer is better for occasional printing. Ink doesn’t dry up, no nozzles to get clogged. It just sits there waiting to be used and prints beautifully when you do. I’m so done with ink jets.
“Ink doesn’t dry up” maybe you meant toner.
Well, ink can’t dry up if it doesn’t have any ink to dry up.
I think they don’t make the home printers anymore.
That sucks, but maybe second-hand can be found, even cheaper.
Thanks for the advice I am going to see if I can find one
The only thing that still might save printers is competition.
Euuhh does nobody realize Brother has existed for like 20 years and doesn’t pull all this HP shit? They even have label printers which allow third party labels.
There are inkjet printers now from multiple other brands which are great too and allow full refills.
Just don’t buy HP it’s that easy.
Dude. Brother was founded in 1908.
1908 was … like 20 years ago.
Euuhh does nobody realize Brother has existed for like 20 years and doesn’t pull all this HP shit?
You were right until around 2020 when Brother, too, started to roll out firmware updates outright blocking third party toners or even worse, making the printers intentionally print like crap with third party cartridges:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
Now, that even Brother has turned to the dark side, I really don’t know what printer to recommend other than older/used Brothers with firmware updates disabled.
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Also, laser printers don’t dry out. Don’t need a subscription.
“They cost money because they save money”
My 1996 Lexmark laser just died this summer. Fortunately I inherited an HP laser (older one) with wifi. Works like a champ.
Picked up a used color laser for $50 a couple years ago.
With all the Big Brains at HP making up all this atrocious bullshit you’d think one of them would say “why don’t we buy all the competition like the large media companies are doing? It’s not like the US will stop us, hell they’ll give us subsidies or something.”
You know why all of the printer companies are so shitty? It’s because they’re in the business of selling printers. That’s why they break and cost so much to maintain. You know why the sewing machine company sells printers that work? Because they accidentally let some of their sewing machine engineers make printers.
Who is the sewing machine company?
That would be Brother.
i had no idea, nice
Yeah, until the printer engineers took over from the sewing machine engineers in around 2020. Even Brother is evil now, rolling out firmware updates that render third party toner useless or do even more evil shenanigans via firmware:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
I don’t think there’s a good brand left these days, Brother was the last bastion of “not shitty” and now they, too, were enshittified.
