> Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine
> The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model.
https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...
“ And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again…”
Cheeky, I like it (here, nor generally).
1. https://www.gawker.com/adult-website-editor-throws-twitter-t...
2. https://kotaku.com/the-verges-infamous-pc-build-gets-fixed-1...
I realize Kotaku and Gawker aren't much better reputation-wise, but a journalism outfit (The Verge) issuing DMCAs against people reporting on them rankled me much worse than the former two. Absolute hypocrisy.
Their entire business model is to make great basic products.
The stock toner only lasted for a year or about 200 pages. A replacement toner costs 50€, more than a single black ink cartridge would cost, and the toner is rated for 1k pages only while the 44€ ink cartridge is rated for 2.2k. (!) In fact, for even one of the most expensive inkjet printers I can find, replacing all _4_ color cartridges costs in the vicinity of 100€. There are single color toners that are more expensive than that.
It is true that for an inkjet cartridge you will never be able to print the rated 2.2k pages, specially if you don't print frequently or in long-spaced batches. A single nozzle cleanup probably wastes around 200 pages equivalent of ink, and you definitely need one after about one week of not using the printer.
The math in these cases favors the lasers, albeit not by several orders of magnitude as is often claimed. Also, the same amount of ink is wasted if you don't use the printer for a week than whenever you don't use it for half a year.
My laser printer will sit there quietly out of the way indefinitely. Then I surprise it with a print job and it just does what I asked before getting out of the way again. Repeat in 3 months, same story.
Wait, do you know that most printers have the ability to clean these clogs (by wasting a large chunk of the ink)? You don't really need to throw the cartridge away. This is why I say that printing the rated amount of pages is difficult, since these cleanup operations waste a large chunk of the ink.
In my experience, an installed cartridge does not become unusably dry even after 1 year of total lack of use. That's because I've had all 4 colors installed for almost a year and they're still printing, and they were open & already close to the expiration date by the time I bought them (amazon warehouse stuff)...
There is absolutely zero chance you'll ever get 2k+ prints from an inkjet cartridge unless you're printing a small emoji on the center of the page. The most I think I've seen is ~500 pages of text.
I'm still on whatever toner came with the printer. It uses the 44a toner, which is ~£45 on Amazon (or third part ones are available for £12), and it's rated for 1000 pages.
I had a look at the HP and brother range of cartridges, and every single one of them was rated less than 200 pages. I found _one_ brother cartridge that does 500 pages but on a £500 printer.
What inkjet cartridges are you looking at that do 2200 pages?
In my case, I had to buy a new (aftermarket) drum unit, and have to go in and clean the rollers, and dust it out every one in a while. I suspect most owners don't do these things and decide to just buy a new one every 5 years or so.
Instead of supporting HP’s printer business, I buy third party toner cartridges on Amazon for 25% the price.
The official supplies are generally inferior.
I’m not sure how much this applies to brother, but it means I pay $5-10 per year for toner. We use multiple reams of paper a year.
The off brand toner cartridges work OK, but they have much lower than advertised capacity. I had run the numbers 6 months ago, and the most economical option is the high capacity OEM brother units. However, my one real annoyance is the printer reports low toner well before it is actually low, we get ~500-1k pages after the low toner warning before the prints start getting faint.
I picked such a machine (a DCP-7065dn) out of the hackerspace's scrap pile. It's complaining that the drum is at the end of its service life, but still makes great prints. It supports wired but not wireless Ethernet.
So I got a $20 gl.inet router, glued it to the side of the printer, and tapped the internal 5v power point (the schematics are easy to find) to power the router. It comes on when I turn on the printer, and their bootup times seem agreeable enough; the router is configured with WDS so the printer gets DHCP off my main WLAN and Just Works™. It took a few hours to find the power trace and perform the surgery, but I love not having an extra power brick.
I'm glad your experience, and the experiences of others here, seem to be better but I can't help but reflect on the variance every time I read an HN poster relating about their positive Brother experience since my own experience was so different.
To be fair I have printed a couple of times at the office. But I think I have been below 10 pages a year for at least 10 years, office and library combined.
The only case seems to be having to send documents to an authority abroad. That happens to me, but infrequently enough.
Now people might say, do you trust the library with your personal documents? First I don't remember when I had something seriously sensitive. And then I would say do you trust all that closed source software on your own Windows PC? As Linux user I would have probably not even been able to open the secret windows the article described.
What you actually need to avoid are manufacturers like HP, unless the idea of an “ink subscription” appeals to you. It’s also best to avoid ink jets both because of ink costs but also because they’re much less reliable especially if you don’t use them often - the ink dries up and the autoclean option never quite works right.
I think this "the ink dries up!" mantra is either outdated, doesn't affect HP anymore, or I got extremely lucky with my HP printers since 2014
If it's that easy for you, great.
Fact is that desktop printers offer a service that is so valuable to some people/professions that manufacturers can be as outwardly customer-hostile as they please and still ship plenty of product.
Change that to "Only buy a laser printer" or "Never ever buy an inkjet printer" and you're closer to the truth. Better still, "Only buy an older - but no too old - office-type laser printer at the thrift store" or something along those lines and you're golden. Cheap toner which lasts for years, the machine has a network connection so you can just wire it to a switch or router somewhere where it is convenient. The "not too old" is mostly because really old laser printers are power hogs, get one with a power-saving mode. It might take a few more seconds before the first page comes out when it as to heat the fuser first but who cares?
I have a HP Laserjet 2200dtn and a Canon MF9220Cdn in different locations, both of them switched off but ready for use after being switched on. Toner does not dry out like ink does, nozzles do not get clogged, the things tend to just work when needed. With enough toner for at least 3 years (and more to be had for cheap on eBay et al) we're set and we do not need to go to any library - which would be a long cycle ride seeing how as we're living on a farm in the Swedish countryside - to print out those stupid forms, schematic diagrams and presentations.
"That Brother printer" will cost you more (and be Yet Another Plastic Thing To Go To A Landfill Later), but will ... print every time. Sure, after a while you might need to clean the rollers or something, but at least you know it will be that and not some random bricking.
About the random bricking though… While this printer doesn't actually brick itself, it does have a very curious failure state where if you leave it off, but plugged into the mains, it will eventually refuse to boot up until you unplug it, wait for ten minutes, and plug it back in. No error message, no blinking lights, nothing to indicate that something is wrong, just nothing until you let it reset itself by removing the power cable for a while. I just leave it unplugged most of the time now.
Consumer printers? Sure. Highly likely. That stuff was designed to be disposable.
Business-class or Enterprise-class printers that had been used in larger offices or have low page counts? A much lower probability.
The business/enterprise stuff is meant to last because they cost a lot going out the door, and so are built robustly. You just have to ensure either a low page count, or some sort of proof that the machine had been serviced regularly by properly-certified printer techs.
Yes, it is still possible to get a lemon. But if you live somewhere with any sort of a significant metro region, you only need a little patience to find older pre-DRM hardware that is still performing well.
I have had a second-hand 4050DTN for about two decades now (liquidation sale, IIRC), and while it’s hurting for a maintenance kit (already have one, albeit in storage somewhere), it’s still running very well in all other aspects.
My latest one is a brother printer that I bought on Craigslist.
I don't know the specifics of this, beyond if you buy the cheapest paper you can probably expect your printer to jam up sooner.
I’m a stupid consumer with printers. I have a HP office jet and pay like $5/month for their ink subscription. I print 30-80 pages a month. The economics work. I have a cheap capable inkjet MFP in the same cost envelope of a bigger, lower toner cost laser.
The printer talks PCL and works with anything I’ve tried including Linux.
The author would pay $12/year for 10 pages per year, without the cost of the cartridge. You need 20 years before you reach the cost of a $240 cartridge. The cartridge would’ve dried out before then.
This entire article is an exercise in “I can’t do math”
I think instant ink is a better product in terms of money saved, especially when you account for the risk of cartridges drying out.
Now, to be clear, when it first came out, I thought “evil capitalists” just like everyone else in this thread. But I think it’s wrong, there’s just a yuckiness factor associated with paying monthly for something you theoretically own.
I think we should just move on as a society from the idea that you somehow “own” cheap personal property like phones and printers and fridges, etc.
Everything is perpetually leased
They created a problem for which the solution was a subscription. Laser toner doesn't have this issue.
> I think we should just move on as a society from the idea that you somehow “own” cheap personal property like phones and printers and fridges, etc.
You do own it. If you want to pay someone a monthly fee to help you manage it, that's your choice. But to say that everyone else should "move on as a society" because of your personal choices is very arrogant.
Also had the same problem with a gas pizza oven (Ooni), ironically from a Scottish company, but has only USA gas connections and is impossible to switch regions. I can very much sympathise with the author and am very glad consoles are no longer region locked.
Gas equipment tends to be extremely controlled, so I can understand no-one wanting to connect to a different region's connector with possibly different regulatory standards.
I understand more with the gas due to the difference in gas canister supplies. They do actually sell replacement regional hoses, so I assumed I'd be able to just switch it out.
I thought you were talking about mains gas for the oven - they tend to get a lot more precious over that being correctly fitted than for canisters.
If the equivalent is "US, CA" I could see this label being a lot less obvious.
A US to Canada or vice versa move would work since they’re on the same system, but a UK number, for instance, doesn’t even have the same digits of numbers necessarily, and even if they’re both 10, they’re completely different formats.
https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...
Seriously. It's so stupid simple. It rules. It juuuuuust prints. No DRM, no nothing. No apps to install. (I think it has apps, but you don't need them. I certainly didn't install any) It costs like $120. I actually bought one model up for $150 that also does duplex printing.
This is the printer that you are wishing for. It certainly is the one I was wishing for. Can't believe it existed. Wasted so much time and frustration on inkjets.
But honestly, I don't understand it in the context of capitalism.
Why does just this one good printer exist? Why doesn't it have competitors? Or if competitors aren't economical to exist, why does this one still exist?
I'm thankful it's here. But I can't think of any other product category at all where there's only one really good one and then everything else is overpriced crap.
Brother has a whole bunch of monochrome laser printers from $120 up to $250ish depending on if you want duplex printing, wireless, document scanning, multiple paper trays, etc. From what I can gather they're all well-regarded? HP, Canon seem to also have decent offerings in that price range though based on a totally unscientific review of scanning Amazon ratings it seems like people like the Brothers best.
I think it's just an issue of inkjets versus lasers.
Inkjets are just horrible. Every single freaking one. Why are they so bad? The ink cartridges always dry out and stop working unless you print on a regular basis, and they all have some weird predatory business model based on selling you a bunch of ink that you don't need. It feels like they lose money on the printer and bank on you buying a bunch of ink later on.
So how did monochrome laser printers in the same price range avoid that weirdo predatory business model? That's my question. I can't really imagine that a laser printer is any cheaper to manufacture than an inkjet printer.
You can't even create a printer startup and fix the issues because it's all basically regulatory.
They still have tracking dots. But at least you can print when yellow is out.
Printers are mechanical devices. Putting ink on the page in a way that actually looks good requires quite a lot of precision. It may take a lot of resources to get a marketable product, so it’s not something startups tend to do.
Can you provide any citations for this claim?
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...
From the typewriter-like things with all their their mechanical moving parts up the the Canon color laser printers we had just deployed, they all took inordinate amounts of time to keep running.
Of course now things like the players are so cheap you can just buy multiple if you want to bypass region encoding on DVDs, for example.
I wonder if off-brand ink would have just completely ignored the region thingy.
However, life is short and I would much rather give my kids 20-40 bucks to gift to a friend than go shopping for a toy. Moreover, I'd rather get something I wanted instead of 10 things I didn't really want; cash presents make that possible.
Of course that doesn't work out for situations where people just buy a random item as a token gift because they (feel they) are expected to provide one. In that situation the best solution is to remove that expectation - if nothing else works by forbidding gifts.
Or to sum it up: I think cash gifts only make sense if the amount is menaingful for the receiver and they are not expected to just gift the same amount back (i.e. the relationship is asymmetric in terms of gift transfer).
There's no simple business reason to do that. The most basic approach is to have the customer pay multiple times: they can afford to move regions or have the goods imported, blocking that route and have them pay for a whole new set is a simple strategy.
Arguing against that simpleness requires fuzzy touchy/feely brand image, consumer satisfaction, lifetime customer value calculations that most printer brands probably care very little about outside of the enterprise market.
I think the general wisdom for anyone caring enough, is to go for a Brother laser printer (I personally went for Xerox but it's the same deal), and I'd posit they're not in direct competition with HP or EPSON:
- it requires ample prior research. You don't stumble upon a laser printer when going to a shopping mall and ask the staff for a printer for your kids homework.
- it requires having given up on many dreams in general and recognizing the bullshit of the whole industry. They are big and bulky, expensive, under marketed, your friends won't have them (or you're lucky), they're never on discount, and you're not a lawyer so you shouldn't be buying something named "WorkCenter 6515" instead of "ENVY Inspire all-in-one" to print school assignments. When I bought mine online I was asked my VAT number for the corporate tax paperwork and had to explain we're just some random family needing a reliable printer.
It's only after having seen the other side for so many years that you give up and buy a professional grade color laser printer if you expect to have to print more than 3 times a year at home.
I would love to be tried, remotely by an american court for breaking DMCA by bypassing DRM for american made software.
"No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part"
Mere advise is almost certainly safe.
Their printers are probably the worst. All the ones I had to touch had problems: scan pages bent, adf adding a blue line on scanned documents, configuration messed up in windows because owning 2 times the same model or one of them being setup both by cable and wifi, huge software bloat on PC or android, thing that should connect but is not detected despite installing all their crappy software and resetting the stuff 10 times, printer refusing to start and scan because a cardridge is missing
That makes me totally crazy and I hate them.
I'm quite sure that they would have died a long time ago and not have this market share if they weren't so aggressive on prices. They are playing on the fact that they make you buy a lot of them. I think that some people should start to sue them.
They are riding on their legendary reputation during the 20th century.
Once upon a time, Hewlett-Packard was the industry leader in precision electronics and their printers in particular were built to withstand World War 3.
Like OP's, that printer took an absolute caning during the pandemic as both kids' schoolwork was constantly spewing out of the thing, and I marvel at how much money it saved us.
⁂
I agree about your description about printers, but I wouldn’t call them “evil”. I’m trying to think of the best word to describe them… haunted? bizarre? chaotic? random? mysterious? No wait, I know; the perfect word is opaque. They do weird stuff and you don’t know why, and you can’t look inside them and find out why. Hmm, now that I’ve come to this conclusion, the answer seems to be the same obvious one that we already have for the similar problem of opaque software and operating systems. Free software, so you can actually look inside and debug the things when your system/printer has found some new way to confound you.
I seem to recall that the original story about how Richard Stallman was inspired to create the concept of free software was that he was stymied by proprietary software in a printer, so this would simply bring the concept back to its roots, so to speak.
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10322408
I wish that the intelligence in printers would migrate back to the computer. Having printers with their own complex formats (PCL, PostScript, etc.) only makes them inscrutable and lends itself to proprietary competing formats and printouts which never gets quite right. I think the original NeXT machine was on the right track with their simple bitmap-only laser printer, where the PostScript processing was done on the computer side.
You do tech support out of necessity when you don't have any other options, and you look to get out as fast as possible.
That being said, the reason it works so poorly might be because there's a lack of continuity within HPs printer line up. For obvious reason I haven't used an HP products in years, but even going back, there seemed to be little lineage within their InkJet printers. The fact that a tools was still available is amazing.
The screw the consumer for the max they can afford works for monopoly, corruption and stand over tactics
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...
Their customer support agent started the conversation with something like "you've been our valued customer for 18 years, how can I help?" and two minutes later said there was no alternative but to open a new account.
The cartridges belong to hp, not me, so they would stop working if I cancelled and I would have to buy my own. That's normal with pay per click printing, which is also the standard in high end leased machines. I don't want my computer to be an appliance but having the printer be 'just an appliance' is very convenient.
Have also owned Brother printers, which were very good, but they tended to overheat and catastrophically fail if you print a lot on them in one sitting (i.e. 1000 flyers).
Owned Epson and always had driver issues.
It's not HP's or any other vendor's business to know where you are. This is an easy solution to this.
I have a few routers at home with a separate Wifi hotspot each configured for separate country to avoid exactly this nonsense for different services.
Advantage of this approach is you can travel with a small travel router all over the world while feeding each of the service with a consistent country location.
Added privacy is a benefit.
That's much worse than the situation in the article, which is just region locked cartridges.
And this: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/compare/
I have about 5 of these at home, each configured at different subnet and VPN for different country. One i always take with me while traveling to securely connect via shady hotel Wi-Fi's.
You can even go crazy with it - install ZeroTier directly in the router by typing few commands and access low-level config of the router from anywhere.
What I hear about HP printers these days is deeply disappointing. For shame, HP. You have truly lost your way.
One general advice is to look for recommended devices in the medical/law/military area. There is nothing special about those printers but their recommondation for such institutions makes them a safe bet and never failed me or one of my clients (even 10+ years later).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
I do not know how brother fares now regarding open supplies.
- return cartridges since they do not work in "compatible" printer. Consumer laws do not care about small print or region locks
- go to unauthorized shop and have original cartridges refiled. I recycled cartridge like that for several years.
Edit: typo
I’d imagine things could be worse nowadays.
He used to buy products from an American company so it should be available in the US too.
