The last time printer shenanigans came up on HN, it was related specifically to apparent Brother shenanigans [0]. I was planning on buying a Brother at the time due to similar comments like yours, and still did so. I've been a happy customer since day 1 with the thing, it just works, even on mobile, and it's fast and quiet. I hope Brother can remain sane.
Or buy a laser printer. They cost a bit more upfront, but a single toner cartridge lasts ages (and won't dry out or get used up in cleaning cycles), the printers are generally much more robust and longer lasting, and because laser printing isn't as patent-encumbered there's more actual competition and less outright user-hostile behavior.
I learned to hate HP inkjets. I decided never to buy HP again.
When I eventually gave up on inkjets altogether, I bought a Samsung laser. It didn't cost much more than an inkjet, toner lasts for ages, doesn't dry up, and it works fine. But as soon as I googled the support pages, it turned out Samsung's printer division had been acquired by HP, the website was impossible to navigate, and there wasn't any documentation.
Unfortunately, the imaging drum is integrated with the cartridge, is not meant to last and HP is not making new ones. I do not know how many refills I will get out of it. However, the starter toner cartridge lasted 8 years and I replaced it with a regular cartridge at that time, so it will be a long time before I need to refill its replacement.
That said, I felt betrayed when Samsung sold its printing unit to HP too. :/
I was not aware of any of this. Thank you! I've just been buying on- or off-brand toner cartridges for way more money than this. (The off-brand ones work fine, the on-brand ones are certainly not perfect; this thing is terrible at photos.)
I would like to vouch for Xerox laser printers. Not only they don't identify your printouts with tiny yellow markings/serial number, but also they gladly accept off-market toners, and places like Amazon have many different brands that race to the bottom of price making it easy to try out what works for you. I am on my third Xerox laser printer and couldn't be happier.
I bought an awesome Xerox duplex colour laser two years and can confirm. Superb. Way better than the Samsung/HP thing it replaced. About to put more after-market toners in tomorrow
Even they're not exempt from being messed with. I had an HP color laser printer which, when purchased, would print on any paper size that would fit in the printer. (Specifically used it to print to US Legal Size.) A firmware update some years back disabled printing to anything larger than US Letter Sized.
I now own a Brother printer that is perfectly happy to print to larger paper.
Lasers also have issues. I had a laser my last printer but had issues with the imgaging drum and other parts. Eventually tonor ended up on some of the rollers and the printer was basically useless at this point.
I bought an epson workforce back some years ago. When it had printing issues i was able to do some cleaning runs and reslove. I have used ink quite a bit over time. But probably not nearly as much as the imaging drum, rollers and other parts i ended up swapping trying to stop the darkened prints on my main machine. The original laser was about 400 bucks, inkjet like 89.99. I dont think i spent more on the inkjet, even after the swaps.
> This is one of those really good "vote with your wallets" situations.
This is a really good situation for actual voting, like actual political action to have regulation, instead of pretend voting.
HP probably doesn't give a damn about the HN crowd, it won't affect their business line in the little, so there's no signaling here.
And assuming Brother gets enough of a loyal following, they can now (probably already are) jack the prices and push the envelope of what's acceptable as business practices, until you'll have to start looking around again at who's left to let you escape predatory practices.
Hard disagree. This is how Chrome won the browser wars - people ask their nerdy cousin which browser to use.
The market of HN is small, but the market power is large. Also, I guarantee you people here make large corporate purchases for things like printers, networking equipment - stuff HP cares about.
Browsers are free, so the choice is to get "the best". With printers the cheapest is often "good enough" and inkjet printers have an intentionally low up front cost. Convincing people that a laser printer is the cheaper choice even if they think that they "barely print anything" is an uphill battle.
I have family members ask to _fix_ their printers, never had one actually taking advice before buying one nor follow advice.
And the reason is simple:
- Google has a tremendous positive brand image in most people's mind, Brother means nothing outside of the elderly generation.
- Printers are seen as a commodity and get thrown at people for 30 bucks at the supermarket. They also work well for the first 30~40 prints, and while we'll bitch about printer ink price, regular people will see it as a cost of doing business and pay.
- Brother printers are reliable but actually not that good from a "what features do you have ?" customer standpoint. I ended up having a secundary HP printer for that very reason: it fits in a niche that no other sane printer maker will touch. And come to think of it, my parents bought the same HP printer after seeing use it in vacation, and they never asked about our Xerox in the living room. And yes, they buy HP cartridges (they also didn't ask me before buying...)
Large corporate purchases: nobody "buys" printer or ink. They comes with a lease and a maintenance contract, and are paid by the page. If the technician comes within 3h to fix the printer and it works ok for another 40 days, no office manager will care about what exact printers are set in the buildings.
What are you thoughts about Canon? I just brought one recently. It has an option for me to opt into disabling support for third party toner cartridges. You read that correctly. It lets you use third party toner cartridges by default and if I do not want to be able to use them, I can opt into disabling them.
On the other hand, Brother prevents cartridges from being reused more than once, which likely kills the market for remanufactured toner cartridges.
I bought a Canon (model LBP612C/613C) color laser printer 3 years ago and have been using 3rd party toner. The prints are great and I've never had a problem. Prior to that I used a Brother b&w laser, also used 3rd party toner, and never had an issue with that one either.
How ironic, the very thing OP warned against happened to Chrome: being now a monopoly it pushes very uncool stuff and no amount of geeks can undo that.
I've had my Brother laser printer for 10 years, only changed the toner cartridge once, and it immediately starts printing when you need it to. One of the best purchases I ever made!
During previous discussions about this there have been some comments indicating Brother is headed down this road as well. No idea how accurate that is.
They offer a closed-source Linux and you need to download an installer from them (an i386 binary, which also works on i686 and x86_64); so, not great. The driver is mostly-reliable, although every once in a while it does kind of give out on you and printing fails, possibly until a restart. I suppose on Windows it's better.
> really good printers that are inexpensive and live a long life?
I bought mine about 4.5 years ago; hardware seems fine so far.
> happy life
yeah, so... not so much when it comes to toners. Either the toner capacity is really low, or the MFP becomes disenchanted with toners quickly. I get "Toner Low" extremely quickly - even with only a few hundred pages printed. Granted, I don't print much these days, but still. And I've already experienced a case in which I put in a new toner and was already told it was low.
When I got my recently-acquired MFC-L3550CDW home, I went to set it up over the network and it just worked. Trying to install the drivers stopped it working :P.
I've not tried printing to it over USB, but over Ethernet it supports IPP and mDNS so all you need to do to print is connect the printer to the network and CUPS will find it automatically.
At some point in the last ten years, network printing has gone from dark magic to just working, and in my experience working better on Linux than Mac or Windows. Printing from Android took a smidge of manual set up but now also just works when called upon. It's almost disappointing, until I remember that while I quite enjoy tinkering I also bought the printer to actually print stuff.
The scanner? Also just works over the network. Mind blown.
It amazes that in 2023, other operating systems still need separate drivers for printers. I just look for AirPrint compatible printers and they work seamless from my Mac, iPhone and iPad. I pulled an old 2010 iPad out a couple of years ago and it could print to a brand new printer.
This is just like everything else on modern operating system. Apple defines a protocol for printers and if you follow that protocol, Apple guarantees compatibility and the user doesn’t have to worry about printer drivers and the manufacturer doesn’t have to worry about creating a new printer driver when a new operating system is released.
When a Windows user updates to a new OS, they have to often go find a new driver. I connect my Mac or iOS device to my WiFI network and it automatically found all of my of my AirPrint compatible printers.
As a vendor, if I support AirPrint, my addressable market is anyone who has bought an iOS device since 2010 or a Mac since 2012.
That’s a much better system than the malware that comes with most Windows printers.
>They offer a closed-source Linux and you need to download an installer from them
Similar experience with their label printers, except they only had a i386 binary, which rather killed my idea of a raspberry pi print server. Also it was generally just terrible and froze after a few labels.
I bought a Brother laser printer like the internet told me to, and I even paid extra money to get the one that is easy to connect on wifi, but we can't seem to connect the printer to any macs wirelessly. It only connects to the iphones and the ubuntu machine. It just doesn't show up in macs. Anyone know anything about that?
Have you tried manually adding it? When adding a printer you can change the type to 'airprint' which makes it discoverable in the same way that iphones discover printers. You could also use the IP address directly if you must.
Brother is great unless you need to configure it to fax over VoIP. I recall horror stories from my technical support days. Had to walk users, over the phone, through navigating to the settings and then changing a binary (literally) value.
> Ok now it says 01101101 and I need you to change it to 10001111.
Yes, I was going to mention Brother. They're excellent; I've bought their products for years.
But, given advertising is legal, and HP advertises much more aggressively than Brother, we can't rely on "vote with your wallet" to solve this problem. "Vote with your wallet" doesn't work when one competitor is spending money on making quality products and the other is spending money on advertising.
The entire premise that capitalism brings the best products at the lowest cost is falsified by advertising.
This is one of those really good "vote with your wallets" situations.