Crispy_MateYou didn't bought it you rented it!
insertfloppydiskhereOkay so I see all this talk about ducky printers but if I want one that’s not trying to guck me over which would that be?
Brother printers are fantastic. They cost a but more upfront but actually work
Yep, I bought a Brother laser printer for $120 a few years ago. I don’t use it super often, but it’s been reliable and easy to use whenever I need it. I’ve never had to replace the toner. It just works.
TwoGemsIs it good for someone who constantly needs to print documents
This is just anecdotal, but I work in IT and I can’t recall a brother printer ever giving me a headache. HP is obviously the worst.
Semi-Hemi-DemigodHP used to make rock solid laser printers back in the late 90s and 00s. Shame what they turned into.
HP is obviously the worst.
HP is special kind of printers shitcompany. They probably spent years on doing market research to understand what people NOT want, so they can do exactly that. 😂
makes me wonder, how are they still in business doing that?
As long as you don’t need color a laser printer is way better for printing documents.
TurboDieselI love my color laser. (Again, props to Brother). It takes off-brand toner with no fuss and hasn’t failed to print yet.
I don’t know that I would print photos with it, but it’s more than sufficient for everyday documents and even game manuals.
ebits21I printed a ton of documents in university with a black and white brother printer. All my notes were always printed, for example.
Still have it over a decade later.
The best. Color laser is pricey but not many people would need that.
A laser printer is best no matter if you print a lot or a little.
Brother will generally be an excellent choice. While HP will generally be probably the worst choice you can make.
JamieAdditional hot take: get a laser printer for your normal documents and just get photos printed somewhere else. The money you’d spend buying 4x6 photos on someone else’s ink and paper would probably be less than you’ll pay for color ink unless you’re an absolute photo printing maniac. And a laser printer toner cartridge will last you like 1,000+ pages.
Agreed, my wife and I got a Brother laser printer about 3 years ago and I still haven’t had to change the toner. It’s been telling me the toner is low for months but still keeps going strong. Granted we don’t print a TON, but we print enough that the initial cost of a laser printer made sense.
Second this. Bought a Dell one 10 years ago and it’s still working like a charm! Got me through all of Uni Ani besides the finicky diva driver it’s just amazing!
This is the way to do it. Getting your photos printed by somebody else will be tons cheaper AND give you better results.
Needed something to print the occasional document for bureaucracy stuff, and I also got a Brother printer a while ago. Used, laser (very important for good value imo), 100 bucks. An older model, black-and-white but with wifi support. Didn’t need to register my license, create a cloud account or whatever other shit companies come up with these days, I could just turn it on and it worked.
Flying SquidThey’re incredibly reliable. I’ve had the same Brother laser printer for a good 15 years now. Possibly longer. Old enough that there’s no wifi or bluetooth options, but it’s a network printer because it has ethernet.
I made my old brother a wifi printer with the help of a raspberry pi.
skulblakaSecond the recommendation for a Brother. I've rarely had problems with them. Above all do NOT buy an HP printer because they come with every form of nickel-and-dime known to mankind.
Alternatively, for the once in a blue moon that the average person needs to actually print things in the modern day, bring your local library a fiver and use their printer. This is the way I do things, because I rarely ever need to print a document. When I do, it's a ten minute drive and a five dollar or less cost and then I don't have to bother with owning a printer.
But in general, Brother is a good brand, and a laser printer will be less hassle and easier to manage than an inkjet, but will have a bit higher purchase cost.
In Germany there are a lot of stores that let you use their printer for 10ct per page. Is this not the case in the US (or wherever you live)?
kingthrillgoreFedEx and Staples have document printers for less than 10 cents a page. This is what I've been doing for years now, when someone won't just take a PDF straight up.
Go to the library next time and see if they’ll let you do it for free. They may very well.
Most businesses in the US have a hard rule against connecting any outside hardware to the network, for security purposes. If you bring them a USB drive you will be asked to leave. If you can get whatever you need printed into a company email, you might stand a chance, but it would frequently require you having a personal connection to someone in the company willing to print your document for you, and depending on the document it will often not be appropriate for business email. American businesses are not really set up to be print shops and most of them would likely not help you unless you go somewhere like a Fedex-Kinkos that IS explicitly a print shop.
Libraries, however, will always have a printer you can use. It just costs, usually a negligible amount per page (10-50 cents depending on the particular library), but they've got no issues with you showing up with a USB drive and printing off of it, or logging into your own document storage (email, onedrive, etc) to print from there, because the computers are intended for public use.
ManosTheHandsOfFateA lot of my printing happens when parents visit. They love to print everything. I’m much more likely to use the scanner on my Brother printer than actually print.
WrenYes on the Libraries! Libraries are often incredibly cheap for printing, and most of them have an online uploading tool so you can print things from your home computer or phone without any hassle. Plus, at least at the library I work at, we have incredibly high quality printers and your docs / photos will come out a lot better than how they would if you were at home, as well as a scanner that can give you a 600dpi TIFF file
Just please try not to hand us a twenty for something that costs 1/100th of that - we often don’t have enough small bills to make change. (Or do and put it on your account for later, if that’s an offered option, or better yet donate the remainder 😉)
Brother ist the way to go. Also OK Form Linux in my experience
From my experience, printer support on Linux is often better than on Windows because all the drivers are included in the kernel and you don’t have to go driver hunting on obscure websites.
bufordtThe new brothers also work fine with chrome os.
I just got around to setting up my Brother MFC-2750DW in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I was prepared for a long process, but Brother publish Linux drivers for it and the whole setup took about 5 minutes. Works perfectly over wifi.
Most hp models are fine, I have a laser jet I swear by.
Third voice for a Brother. I used to work an office supply store and they were by far the most reliable printers we sold.
Saw some people posting recently they sold out also
I also heard a rumor about something somewhere, that maybe something might have happened. But I’m not sure. /S
empireOfLoveYes, some of their firmware updates started breaking aftermarket toner cartridges and support said “that sucks” like it was very intentional. It seems constrained to a few of the MFC color models more than anything tho I’ve never had any issues other than bad wifi modules in the b&w home office lasers. Which if you’re using wifi on a printer that’s your own damn fault lol
Yeah I’m not sure whether this is shenanigans or an actual problem Brother is managing here. The post does mention there are problems with incorrect response to temperature management with the unoriginal cartridge, which again could theoretically cause harm.
I honestly wasn’t aware unoriginal cartridges were a thing for Brother printers, since the originals tend to be quite reasonable.
But to continue using the unoriginal cartridges he can as the answer states, use BRAdmin to downgrade the firmware.
So it’s not like Brother is attempting to take control of your printer like HP likes to do.
u_tamtamI’m sure HP didn’t ramp up their bullshit from 0 to 11 overnight, the question now is how much we can trust Brother not to be walking the same path and mandating more and more restrictive firmwares in the future. I think them opensourcing drivers and firmwares would help mitigate that, and if their business model is really to be that sole good guy and antagonize the likes of HP/Epson/… they don’t have anything to lose and a lot to win (or as a minimum, myself as a customer).
HP has done the ink cartridge shenanigans for more than 30 years now. They just recently found a new trick. Apart from that nothing has really changed.
I am not aware Brother ever did similar things to basically trick or cheat their customers. Most other vendors are somewhere in between. AFAIK none are as bad as HP.
My dad is running his Brother HL-1212W printer on the open source Linux driver, works perfectly fine, and I was actually surprised about the high quality of his prints for such a cheap printer.
AFAIK Brother is among the best regarding opensource drivers too.
All this printer talk almost makes me want to buy a new printer. My current printer is a 14 year old Samsung color laser, and the print quality is not that stellar anymore. ;) The Samsung open source driver kind of suck for this printer. There isn’t even a driver for this specific model CLP-325W, so I have to choose another Samsung printer that is (mostly) compatible.
The Brother printer was completely plug and play. The system recognized the printer, and installed the correct open source driver, no hassle at all.
Eh, I am all about wired networking wherever I can, but my awesome old Brother laser printer gets used like once per month or two, and it lives off in a far corner of the house where it isn’t taking up valuable space. Plus it could work with a tiny fraction of the LAN bandwidth available to it.
On wi-fi it stays, lol. I think I may have had to reconnect it once in the decade+ we’ve had it. Otherwise, the printout is ready before I can even walk to the printer (unless it has a ton of pages, naturally).
I don’t even know how old it is at this point. I just know it’s over a decade because I didn’t buy a third party toner cartridge until 2014.
Can you avoid firmware updates? Are there domains that need to be blocked to prevent them?
Yes the firmware updates are only voluntary. The driver will sure nag you to do them but you can choose when and what version easily.
That was because of a misunderstanding. Brother started a subscription service and people assumed that meant you had to pay a monthly fee to use the printers like with HP. Instead, it’s a toner subscription like Dollar Shave Club or Amazon’s Subscribe and Save where they auto-send a new toner at your requested interval.
elscallrI use cheap Chinese knockoff toner in my Brother laser
I heard they stopped allowing that recently.
Mine still allows it. There might be a model or two that doesn’t but I’d be surprised.
Up to date firmware?
I treat that thing like a rented uhaul, of course the firmware hasn’t been updated
ThirdWorldOrderI’ve had my Brother printer for several years and never had an issue. I don’t have the color one, just black and white. Would buy again.
I treat my Brother laser like a rented uhaul truck and it just keeps going.
AnUnusualRelicI have one of the complicated brother ones that scans and prints, including double sides, in colour, and it’s a tank. Works fine in Linux too.
It even does fax, which someone, somewhere probably finds useful.
NotoriousDoctors offices and health insurance. It’s weird but technically fax machines are still considered “secure” communications for sending PHI. Sending it across the internet requires a lot of expensive hoops to jump through, or they could just buy a fax machine.
Funny thing is those faxes are going through internet anyway most of the time.
Where I live fax are considered a legal proof contrary to emails.
So for important contracts it is considered safer than mails.
And honestly it kinda is since an email can totally end up never being recieved without any kind of error or warning. A fax you should know immediately that it wasn’t received on the other end.
I still wish fax would disappear soon but an email is not a good replacement.
Emails are now considered the defacto standard for businesses but they suck and are absolutely not reliable.
Send signed email. Done.
Bunch of weirdos, that’s what they are.
I’ve had the same brother inkjet printer for 14 years now, and it still works great.
Even worse, if you subscribe to the ink service with an HP printer, it will update the firmware. But if you decide to cancel the service, they don’t change the firmware so you now own a brick.
bob_wileyMy dad seems to love their service. I don’t understand it. He pays per-page for a printer he bought and sits in his house. I challenged him on it and he stood is ground that it’s great. I just can’t wrap my head around that. Meanwhile he is against car companies making things like CarPlay a subscription.
If you print regularly a lot, HP’s 6 cent per page, 100 pages per month plan is about the same price as a small black and white laser’s drum and toner.
But you can plan full page photos on photo paper with it for that 6 cent too, not just BW documents. I like it, a full year costs about the same as 1 set of XL OfficeJet ink and you never have to try to save money by going BW / draft mode. Just print whatever. Clean the head whenever needed. It’s all included.
Yes it is a subscription, but this one is actually useful.
I guess I don’t print enough to see the value. A toner cartridge will last be for years and years in my printer. I don’t think I’ve ever replaced one in my home printer.
Maybe I’m weird, but if I knew I was getting charged per-page, I’d question every single print I made. I was making a custom card for someone a while back and printed a sheet with some BS on it just to see what I need to put where, for planning. I know 6 cents is basically nothing, but if I was paying per page I would have tried to spend time reasoning it out, remembering past prints and trying to fold it up in my head. I even questioned the paper usage for what I ended up doing, and used the justification that I could use the paper for some other things afterward, it wasn’t instantly trash. I’ve always been the type that likes spending a lot 1 time rather than a little a lot of times.
Wait, 6 cents? That’s three times what I paid to print stuff at uni.
Okay that was a decade ago, but still, I don’t pay 3x for other office services.