“Once upon a time, I bought a Brother color laser. It never failed to do its job. The End.”
I just bought one last week and holy shit you aren’t joking. Our Canon was malfunctioning for the last 2 years, so I finally bought a refurbed B&W Brother Laser. I’ve never had a printer just work like this. I didn’t even have to connect to it. My browser just automatically detected it, even on Linux.
I have one of their all-in-one colour toner machines for my GF’s business, it’s awesome. Scanning to an SFTP share means she can just feet a stack of paper into it and get a PDF in her Documents/Scans directory.
AND fun fact, there are no lasers in “laser printers” they all use 1D LED arrays to transfer the image data to the drum. Only the early toner based printers used a real laser and they were operating almost like a CRT, scanning a raster onto the drum.
In all fairness, my cheap Brother laser printer hasn’t let me down at all. Unlike the HP inkjets of the past.
I bought mine (HL2270-DW) 12 years ago for college. Last week I plugged it in after it sat for several years and printed off some stuff for family with 0 problems. I think it’s only on its second toner as well.
Still the exact same printer my family has been using for the past 10 years after our old Inkjet kicked the bucket a measly 3 months after it was born. And it has seen some stuff, including being dropped at least twice, plastic film in the paper compartment, coffee-stained (for aged effect) paper, and even a x-acto knife blade that somehow ended up in there.
my wife was having some problems finding the right W11 drivers for our Brother HL-2030 and dared to utter the thought of replacing it
I shut that down right quick
Conversely, I have a recent-ish (<5yrs old) Brother inkjet printer that’s waiting to be dumped to recycling because it arbitrarily decided that it didn’t ever need to be discoverable or respond to any print requests one day, and so even though there was nothing mechanically wrong with it, even hooking up a Raspberry Pi to run CUPS over USB didn’t fix the issue – because Brother explicitly refuses to publish drivers for the Raspberry Pi, and their inkjet drivers are proprietary.
I’ve since replaced it with the best-reviewed Epson printer I could find that supports a generic PCL driver, so that if Epson ever loses their minds in the way Brother did, I can fall back on an open-source implementation of good ol’ PCL.
That thing’s given us no issues so far.
My experience has also been that laser printers work a lot more reliably.
Heck, even my 7 year old HP laserprinter is doing just fine, still
Granted, I print like 70 pages a year, but that’s still better than the inktjet before!
laser is especially nice if you don’t print often since you don’t have to worry about ink drying up
Linux/Cups. Postscript. Laser. Have never had a problem. Printers not working is a “put the logic in the Windoze driver” problem vs telling a good printer “Print this”.
My Brother laser printer/fax that looks like it came from the 90s is amazing and works with everything on default drivers. Mac, PC, Linux, Android, all of these work fine for me. The brother driver gives you more options if you care to install it, but you don’t have to.
Inkjet is a different beast. Especially the ones that don’t let you print B&W if you run out of colour ink, or that check for “legit” ink refills.
Especially the ones that don’t let you print B&W if you run out of colour ink,
They need the colour ink to print the tracking dots :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170607-why-printers-add-secret-tracking-dots
Oh, you mean laser printers?
Sadly the consumer laser printer market is in decline and a couple of companies have already exited. I’m not sure how much longer they’ll be available (new).
Home printing is a declining market overall, SMB printing has plateaued, and a lot of the die-hard laser printer users are moving away; because bringing big canisters of microplastics into one’s home is less appealing than it once was.
