Got a simple brother laser printer. Duplex, BW only, works flawlessly with Linux and as a network printer.
4-5 times a year I’ll need to print 10 pages. Add an additional one every two weeks.
The printer definitely paid for itself in convenience.
Same, I got mocked for buying it. It gets used at least once a month.
Xennial here, get a Brother laser printer if you can. The “starter toner” lasted me for like 4 years so far and is only now getting low. I can’t imagine going back to an inkjet that would always dry up since I used infrequently, but I still needed it.
A second vote for brother lasers.
I upgraded my old printer about 6 months ago. Laser is far superior, and no longer particularly expensive. I also discovered they have solved the photo printing quality issue at some point (laser’s only real weakness). I ran off a photo and it came out near/at inkjet quality.
You do one up front payment and it saves so much money long term, so many people are against that concept
Bonus is you can buy third party refilled toner in bundles for like $15 for 3. I bought some a couple of years ago and I still haven’t burned through the first replacement
There have been reports that Brother has finally started being evil about third-party toner with new firmwares.
That’s why I’m thankful I haven’t updated mine and it’s an older model. People should look out for that for sure.
Same, 3 years running, printing lots of shit for my own company and just now got a “low toner” warning which I’m ignoring for the last 2 or so months. Buying an inkjet is the biggest scam there is, you pay more in the ink and broken printers than you ever would for a laser.
Yep, finally got rid of my Epson BJ with a Brother b/w laser and it’s fantastic. A little louder but it functions like it should instead of complaining about low Magenta.
I think, for me, owning a printer is like owning a van. You’re the only person your friends know who has one, so every time someone needs it you’re the one they ask.
Joke’s on you; I have no friends.
Except for my wife and kids almost nobody knows I have one. But yes I have gotten pdfs from my mother in law to print.
I bought a Brother printer and an extra large toner cartridge a dozen years ago and it just sits there and prints things without any problems from any device on my WiFi.
So invent a time machine and get a Brother from ten years ago is my advice.
Same. After years of replacing ink in the hp to do one print job, then letting it sit and dry out until it was time again. But now I’ve had that brother for a decade on the same toner
The entire printer industry is being funded by our grandparents, I am not fucking joking. My grandpa has bought MULTIPLE printers last year alone, please some one send help.
Help in the form of more printers?
No, he obviously needs a fax so he can receive your message
My entire family for probably 30 years thought i was gaslighting them about how bad my grandfather is with computers. And phones. And the internet. And phones.
He’s 93 and he’s convinced them really well these last 5 years or so. It’s a nightmare lol.
I have a printer, and know where the power cord is! I even have it paired to my wifi and use it to scan stuff. Don’t ask me to print anything, I can’t afford the ink.
Who the hell can afford printer cartridge
The problems with society can really be highlighted with how printers are marketed. Cheaper to buy a new printer than replace the ink cartridges on an existing printer.
We are literally built to encourage waste.
Nope. You just need to pay more to be eco friendly
Which is not how it’s supposed to work but I agree with your sentiment
I’m sorry, friend, but I don’t agree with you. This is how it is supposed to work and therefore it should be dismantled
I have two ten year old non color hp laser printers. I bought them at a surplus sales along with two new toners. So far I’m still on the first printer. They are old enough that they have no drm. The work with everything and I expect them to outlast me. I print about ten to twenty pages a year.
Who the hell can afford a printer
Anyone can afford the printer, it’s the ink that’s the problem
The cheap refills came with a free printer.
laser is the secret
Brother is the other secret, though it seem like maybe even they have turned… the problem with making a solid piece of equipment that will last for a decade is you consume your customer base and can’t show ‘growth’ constantly.
My Brother color laser (model 3170, bought in 2016) doesn’t print the perfect photos, but that’s not what I use it for. I print coloring sheets and camp forms for my kiddos and random forms for adult life. It ran on the original toner carts for around 5 years, with black being replaced first on its own. There’s no inkjet in the world that will have 5 year-old carts work, but laser toner doesn’t dry out.
Yup, one of the first things I did when I had a reasonable expectation of not moving around often was buy a big ass brother laser printer, scanner etc used for like $60. These things are built like a tank.
Going to my local library is the secret.
My local library has been getting refurbished for a couple of months.
It’s really thrown off my ability to do paperwork, as they were the only people around with a working printer.
I actually had to fix the printer at work. Horrible stuff.
Hey! I use my local library too! 😂
Ditto on libraries. Mine does AWESOME large format printing for next to nothing. I got 5 different sewing patterns printed, which ended up being 20 or so pages of 48"x48" sheets in color and it cost about $30. Priced it at fedex and it was running well over $100 (I think closer to 200 or 300 but I didn’t pay much attention after seeing how much it was at the libraries.
I have a small Canon b/w laserjet at home which has worked well for small projects but the libraries have been a huge help for anything outside standard letter size print jobs.
The best investment of my life was buying an Epson LQ500 back in… I don’t know… '95 perhaps? All this years, and even after months or even years without use it will happily awake from its slumber to once again scream and punch dots on to its never ending but ancient supply of fanfold paper
But where do you get new ribbons? Or can you re-ink them?
For one, they are still sold new for a surprising low amount of money (e.g.: https://www.bueromarkt-ag.de/farbband_kmp_0633_0501_fuer_epson,vt-farbbaender_und_-rollen,vh-epson,vg-lq_500,p-06330501.html) but re-inking them using just rubber stamp ink is also a possibility.
"Xennials are the micro-generation of people on the cusp of the Generation X and Millennial demographic cohorts.
Many researchers and popular media use birth years from 1977 to 1983,[1] though some extend this further in either direction"
never heard of these.
We are the elder millenials, who know how to defragment a hard drive.
I’m a bit older than the minimum age to be a millenial and have defragmented many drives. when I was like 6 but I still remember watching that stupid coloured blocks diagram for hours for some 20mb or something
A little older than minimum? Doesn’t that make you the young side of smack dab in the exact category? xP
Those were the days
We who have set dip switches or jumpers for an irq address on a sound blaster.
I’m not even gen X and I’ve done this! On multiple computers. … Oh god, I’m a nerd, aren’t I?
Yep.
We, the internet’s first squeakers, ruining all of your adult conversations on ICQ, Prodigy, and AOL.
A/S/L?
We could whistle into a phone and get a modem to try to talk to us.
What a phreak!
I’m a younger millennial but I know how to do that. Culturally I relate way more with gen z than I do millennials, but man do I feel immense pain when I have to explain to people younger than me how to use technology. I had to explain to one of my younger coworkers how to navigate between folders and different hard drives within Windows the other day and it was more difficult than teaching my mom how to use a smart phone when they first came out. Too young to have had a MySpace but old enough to be everyone’s personal IT guy.
You must be 28
I’m guessing 36
The proto-millennials, if you will.
The deep magic
By hand. 😤
Uphill, both ways
At 2400 baud and then someone picks up the phone
Defragmenting takes way too long, especially with a > 6tb drive: just buy a new one and copy the data to it then wipe the old one.
It doesn’t do anything you know it just burns out the hard drive.
It did back in the windows 95 through XP days. I 'member when Windows would bog the fuck down if it was too fragmented. I’m pretty sure it was fat32 that was the problem.
Oh yeah, defrag me harder daddy
I’m in there, I feel closer to Millenial than Gen X but not quite full Millenial. Think it’s also referred to as the Oregon Trail generation, due to it being a common early PC game to play in class when they taught us computers. I still remember first seeing the trash bin on a Macintosh grow fat when it had items in it, I thought it was awesome, years before Windows.
Yes but do you remember The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary and the creepy dolls?
We’re sometimes referred to as “The Oregon Trail Generation.” We rode our bikes and ran around in the woods until it got dark, then went inside to play Nintendo.
We are the Xenomorph generation.
I thought we were the Oregon Trail generation. (‘81)
They were called Gen Y back in the early 90s
TIL I’m a “Xelennial”
There are a bunch of us who had a more GenX life than our birth year would suggest. The internet wasn’t a source of study and paper writing until college. We were allowed to stay home alone after school far younger than is legal today. In the summer we were kicked out of the house and roamind the town on your bike with no method of contact was normal.
If you saw kids in an 80s movie our lives matched that more than a 90s movie.
Just get a Brother laser printer. It uses a normal power chord same exact as any desktop PC, and uses toner, same exact as any real printer that’s not a money farming piece of shit ink jet.
DISCLAIMER: I have not investigated Brother or other brands for enshittification in recent years, so YMMV.
My Brother lazer color printer has just been sitting here, pooping out pages and pages of what ever I want, sometimes sitting there off for months, year after year. Still haven’t changed the toner.
Is that an AC/DC power chord?
Sir/ma’am, you win the best comment I’ve seen today, congrats
Same, had a samsung for 5 years and it sucked, my Brother has been solid for over 5 years now. Just get one that has network support, so you can print from any computer (and even a phone) in your network.
I really miss google cloud print, it was an amazing product (my printer still supports it).
Seconded! I have several Brother MFCs. Rock solid, great Linux support, rarely change the toner.
My HP color laser was such a hassle, every time I wanted to use it I had to hard boot it, and even then it only worked half the time. No wifi or apple access over the network or any other fancy stuff ofc.
Have a b&w brother now, the android app is meh but else it’s wonderful, just doing its job all day long.
Is the color laser as good?
In my experience, yes, but I also do not print a ton of color things, or things in general. It’s just been spitting out random pages here or there for years. Maybe only went through 1.5 reams so far.
I had a Samsung laser back in college and now it’s leaving streaks down the page. No clue how to clean it. I think I gave it away
I just write the document by hand the one time a year I need a printer. Doesn’t work for everything but is good enough for lots of the stuff that still requires your signature in ink
i just sign a piece of paper, take a picture then photoshop it into to a screenshot of the pdf, and slightly distort it and add noise to make it look like it was scanned….
if they want me to physically mail the paper in, i just give up and move on.Ah, found a solution for that too. There’s services twhere you can send a pdf and they will print it, pack it in an envelope and send it to any address you specify.
nice…
