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  • Get a laser printer not an inkjet printer

    Inkjet printers will crap out if not used constantly due to the ink lines getting blocked with dry ink

    I've got a brother laser printer and it works great

  • Brother, my brother. My little HL1200 serves my needs nicely, is cheap to run with both genuine and third party toner, and the company isn't run by a bunch of greedy pigs. Probably the only printer brand I'll ever buy again. Fuck HP indeed.

    Edit: discovered Brother plays that game too

  • At work we sell our customers (small but high volume printing) regular brozher laser printers.
    For s/w: HL-L5100DN or MFC-L5750D(W or N? Don't remember)

  • I have a Brother HL-L3230CDW. It has been a horse and has quickly become my most prized possession of all things that I own. It takes anyone's toner and produces quality without question. It works with my various Linux, Macs, Windows, and Android devices without hesitation and minimal fuss to get setup.

    So that's what I would recommend. Is a good bit of coin up front but in my opinion, it has paid for itself in cheaper long run TCO and sanity in that it just fucking works.

  • Brother had one for almost a decade now and not 1 issue

    Ink jet printers are a cartel and a scam

  • Another vote for Brother . I have a black & white laser printer (mfc-L2675). And I can get a 3-pack of toner off Amazon for around $20.

  • If you want to print in oversized, I can readily recommend the Epson ET 8550.

    It's a 6 tank A3+ photo/poster printer for under €800. If you got the use case for these (say as a photographer or an artist or you just want to print your own posters) then it's a really good model.
    Unlike it's closest rival in the semi-professional market from Canon, the tanks make ink very cheap to operate, the vast vast vast majority of the printing cost is going to be the paper. It has a damn good printing quality even on mostly dark prints, it's quite fast for documents spitting them out in 3-5 seconds each so for personal use it's not meaningfully behind a laser. Quite variable, too, you can take the back off and feed whatever material you want in there with a huge clearance for thick plates to print on.

    Sure, it's not something the average user ever needs but if you are looking for something like this, I can recommend it.

    • Interesting. What's the total price per sheet on decent paper? I do a few hundred A3 prints a week.

      • It's difficult to say as a lot depends on your specific use case and what you print and on which paper.

        For my main use case, I bought a 100-pack of relatively inexpensive satin a3+ poster paper (so only 280g, but eh, they get put on the wall with something like poster strips or tack, I hardly need them to be thicker) which comes down to ~78cents per sheet. Ink usage is difficult to measure because my prints differ wildly in how much color is on them but my average so far seems to be ~50 cents per max quality a3+ print. So ~€1,30 per full size print if I want to be slightly pessimistic about it. But some of them were probably more like 85 cents total. 😅

        The ink bottles really last a long time. Check your local prices but over here they cost €22 a bottle to replace, the printer has two blacks (one is pigment based for documents and stationary and so on), CMY and a 60% Gray, they all cost the same here but might be different for you. And then of course depends on what you print.

        What I sadly cannot say is what A3 would cost, but scaling down you should be looking at roughly 20% less ink costs per print for full-size graphics prints, and then of course the paper you're printing on. But that's just mathing it down from my A3+ prints.

  • I have a brother laser at home and on the rare occasion I need color prints I send them to Office Depot.

  • Have one of the last decent HP printers.

    I've gone from being able to easily and happily recycling my laser printer cartridges to HP - print off the label and send free post - to going through some convoluted account sign-up bullshit pictures of my inside leg whilst upside down. Yeah not happening.

    Eventually my toner is going to be too expensive to support and the printer scanner will break.

    Thank-you for asking this question.

  • I’m pretty happy with my Canon GX7021.

    It’s pigment based inkjet, so no bleed, and it also prints thick card stock that lasers can’t. And way cheaper than lasers.

    Otherwise ticks all the boxes, double side print and scan, Ethernet etc

  • I had a really bad experience with a $30 hand scanner and Brother support (they included the wrong size calibration sheet in the packaging and refused to replace it, and were assholes/user blaming about it). I definitely did not want to deal with that for a $400 printer/scanner combo. I went with Xerox 6515 instead, which has been going solid for 4 years - black toner is at 25%, the rest are mostly full. I have never used it with USB, only Ethernet (plugged in network). Works great with Windows, Linux, and Mac. The scanner does great work.

    Cheap printers are cheap because they make up the cost with ink. If you want something decent then bite the bullet and fork over more cash upfront. A printer designed for corporate/office work will typically be more durable - but buyer beware, may have "features" that only look good on a sales presentation. Do your research, avoid cloud storage/fax/etc.

    I also got my godmother an Epson Ecotank, due to simplicity. It has been going swimmingly. Their "innovation" is (massive, mind you) refillable tanks in the printer, you must buy bottles of ink. That makes ink DRM impossible, but their ink is cheap enough that bootleg ink is unnecessary.

    If you can't afford a more expensive printer right now then take trips to your local FedEx/whatever and put some money each time you do towards a decent printer. DO NOT get a temporary cheap printer, ink will easily cost you the same as a decent printer over a short period of time.

91 comments