For those of us who need to print a bit more often, my advice is to buy a black and white laser printer for ~$40 on Craigslist and you'll get years of cheap, reliable occasional printing in your own home while you use up the rest of the toner cartridge that came with it. When it breaks you can probably find another one in the same price range.
I'm going to advise against this. Most people selling their printer are doing so out of frustration due to paper jams or other nonsense. I have gotten 2 used printers out of not wanting to generate e-waste, only to have constant printer jams and other frustrations leading to me having to just print at the grocery store instead.
"That Brother printer" will cost you more (and be Yet Another Plastic Thing To Go To A Landfill Later), but will ... print every time. Sure, after a while you might need to clean the rollers or something, but at least you know it will be that and not some random bricking.
I got a Brother laser printer (HL-3170CDW) and in terms of economy it's hard to beat. (Never buy an ink printer though. That advice holds.)
About the random bricking though… While this printer doesn't actually brick itself, it does have a very curious failure state where if you leave it off, but plugged into the mains, it will eventually refuse to boot up until you unplug it, wait for ten minutes, and plug it back in. No error message, no blinking lights, nothing to indicate that something is wrong, just nothing until you let it reset itself by removing the power cable for a while. I just leave it unplugged most of the time now.
> Never buy an ink printer though. That advice holds.
With traditional ink printers, yes.
With the new tank-based printers? No. That advice no longer holds.
Tank-based printers separate out the tank that holds the ink from the nozzle that sprays the ink. This allows the printer to fully seal off the tank when the printer is not in use, preventing the ink from drying up. The traditional ink cartridges are not able to do that, which is what causes so much frustration and wastage.
I have a few clients with the tank-based printers, and these products seem to have solved the last major objections against inkjet printers. FWIHS, they tend to work quite well.
How do they keep the ink from drying up in the nozzles? That, in my experience, is the problem. There's always leftover ink in the nozzles from the last print operation.
I did buy a (Brother DCP-J4120DW) colour inkjet printer all-in-one device. And (surprisingly to me) it actually doesn't suck. The Linux drivers work. Sure, the ink is pricey, but it has generally been trouble-free. I left it for a couple of years without printing anything and it clogged up, but when the pandemic hit and I started having to print at home again, it cleared up with a couple of head-cleaning operations. I'm not printing much - maybe a double-sided sheet a week.
So yeah, the advice to never buy an inkjet - it's true but not disastrously true all the time.
I second the trouble-free experience with the dcp-j4120. Printing from Android works fine as well.
It does seem there are Linux problems ahead though, as the drivers seem to support only some deprecated CUPS driver version...
Perfectly. At least from the cable onwards. This seems to be a fairly common problem for Brother printers, oddly enough. I eventually figured out the issue from one of several Youtube videos addressing it.
I wonder if Brother knows of its growing positive reputation over the past ~15 years, and whether there are internal pressures within Brother's C-execs to capitalize on this through 'successful' tactics that others are employing.
Its just the lasers though. I had a brother inkjet and it was a short lived disaster. I don't print much and the heads dried up a bit and then in 'cleaning mode' it blasts out most of the ink of the cartridges, but doesn't fix the problem. Other inkjets have the print heads on the catridges so you get new ones when they are replaced. Brother inkjet heads are part of the printer which means they can be a better quality head, but if there is a problem then its much harder to fix. In the end the printer didn't last a year because it heads got fouled and couldn't easily be cleaned/replaced.
Maybe they know, and it's a better business model for them. I don't know how the costs break down. Anti-consumer shenanigans cost money -- first they have to be engineered, then it probably generates a certain amount of after market support issues even when it works perfectly. A shenanigan-free product could be cheaper to design and quicker to market in the first place.
> Most people selling their printer are doing so out of frustration due to paper jams or other nonsense.
Consumer printers? Sure. Highly likely. That stuff was designed to be disposable.
Business-class or Enterprise-class printers that had been used in larger offices or have low page counts? A much lower probability.
The business/enterprise stuff is meant to last because they cost a lot going out the door, and so are built robustly. You just have to ensure either a low page count, or some sort of proof that the machine had been serviced regularly by properly-certified printer techs.
Yes, it is still possible to get a lemon. But if you live somewhere with any sort of a significant metro region, you only need a little patience to find older pre-DRM hardware that is still performing well.
I have had a second-hand 4050DTN for about two decades now (liquidation sale, IIRC), and while it’s hurting for a maintenance kit (already have one, albeit in storage somewhere), it’s still running very well in all other aspects.
> The business/enterprise stuff is meant to last because they cost a lot going out the door, and so are built robustly. You just have to ensure either a low page count, or some sort of proof that the machine had been serviced regularly by properly-certified printer techs.
On the large format side, OG DesignJet 750Cs were pretty dang serviceable for the longest time. The first one I had to repair took a good day or so to disassemble/reassemble, but the next 2 I was able to handle in the second half of a workday.
I do think that used enterprise things will be likely to work well.
I do not live in a place that can fit an “enterprise” printer though, and I think for many people living in apartments it’s a bit of an ask. But it’s also pretty dependent on both the value of the surface area required to you and your printing needs.
I've done it four times. One printer had an issue but was still usable, the other three didn't. It's very common for students and other folks to sell perfectly fine printers when they move.
My latest one is a brother printer that I bought on Craigslist.
