Why do all home/casual use printers suck? Endless error messages, planned obsoleteness, breaking quickly, not being able to read their own ink cartridges.
You look at reviews for any printer and no matter how good it's been reviewed, there's the slew of people reporting in on all the technical difficulties that the new owners haven't encountered yet.
What the hell printers do you guys use? I need an all-in-one. Pic related, what I'm thinking of buying. Rife with technical problems but it only costs $60 so fuck it.
Are they above normal printer-company antics like re-coding their cartridges so you have to buy new ones all the time?
Charles Robinson
HP is quite literally the worst when it comes to consumer-grade printers. Their business-grades are alright, but right off the bat, I have an HP sitting right next to me--$25, cartridge lasted less than half a year, with barely 2-3 dozen print jobs. Go to get a replacement cartridge--it's more than the fucking printer.
Nathaniel Perez
pretty much
Anthony Hughes
My biology teacher in high school just cut open the things and used a syringe to refill them. There are tutorials online, according to him.
Leo Rogers
It's all because of a shit marketing idea to sell printers at a loss and make profit on cartridges
Now they are all forced to sell printers at a loss or else nobody buys their printer because people will always will buy the cheapest one
So in order to make any money, they are stuck with jewing the customer out of every last shekel through dubious means such as price gouging on ink cartridges
Henry Barnes
I buy HP color laser printers then sell them when they run out of toner because its literally cheaper to buy the same printer again than buying 3x$80 toner cartridges
Elijah Morgan
I often hear people picturing them as the most "honest" brand of printers. No personal experience though.
Parker Lewis
So what's the solution? I've had HP printers that lasted me years, but this was about a decade ago.
One user recommended Brothers brand, I'm currently checking them out. Surely there's ONE god-like company that's raining quality from on-high.
Buy this, never touch Inkjet again, they are all utter garbo.
Brayden Morgan
No delivery to the US :(
Wyatt Lee
Brother laser masterrace
Once you go laser, you never go back
Then order it from Amazon.(yourTLD) then retard.
David Allen
I'm liking what I'm seeing. But as I said I need an all-in-one. Unless I'm totally blind, your recommendation is just a document printer.
Still, many thanks for turning me onto this brand.
Alexander Rogers
Ever since I use laser printers I never had any problems whatsoever. Inkjets on the other hand really are pieces of shit and should be banned from this world. It's bad enough that every once in a while some cunt gives me a report printed with an inkjet. I hate reading those blurry, pale prints.
Adrian Williams
>ink cartridges
If you get a printer that uses ink you're making a big mistake. I even have a HP laser that actually works. Like it actually works, when I want it to.
Matthew Foster
It looks like brothers brand doesn't have a color, laser, all-in-one.
Matthew Allen
I'll look into other brands now too. Seems like laser is the way to go for sure.
Oliver Harris
Basically what everyone in this thread is already saying - get a laser. I have an HP 1319 MFP. I have a cheap USB/ethernet print server hooked up to it. Works like a champ.
So if you want color, integrated network, whatever - just find a printer within your budget and read the reviews on it.
If ours ever dies, I'll prob go color and integrated network. But never ever back to inkjet.
Liam Diaz
>HP 1319 MFP
Why are color laser printers uncommon? Seems like the vast majority only do b&w
Camden Edwards
I use a Brother black-and-white laser printer. No scanning or anything, just printing.
It's without a doubt the best printer I've ever had.
Color laser printer, that copies and scans. Hits all the bases.
Brayden Nelson
just like with thinkpad laptops, you need to go business class
It seems like you will be paying more for less features, but in reality you are paying for components that aren't designed to break 2 weeks after the warranty ends
Jeremiah Parker
This. Consumer grade electronics are shit because they know they can shovel shit on the customer and they won't be losing out on huge bulk orders from them. You can't do that in a large contract job.
David Hill
The printer will throw a warning to replace the toner, even though it has a few hundred pages left, BUT you can just go in the menu and disable the warning to keep printing. No hacks like covering up sensors or that bullshit.
You can also buy cheap 3rd party toners for them. The ones I get from newegg are just as good as the authentic ones.
Jordan Price
I had a bad experience with Brother printers--I specifically bought a couple because they were advertised as Google Cloud Print compatible (I run an ssh lab with chromebook clients). Despite the run around the printers were never able to connect to cloud print and it was a widely acknowledged problem that Brother was unable or unwilling to fix via updates.
Charles Edwards
Got a refurbished Epson DX4050 (model might not be exact) from my very first job after high school, after 8 years is still printing great without issues. Don't have much experience with Brother or HP but when they started becoming "smart" that's when everything went downhill
Oliver Taylor
I have a Brother MFC-255CW, my wife has a Brother Laser Printer (not sure of the model) and my office uses nothing but Brother printers, which is why we have them.
They really are good printers, from personal experience with my MFC-255, I bought two sets of cheap ink cartridges about 4 years ago for about $10 USD a set (set includes Black, Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan). I just put the second black in from the set last week. Admittedly, we don't print often, but in the last 4 years, I can't recall a single issue that has occured due to any fault of it's own.
Angel Baker
Thanks for the input guys. Learned a lot. I'm buying this for my mom, who wanted to spend around $100. Obviously that isn't gonna happen. But I found this:
And most laptops in general. HP's business laptops are so much better than the consumer crap.
Levi Turner
Shit I'm retarded, those aren't all-in-ones.
Gabriel Powell
They do, but all laser colour is incredibly expensive. If you need colour printing, go to a print shop and get it done properly. Otherwise just go B/W
Gabriel Collins
Yeah that's what I'm quickly learning. Or town library, 10 cents a page and perfectly acceptable other than photos.
Oliver Nguyen
>10c/page for color Fuck. Mine charges 25c/page
Dominic Gutierrez
Shame it doesn't have a wired network port. The equivalent wired one seems to be, like, twice the price.
Jordan Gomez
I have the wired version of it, It was about £5 cheaper back when I bought it.
Mason Brooks
older ones forced you cover up the sensor they're not that bad, but I gave my old Brother HL2150N to my dad when I got a refurbished samsung ML-2851ND many years ago because fuck not having automatic duplex printing..
Ian Flores
I have one of these from dumpster diving behind a school. I don't think they were even supposed to throw this away?
The black toner was half depleted but the rest was full. Costs about a thousand dollars to replace the cartridges so I'll just throw away the printer when I use it all, which I suspect will be in five years based on how much I print.
Though, you can get a set of bootleg cartridges on amazon for about 200 dollars. They last about 3/4 as long and the quality is supposedly 70% of the original. But any pictures I print are so pristine anyway, I'd almost be okay with a 30% loss in quality.
Brandon Russell
Not anymore, most cartridges have a chip that records how much ink has been used so you have to know how to replace that too.
Hunter Gomez
never had those problems already added CIS
Cameron Howard
there are several shops where you can get a refill for like 5$. HP saves the ID of the last few cartridges, so you just get another one in the shop and since its ID is "new" to your printer it doesnt act up.
Evan Thompson
Brother
With a Continuous ink system from aliexpress
Samuel Young
you can get chip resetters and cartridges designed to be refilled
Camden Diaz
> planned obsoleteness, breaking quickly,
No, you just bought a shitty $30 printer
Brother 4150CDN reporting in Color laser masterrace
Jose Ross
I have an Epson Work Force printer. I've never had issues with it. It doesn't seem to blow through ink as fast as my old Canon Pixma. Epson also provides Linux drivers on their website which is nice. If you just need black and white printing, Brother makes some nice cheap laser printers. Next time, do a little research before you buy the first thing on sale.
Matthew Davis
like the other anons said, don't buy a fucking inkjet piece of shit, laserprinters are the way to go. a friend of mine gave me pic related for free. it's an office printer, so it was abused as hell before I got it, so I had to glue the whole thing back together. but aside from that it has been performing perfectly for more than two years now, and on the same fucking cartridge that came with it. oh yeah, i also got zapped a couple of times touching the usb cable. apparantly there is a 30V AC load on the outer metal part of the usb port when the printer isn't turned on. needless to say i only connect it to my pc when i need to print.
Cameron Baker
cheap shit with lots of moving parts is going to fail on you
my printer sucks, but I barely need to print anything anytime I really, truly need to do a lot of printing, I'll take it down to the print shop
Isaac Watson
However they're the only printers that are plug-and-play on Linux.
HP lasers are bretty gud, even if they need a proprietary plugin to work with HPLIP.
>there is a 30V AC load on the outer metal part of the usb port u wot m8
Jaxson Reed
exactly
Angel Cruz
>I buy HP color laser printers then sell them when they run out of toner because its literally cheaper to buy the same printer again than buying 3x$80 toner cartridges
No it isn't.
Because the toner that comes with the printer are only "DEMO" cartridges. I think mine were only like 5% the capacity of a proper cartridge.
Also, you don't have to buy HP cartridges. Just stop being a cuck and buy cheap 3rd party alternatives.
Connor Sanders
>brother enjoy having to replace the image drum unit every 12000 prints
Hudson Stewart
We had several redundant printers at my last job, due to downsizing of the company. Couple of years old, but hardly used and perfect working condition with full toners.
Tried to sell them online - no takers. Tried to give them away for free - no takers. I would have taken one myself, but they were so large and my apartment is tiny.
Eventually one colleague took one for his sister, who had her own company. The rest we threw in the dumpster, which pained me.
People just don't want large stuff, even if it is expensive.
Luis Hill
/thread Every brother that I have use that wasn't a bargain bin version has worked well. They even release plenty of driver support for Linux with support for multiple distros and a very simple installer.
Henry Brown
>They even release plenty of driver support for Linux with support for multiple distros
Then why did I spend hours fucking around in CUPS and still only have basic functionality?
Julian Watson
Are you using ArchLinux? My debian machine has nearly the same level of support as windows with a one-click installer.
Daniel Johnson
>Are you using ArchLinux?
Yes. It's a constant pain desu.
Angel Lewis
>ArchLinux You should be using a debian based print server instead of doing it natively. Even if it's just a virtual machine.
Blake Wilson
I should just be dumping Arch. Just too lazy to re-install everything.
Kevin Green
All-in-one is shit. Buy a separate fucking scanner. Brother workgroup series mono laser should be $100 or less and is the best option for home use. As for a scanner, get a Fujitsu ScanSnap S500 or S1500 - they're on eBay for $120-$200 right now.
Grayson Kelly
My Brother HL-2170W was plug and play on Linux, even on the network.
Noah Russell
Get an HP if you need Linux drivers. Get a brother if you need it to work forever.
Hudson Jackson
Brother MFC-J6920DW are amazing multifunction machines. Yes they're inkjet, but by god do they work, and they work perfectly after months of sitting there doing nothing. The scanner is huge, and looks great as well.
Wyatt Brooks
All-in-one is always a compromise. You won't ever get the value for your money compared to separate components.
Also inkjet = trash. Look at the most helpful 5 star amazon review for your printer: "[...]print-head started missing a lot of lines on the black ink, so I changed the cartridge. There was no improvement, so I made many attempts to run the head cleaning steps. That made things worse and then it started missing lines on all colors big time. Some were missing almost all the dots in the test print pattern. After days of trying to fix this, I was tempted to simply give up and buy a new printer once again! But since I now am retired and don't use it for my business, I gave it another try. I ordered this cleaning kit from Amazon/Printhead Hospital: It took many, many repetitions of the procedure before the test print was almost perfect (only one dot missing). At that point I said "close enough" and stopped. That was two months ago and it is still printing fine."
Wyatt Garcia
>print-head started missing a lot of lines on the black ink Sounds like head alignment to me. The guy is retarded.
William Nelson
What if I told you there was a printing technology that never required head alignment nor nozzle cleaning.
Grayson Gonzalez
What if I told you I was printing images onto photo paper? What if I told you that I have only ever had to do head alignment once in 5 years, and that my printer has never needed nozzle cleaning? >MFC-J6910DW
James Turner
>printing images >photo paper I'd say it sounds like you're a printer nerd and you're doing some niche bullshit.
Bentley Wilson
>printer nerd Sometimes you just need to get the colours right man.
Noah Gomez
OP I have that exact printer and its been going strong for 4 years now. The only problem I run into with it seems to be the print heads need to be cleaned every 2 months but other than that its a fairly decent printer.
Mason Fisher
I have a HP F4185 selfmodded with external ink tanks. It's about 9 years old, hassle free operation for almost a decade.
8.76 USD per liter of ink.
HP 22 which is a 6.0ml color cart is rated for 160 pages, That's 26,666 pages per liter of ink.
HP 21 is a 7.0ml black cart is rated for 190 pages, 27,142 pages.
I mainly print color with occasional black n white copying, ink is much more suited for what I use my printer for, also no warmups from a cold start, no smell of cancer toner either.
Looking to upgrade to a Brother A3 AIO in the future though because they support supersize carts.
Luis Baker
why are there so many lasercucks in this thread
inkjets have way better print quality
Lincoln Bell
lol okay then friendo
Benjamin Wright
Got myself a Samsung ML2165 Laser printer for about 30€ three years ago. Still working fine, needs under heavy use by three people yearly new toner, which comes in at about 20€ a pop
Elijah Ward
Noone gives a fuck about quality if it hardly works.
>got Cannon ip4500 >recommended to me by some faggot on anandtech around 2007-2008 >it is the only piece of tech ive ever wanted to physically destroy in anger
After many years of suffering replaced it with a brother laser and never looked back. Cunt on anandtech trolled me good.
Nathan Turner
>inkjets have way better print quality in what world?
Isaac Bailey
Nigger if it can go 12000 prints without an error I consider that a win.
Benjamin Roberts
inkjet brother. had to replace print head after six months. good thing it was still under warranty. still pretty sucked
Aaron Torres
>laserbeams are thinner than an inkjet nozzle could ever be >"inkjets have way better quality"
go away ink jew
Adrian Hughes
Few reasons:
Printing, even for as long as its been around, is an incredibly, stupidly, complex idea. Literally, think about it. You're asking your PC/Printer to take a package of data, which you or I see as an image/text document/whatever on the screen, and turn it into instructions for a series of rollers, microscopic nozzles, and pulleys to follow to reproduce what you see. It's not a type-writer. It can't just actuate a single arm to give us a letter, no. It has to activate microscopic nozzles on the print head to spray a certain pattern onto the page, at a certain point on the page, which it best guesses from where the page came in at. It doesn't use a Pen. It can't just move 2 arms to replicate a drawing someone did before like an Autopen. It has to break down that drawing into parts, decode the color data, and tell the print head as the rollers/pulleys move, where to spray ink on the paper, what color combination to spray, and how much to spray for, to give us a tiny little part of our image. They're absolutely mind boggling complex, really. And that's a "simple" inkjet printer.
All these moving parts, pressurized ink systems, sensors, nozzles, electronics, body panels, and more, have to fit together and work to be sold for $40 in a box at Walmart. That is why cheap printers suck.
Yes, "expensive" ones suck too. Mostly because they use similar/identical systems to the cheap ones to simplify the supply chain/construction process. Get yourself one that is genuinely different and unique and never sells for cheap. Those are the ones worth having.
Xavier Walker
I love my HP, always bought them. I tried an Epson InkJet and Brother Laser, and brought them both back, and went right back to HP.
Ya, the ink situation for colors sucks, but it's the same with any brand of inkjet printer.
Also, when you say your inks only lasted a few dozen print jobs, were those print jobs a bunch of color rich prints, or just black and whites? So many people think their inks will last forever when printing a shit ton of pictures.
