Looking for a new printer. My new HP Inkjet is a piece of fucking garbage and I’m going to smash it to pieces in my driveway.

Looking for something with good Linux support, and as little proprietary online HP-type bullshit as possible. Also, should I get a laser printer?

    • vampatori ( vampatori@feddit.uk ) 
      1·
      3 years ago

      We’ve got some Brother laser printers at work and they’ve been great. We get third-party toner from a local company for peanuts too, as well as sending them the old cartridges to reuse/recycle. If I ever need a printer at home, this is the route I’ll go!

      EDIT: Also, checkout company closing auctions (there’s a few around again!) and you can pick-up some decent office stuff including printers for cheap!

  • deadbeef79000 ( deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz ) 
    2·
    3 years ago

    Brother MFC-xxxx whichever is available. Plug in the ethernet or connect to wifi and go. No drivers.

    We’ve had a decade+ of solid use, the couple of times we’ve had issues we’ve had reasonably priced local service.

    It’s because they’re lower-end “business” machines rather than any-level “consumer” grade crap.

    We’ve had a bad run with off-brand toner shitting up the machine though. We probably spend about $600/year on genuine toner. But we do a lot of printing. I shudder to think what our inkjet costs would be though.

    If you don’t need immediate printing facility, you might find printing ad hoc at Stationery Warehouse or the public library more cost effective!

  • monobot ( monobot@lemmy.ml ) 
    1·
    3 years ago

    I know people say Brother, and I believe they are right. But around me Brother is just not that popular and didn’t want to risk it for future support, so I got cheapest wifi enabled HP laser available here (M111W), works without problem on Gentoo, Mint and Android. Hardest to setup was gf’s Windows. Works over USB cable and wifi.

    I might regret it later, but currently it is working. If I could try out Brother, I would. Also their website is not clear about specifications of cheap models, so I decided agains it.

    And don’t take injets, those are awful.

  • mspencer712 ( mspencer712@lemmy.fmhy.ml ) 
    1·
    3 years ago

    I agree with nearly everything I’m seeing. Maybe to summarize:

    Laser of any kind is shelf stable. Liquid ink dries out and different printers compensate for this in different ways. Even dumb ink tank printers - where you add liquid and there’s no chip to be read anywhere - can have internal ink sponges that fill up and cause failures. Just a different kind of chipped consumable.

    Color laser means four smaller cartridges and an extra wear part to replace after a few years: ITB or intermediate transfer belt. Instead of going from toner drum to paper, toner goes onto this belt first and then to the paper.

    Different printer manufacturers have different behaviors to lock you into only buying their consumables. HP tends to be the worst offender, but it varies.

    I got lucky, bought a used HP Color Laserjet Pro MFP M477fdw. Basically two generations old, and the top of their desktop / tabletop printer line without being tabloid / large-format or being a huge copy machine / document station.

    Toner chip validation is an option you can turn off. For now. But individual components have firmware versions and can be incompatible with each other, so I’m fully confident I’m one part replacement away from needing to update firmware on everything else and losing this tolerant behavior. A full refill of all four cartridges (5000 pages) totals like $65 right now, so that will suck.

  • davefischer ( davefischer@beehaw.org ) 
    1·
    3 years ago

    Small & cheap: Brother laser.

    I mostly stick with HP Laserjets. I had a 4000, upgraded to an 8000 (for 11x17) then had a Ricoh Aficio MP-C4500, which was nice but already near the end of its life when I got it, so when that finally gave up I got a HP LaserJet M604, which has behaved very nicely (though it only does 8.5x11).