7 ms·

The 1990s saw "peak printer" with the arrival of the HP LaserJet 4 series; perhaps the ultimate laser printer, considering the time in which it was created. Re

by gjvc 6y ago

The 1990s saw "peak printer" with the arrival of the HP LaserJet 4 series; perhaps the ultimate laser printer, considering the time in which it was created. Realising that they were cannibalising future sales by having people buy one for life, HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults and improve the predictability of upcoming quarter's earnings. Other manufacturers were either too clever to ever create a reliable printer which would never need replacing, or they soon followed suit. Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste.

troydavis 6y ago
I owned a LaserJet 4L in about 1994 and, yes, it was amazing. It was also about $550 in 1994 dollars, or something like $900 now. That was the smallest LJ model, targeted at individuals and home offices, and one of the least expensive printers on the market other than dot matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slor0f3LJIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slor0f3LJIU I don’t think I’ve spent a total of $900 on printers since then. If one is willing to use a laser instead of an ink jet, quality still exists. I have a Brother MFC-L2750DW now (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_mfc_l2750dw_all_in_one_monochrome_laser.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_m...). It’s wonderful and works flawlessly, including duplex scanning to macOS. It’s a far better price:quality mix than the LJ 4 was. It was $250, though, not $50, and as an inexpensive laser, it only prints in monochrome. If one is willing to spend $200+ and accept monochrome, good printers still exist. Today’s $900 printer will shine your shoes.
- sjg007 6y ago
  Ooh duplex scanning. I need that.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    For what it's worth I waffled back and forth over this and ended up getting the cheaper Brother model that does everything else including duplex printing but that doesn't have duplex scanning. Seven months in so far and I haven't regretted the lack of duplex scanning. Of course that may vary for your use case, and if you have lots of documents or whatever that need digital archiving then obviously get it, but I haven't personally experienced that need.
    - jamiek88 6y ago
      I also recommend your version. Had it for years. Changed the toner once. It’s been in storage for a year in hot Houston, moved cross country three times in a uhaul and gone months between prints. Just used it the other day to print a pumpkin stencil, prior to that printed immigration docs, 100+ pages in March. No colors, single side scan, does everything else on macOS.
    - jdeibele 6y ago
      I use my Brother MFC-2740DW more for scanning than I do for printing. It does a great job with Apple's Image Capture on my Mac either using the document feeder or the flatbed. What I love about the document feeder is that it will scan both sides of the pages and combine them into one PDF. Really handy for dealing with real estate and other legal documents that are 20 pages long. I have rarely had a page skip but then you can scan that page and use Preview to insert it in the proper place in the PDF. You could feed 10 pages, then flip them and feed them in again and combine manually. But it's very nice that the machine will do it for you. We also have a Brother color laser printer, an HL-3170CDW. Its print quality is better and faster than my machine but it likes to go offline for no apparent reason after a couple of days. The easy fix is to power it off and on but it'd be nice if there was a better one.
      - toyg 6y ago
        You can also generate two pdfs and just have PDFsam merge them for you. I have a Brother without full-duplex and I do that, it’s pretty quick.
    - sjg007 6y ago
      Yeah I have duplex printing already. I really need duplex scanning because everybody prints duplex.
    - amaccuish 6y ago
      I sent my first brother back after I realised I misread duplex printing/vs duplex everthing. It's so handy to just dump a pile of pages in the ADF and let it chew through it all (when I was at uni with handouts etc, book extracts) I feel like in 2020 we should all be more scanners than printers, so for me anyway it pays to have the duplex scanning
  - philsnow 6y ago
    I'm wary of multi-/omni-function printers (driver support for printers is bad enough and I don't want to spend a year's worth of PTO figuring out which particular unicorn multi-function will work with all the devices I currently have on hand), so I have a brother B&W laser (from a ~decade ago, still perfect, still works across all my platforms) and a fujitsu scansnap ix500. the scansnap does (single-pass) duplex scanning, has a decent enough mobile app, and happily sits on my wifi. the above combination was absolutely critical during remote learning last spring, my kids' teachers wanted a bunch of stuff printed and results scanned back in.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
elorant 6y ago
I bought a Lexmark e232 back in 2006 for a mere €120. Fifteen years later and the damn thing works like a charm. It's not just HP that made high quality products.
tanseydavid 6y ago
I got 22 years out of a HP4000. I bought two other HP printers later in that timeframe and they were both garbage in comparison to the HP4000. I was big fan of HP at one time but have refused to even try any of their products for more than 10 years now -- their quality across-the-board dropped too low for my tastes.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Perhaps that was because HP didn’t make the print engine for that printer. It was made by Canon, HP added their own controller.
CydeWeys 6y ago
I had a LaserJet 4 too, and I think there's some rose-colored glasses effect going on here. I have a Brother DCPL2550DW that I got for $130 when the pandemic started and it's been better than the LaserJet 4 ever was in the following ways: more reliable (not a single jam), duplex printing out of the box, much cheaper, built-in networking (both Ethernet and WiFi), uses a modern interface (USB) that modern computers actually have ports for, built-in combo flatbed/feed tray scanner, better/more intuitive buttons on the printer, faster printer speed, and high enough data throughput to max out its print speed even for complicated pages. For a bit more money you can get a version of this that does duplex feed scanning as well (it wasn't worth it for me but it was for troydavis in one of the sibling comments). The LaserJet 4 was fine for its time but it doesn't compare to decent modern printers. Substantial improvements have been made over the past few decades.
- developer2 6y ago
  > I think there's some rose-colored glasses effect going on here That may be anecdotal based on brand and model. I can agree with you in this case because I've got the Brother DCP-L2540DW. I got it on sale for $99 CAD (~$75 USD) when it was still the newest model available. I'm using the stock cartridge still, though I have a refill purchased and ready to go in case it's not possible to buy one when the original powder runs out. This line of Brother printers is indeed good. It's impossible to say whether this applies generally to any laser printer, or to any Brother laser printer, or if we were simply lucky to have picked up these particular models.
  - ghosty141 6y ago
    My Brother hl 2340d is also working really well. Using the same 10€ cartridge for over 3 years now and not one hickup
  - grawprog 6y ago
    Not sure of the exact model, but we had a brother laser printer at my old work. A few of them actually. They were fairly reliable most of the time. It would jam occasionally and figuring out errors with it was sometimes frustrating. But i never really hated them or have any ill feelings towards them the way i do with other printers.
macjohnmcc 6y ago
I have a Brother duplex color laser printer connected to the network here at home and it's been reliable but I don't use it heavily so I don't know if moderate use would have broken it by now or not.
kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
> HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults I often hear such claims of planned obsolescence and while I won't put it past companies to do it, they feel a bit too conspiratorial to me. Are there any documented cases / exposes of companies doing this, as opposed to just making lower quality stuff because it is cheap? I am talking of deliberate planned obsolescence, and not of things like the iPhone battery scandal where Apple throttled the speed of devices to prevent sudden shut-offs.
- euanc 6y ago
  "The Phoebus cartel existed to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. " "The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours[6] (down from 2,500 hours),[6] and raised prices without fear of competition. The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours. A 1929 table listed the amount of Swiss francs paid that depended on the exceeding hours of lifetime.[8]" https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phoebus_cartel&oldid=980971162 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phoebus_cartel&ol...
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  My impression is that it's just guesswork, extrapolation from the already-dubious DRMed inkjet refills and toner cartridges.
- sly010 6y ago
  Making batteries hard to replace by gluing them in is obviously a conscious decision, not some sort of cost saving.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
    There are simple pull-tabs to remove them. The alternative is a hard shell (which decreases the space available for energy storage)... or letting the battery flop around inside the unit, I suppose.
  - cbmuser 6y ago
RhysU 6y ago
Old monochrome duplex network-attached laser printers are hands down the best. So long as one can find a source of good toner cartridges.
jayofdoom 6y ago
I think, based on the other comments here, and my experience with my own Brother printers... I think they are the "less clever" people building reliable printers.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  The key is to buy a Brother with all of: - ethernet - BR/Script3 (their PostScript clone) - duplex This advice has been good for the last 12 years or so. I never install their drivers; I just tell CUPS that there's a Brother in PS mode with a duplexer at a particular IP address, and then there's no further issue.
jrs235 6y ago
I still have an HP Laserjet 4 series printer with network card. I bought it 10+ years ago on Craigslist for $40 which included toner in it. I love it! Has two 500 page (1 ream) trays. That toner lasted a few years. Bought more toner that lasted 5+ more years. Bought another toner cartridge. Finally starting to look at replacing it with a multi function color laser printer.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Get a 4050n for bulk printing without tracking dots and a multifunction inkjet for everything else.
sickcodebruh 6y ago
Back when I used to do IT work, close to ten years ago, the HP LaserJet 4 and I want to say both the 3000 and 4000 were always the printers I was happiest to see when I walked into a new client’s office. They seemed to last forever, they broke the least frequently, their drivers were the easiest to install and the most stable. It’s both wild to me and not totally unsurprising that so many people have fond memories for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people were still squeezing life out of theirs!
- bsder 6y ago
  HP Laserjet 4's were great--except that they could trip you local power substation offline when the powered up and the ozone was overbearing. Great to use in a corporate environment with lots of ventilation and power--home environment, not so much.
throwaway_dcnt 6y ago
My nearly a decade old hp laser printer is chugging along nicely and in addition to my work related printing, has handled multiple kids going through middle, high school and college including snapchat picture wall phases!! On first set of toner cartridges.
agumonkey 6y ago
I find the planned fault business model near conspiracy theory. It makes sense but I find it hard that it was a bullet point on a chart: - failure rate: 50% per year to ensure sales what's next ? - > 300MB driver install with at least 5 annoying 3rd party crap Now I can be wrong ..
- moltar 6y ago
  > The Phoebus cartel existed to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. They appropriated market territories and fixed the useful life of such bulbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I knew about them but aren't they the exception ?
fedorareis 6y ago
My parents still have an HP LaserJet 4 series printer. As long as you are just printing text that thing generally works great (some PDFs seem to max out the buffer and take forever to print). It will be interesting to see how long their much newer HP all in one laserJet lasts in comparison.
daniellarusso 6y ago
Ha! I literally replaced my Laserjet 4P at the beginning of this year. I now have a multifunction Officejet Laser, so scanning multiple pages over wifi is an added bonus.
vt240 6y ago
Still running our LaserJet 5si on the network for 11x17 pages. Been out of service (maintenance contract) for years, but it's still working fine with some light cleaning.
dehrmann 6y ago
I know someone still using a LaserJet 1100. Looks like it might be from 2002? She can still find toner for it, and adding a PCIe parallel port was enough to get the printer working in Windows 10.
cortesoft 6y ago
You seem to be saying contradictory things... if printer quality has decreased so that printers now break quickly, wouldn't that make a second-hand one a really bad idea?
- gjvc 6y ago
  No. Buy a second-hand older, simpler, more reliable device rather than a newer, not-as-well-made, less reliable device, second-hand or not.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    How far back do you have to go to get a reliable one?
lstodd 6y ago
> Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste. This. It's amazing what can be found if one takes a look. I got an Epson C8600 for free (A3 color laser with duplex and all from 2006 or maybe 2008?) complete with spare cartridge set. Someone was throwing out old office stuff. The only problem was the pagecounter chip on the photodrum that had to be replaced, that was something like $5. And I had to reinforce the ikea table it sits on. Otherwise a great machine, if a bit slow to start up.
verpeteren 6y ago
The HP8150DN was also awesome. It had extra's that could tack, sort, duplex, multiple trays for odd papersizes and a massive, massive 3000 (?) page bay.

by gjvc 6y ago

troydavis 6y ago

I owned a LaserJet 4L in about 1994 and, yes, it was amazing. It was also about $550 in 1994 dollars, or something like $900 now. That was the smallest LJ model, targeted at individuals and home offices, and one of the least expensive printers on the market other than dot matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slor0f3LJIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slor0f3LJIU I don’t think I’ve spent a total of $900 on printers since then. If one is willing to use a laser instead of an ink jet, quality still exists. I have a Brother MFC-L2750DW now (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_mfc_l2750dw_all_in_one_monochrome_laser.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_m...). It’s wonderful and works flawlessly, including duplex scanning to macOS. It’s a far better price:quality mix than the LJ 4 was. It was $250, though, not $50, and as an inexpensive laser, it only prints in monochrome. If one is willing to spend $200+ and accept monochrome, good printers still exist. Today’s $900 printer will shine your shoes.

sjg007 6y ago
Ooh duplex scanning. I need that.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  For what it's worth I waffled back and forth over this and ended up getting the cheaper Brother model that does everything else including duplex printing but that doesn't have duplex scanning. Seven months in so far and I haven't regretted the lack of duplex scanning. Of course that may vary for your use case, and if you have lots of documents or whatever that need digital archiving then obviously get it, but I haven't personally experienced that need.
  - jamiek88 6y ago
    I also recommend your version. Had it for years. Changed the toner once. It’s been in storage for a year in hot Houston, moved cross country three times in a uhaul and gone months between prints. Just used it the other day to print a pumpkin stencil, prior to that printed immigration docs, 100+ pages in March. No colors, single side scan, does everything else on macOS.
  - jdeibele 6y ago
    I use my Brother MFC-2740DW more for scanning than I do for printing. It does a great job with Apple's Image Capture on my Mac either using the document feeder or the flatbed. What I love about the document feeder is that it will scan both sides of the pages and combine them into one PDF. Really handy for dealing with real estate and other legal documents that are 20 pages long. I have rarely had a page skip but then you can scan that page and use Preview to insert it in the proper place in the PDF. You could feed 10 pages, then flip them and feed them in again and combine manually. But it's very nice that the machine will do it for you. We also have a Brother color laser printer, an HL-3170CDW. Its print quality is better and faster than my machine but it likes to go offline for no apparent reason after a couple of days. The easy fix is to power it off and on but it'd be nice if there was a better one.
    - toyg 6y ago
      You can also generate two pdfs and just have PDFsam merge them for you. I have a Brother without full-duplex and I do that, it’s pretty quick.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    Yeah I have duplex printing already. I really need duplex scanning because everybody prints duplex.
  - amaccuish 6y ago
    I sent my first brother back after I realised I misread duplex printing/vs duplex everthing. It's so handy to just dump a pile of pages in the ADF and let it chew through it all (when I was at uni with handouts etc, book extracts) I feel like in 2020 we should all be more scanners than printers, so for me anyway it pays to have the duplex scanning
- philsnow 6y ago
  I'm wary of multi-/omni-function printers (driver support for printers is bad enough and I don't want to spend a year's worth of PTO figuring out which particular unicorn multi-function will work with all the devices I currently have on hand), so I have a brother B&W laser (from a ~decade ago, still perfect, still works across all my platforms) and a fujitsu scansnap ix500. the scansnap does (single-pass) duplex scanning, has a decent enough mobile app, and happily sits on my wifi. the above combination was absolutely critical during remote learning last spring, my kids' teachers wanted a bunch of stuff printed and results scanned back in.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

elorant 6y ago

I bought a Lexmark e232 back in 2006 for a mere €120. Fifteen years later and the damn thing works like a charm. It's not just HP that made high quality products.

tanseydavid 6y ago

I got 22 years out of a HP4000. I bought two other HP printers later in that timeframe and they were both garbage in comparison to the HP4000. I was big fan of HP at one time but have refused to even try any of their products for more than 10 years now -- their quality across-the-board dropped too low for my tastes.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

Perhaps that was because HP didn’t make the print engine for that printer. It was made by Canon, HP added their own controller.

CydeWeys 6y ago

I had a LaserJet 4 too, and I think there's some rose-colored glasses effect going on here. I have a Brother DCPL2550DW that I got for $130 when the pandemic started and it's been better than the LaserJet 4 ever was in the following ways: more reliable (not a single jam), duplex printing out of the box, much cheaper, built-in networking (both Ethernet and WiFi), uses a modern interface (USB) that modern computers actually have ports for, built-in combo flatbed/feed tray scanner, better/more intuitive buttons on the printer, faster printer speed, and high enough data throughput to max out its print speed even for complicated pages. For a bit more money you can get a version of this that does duplex feed scanning as well (it wasn't worth it for me but it was for troydavis in one of the sibling comments). The LaserJet 4 was fine for its time but it doesn't compare to decent modern printers. Substantial improvements have been made over the past few decades.

developer2 6y ago
> I think there's some rose-colored glasses effect going on here That may be anecdotal based on brand and model. I can agree with you in this case because I've got the Brother DCP-L2540DW. I got it on sale for $99 CAD (~$75 USD) when it was still the newest model available. I'm using the stock cartridge still, though I have a refill purchased and ready to go in case it's not possible to buy one when the original powder runs out. This line of Brother printers is indeed good. It's impossible to say whether this applies generally to any laser printer, or to any Brother laser printer, or if we were simply lucky to have picked up these particular models.
- ghosty141 6y ago
  My Brother hl 2340d is also working really well. Using the same 10€ cartridge for over 3 years now and not one hickup
- grawprog 6y ago
  Not sure of the exact model, but we had a brother laser printer at my old work. A few of them actually. They were fairly reliable most of the time. It would jam occasionally and figuring out errors with it was sometimes frustrating. But i never really hated them or have any ill feelings towards them the way i do with other printers.

macjohnmcc 6y ago

I have a Brother duplex color laser printer connected to the network here at home and it's been reliable but I don't use it heavily so I don't know if moderate use would have broken it by now or not.

kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago

> HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults I often hear such claims of planned obsolescence and while I won't put it past companies to do it, they feel a bit too conspiratorial to me. Are there any documented cases / exposes of companies doing this, as opposed to just making lower quality stuff because it is cheap? I am talking of deliberate planned obsolescence, and not of things like the iPhone battery scandal where Apple throttled the speed of devices to prevent sudden shut-offs.

euanc 6y ago
"The Phoebus cartel existed to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. " "The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours[6] (down from 2,500 hours),[6] and raised prices without fear of competition. The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours. A 1929 table listed the amount of Swiss francs paid that depended on the exceeding hours of lifetime.[8]" https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phoebus_cartel&oldid=980971162 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phoebus_cartel&ol...
blacksmith_tb 6y ago
My impression is that it's just guesswork, extrapolation from the already-dubious DRMed inkjet refills and toner cartridges.
sly010 6y ago
Making batteries hard to replace by gluing them in is obviously a conscious decision, not some sort of cost saving.
- ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
  There are simple pull-tabs to remove them. The alternative is a hard shell (which decreases the space available for energy storage)... or letting the battery flop around inside the unit, I suppose.
- cbmuser 6y ago

RhysU 6y ago

Old monochrome duplex network-attached laser printers are hands down the best. So long as one can find a source of good toner cartridges.

jayofdoom 6y ago

I think, based on the other comments here, and my experience with my own Brother printers... I think they are the "less clever" people building reliable printers.

dsr_ 6y ago
The key is to buy a Brother with all of: - ethernet - BR/Script3 (their PostScript clone) - duplex This advice has been good for the last 12 years or so. I never install their drivers; I just tell CUPS that there's a Brother in PS mode with a duplexer at a particular IP address, and then there's no further issue.

jrs235 6y ago

I still have an HP Laserjet 4 series printer with network card. I bought it 10+ years ago on Craigslist for $40 which included toner in it. I love it! Has two 500 page (1 ream) trays. That toner lasted a few years. Bought more toner that lasted 5+ more years. Bought another toner cartridge. Finally starting to look at replacing it with a multi function color laser printer.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Get a 4050n for bulk printing without tracking dots and a multifunction inkjet for everything else.

sickcodebruh 6y ago

Back when I used to do IT work, close to ten years ago, the HP LaserJet 4 and I want to say both the 3000 and 4000 were always the printers I was happiest to see when I walked into a new client’s office. They seemed to last forever, they broke the least frequently, their drivers were the easiest to install and the most stable. It’s both wild to me and not totally unsurprising that so many people have fond memories for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people were still squeezing life out of theirs!

bsder 6y ago
HP Laserjet 4's were great--except that they could trip you local power substation offline when the powered up and the ozone was overbearing. Great to use in a corporate environment with lots of ventilation and power--home environment, not so much.

throwaway_dcnt 6y ago

My nearly a decade old hp laser printer is chugging along nicely and in addition to my work related printing, has handled multiple kids going through middle, high school and college including snapchat picture wall phases!! On first set of toner cartridges.

agumonkey 6y ago

I find the planned fault business model near conspiracy theory. It makes sense but I find it hard that it was a bullet point on a chart: - failure rate: 50% per year to ensure sales what's next ? - > 300MB driver install with at least 5 annoying 3rd party crap Now I can be wrong ..

moltar 6y ago
> The Phoebus cartel existed to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. They appropriated market territories and fixed the useful life of such bulbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I knew about them but aren't they the exception ?

fedorareis 6y ago

My parents still have an HP LaserJet 4 series printer. As long as you are just printing text that thing generally works great (some PDFs seem to max out the buffer and take forever to print). It will be interesting to see how long their much newer HP all in one laserJet lasts in comparison.

daniellarusso 6y ago

Ha! I literally replaced my Laserjet 4P at the beginning of this year. I now have a multifunction Officejet Laser, so scanning multiple pages over wifi is an added bonus.

vt240 6y ago

Still running our LaserJet 5si on the network for 11x17 pages. Been out of service (maintenance contract) for years, but it's still working fine with some light cleaning.

dehrmann 6y ago

I know someone still using a LaserJet 1100. Looks like it might be from 2002? She can still find toner for it, and adding a PCIe parallel port was enough to get the printer working in Windows 10.

cortesoft 6y ago

You seem to be saying contradictory things... if printer quality has decreased so that printers now break quickly, wouldn't that make a second-hand one a really bad idea?

gjvc 6y ago
No. Buy a second-hand older, simpler, more reliable device rather than a newer, not-as-well-made, less reliable device, second-hand or not.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  How far back do you have to go to get a reliable one?

lstodd 6y ago

> Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste. This. It's amazing what can be found if one takes a look. I got an Epson C8600 for free (A3 color laser with duplex and all from 2006 or maybe 2008?) complete with spare cartridge set. Someone was throwing out old office stuff. The only problem was the pagecounter chip on the photodrum that had to be replaced, that was something like $5. And I had to reinforce the ikea table it sits on. Otherwise a great machine, if a bit slow to start up.

verpeteren 6y ago

The HP8150DN was also awesome. It had extra's that could tack, sort, duplex, multiple trays for odd papersizes and a massive, massive 3000 (?) page bay.