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Yes, HP is a giant scumbag. But the conclusion from the big printer thread last week: just buy a Brother laser printer and never look back. Seriously, inkjet a

by ohazi 6y ago

Yes, HP is a giant scumbag. But the conclusion from the big printer thread last week: just buy a Brother laser printer and never look back. Seriously, inkjet and all of the surrounding bullshit is not worth the time or the money or the energy or the frustration.

Wistar 6y ago
THIS. I gave up on HP printers in about 2007 when I realized that their required software was absolutely terrible, at least on my machine. It was huge install, and caused a number of weird problems. The Brothers I have work well with a minimum of problems although my Brother color printer required a new drum set awfully fast (and cost more than I paid for the printer). For inkjet, I use Canon and I love them, although the ink is expensive, especially the 8-color ink packs.
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  For inkjet printer, I think Epson's ink tank printer is great. The printer cost 3x compared to other cheap loss-leader inkjet printers, but the inks are cheap and you buy it by the bottle instead of by the drips in cartridges.
- greyhair 6y ago
  You and I are in a similar camp. I have a monochrome Brother laser (with Duplex) and a Color Canon Inkjet, both on wired networking. Both work well including printing from my phone. Not problems with either, I print mostly on the laser, occasionally on the inkjet. The Canon inkjet can sit idle for weeks at a time, and I still haven't had a plugged nozzle in eight years.
bhouston 6y ago
I've converted our office to Brother (4 printers), my parents to brother (2 printers) as well as bought 3 Brother printers myself over the last 12 years. Such an amazing printer and company. And remember it works flawlessly with Linux.
- mattmanser 6y ago
  In the big printer thread referenced, the consensus was that they do not work flawlessly with Linux.
- ansible 6y ago
  After the fiasco with an HP InkJet MFP, we went with Brother. Instead of constantly using steam to clean clogged jets, it just... works. Much less fiddly. The missus mostly prints from her iPad, phone, or Windows laptop, I haven't used it much from Linux.
- beagle3 6y ago
  I have recently bought an office class Brother printer. It works flawlessly on Linux; but it doesn’t work flawlessly on Macs, and I’ve found bug reports for the same thing going back to 2015. When you use the Mac OS built in “scanner” app to scan to PDF, it will scan in color even when you ask it to scan in B&W; unfortunately, this will confuse the app and the pdf will be corrupted. The recommended workaround is “scan in color” (which I do, and then use Ghostscript to convert to b&w), but it’s ridiculous. That said, as far as quality, speed, robustness and reliability, this is the best printer/scanner/fax machine I ever used. And it works perfectly well on Linux.
  - dreamcompiler 6y ago
    By "scanner" app do you mean Preview? My several-year-old Brother laser printer works fine in B&W mode on Catalina. Maybe this is just a thing with newer models.
    - beagle3 6y ago
      TIL: Preview can import from the scanner. I was using the scanner window available from the printer icon associated with the multifunction printer. Another comment mentioned the standalone "Image Capture.app" which was also news to me. However, all three are using the same underlying implementation. Scanning in color works. Scanning to JPEG works. However my preferred scanning mode (300dpi, A4, to PDF) produces the garbled image seen here[0], and apparently has been doing so since at least 2012 ... My impression is that preview/scanner/imagecapture all trust the printer to do the conversion to PostScript/PDF, but somehow don't manage to tell it to use B&W instead of color -- it seems like r/g/b pixels are treated as individual gray pixels. [0] https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&prod=ads2100_eu_as_cn&faqid=faq00002976_000 https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro...
boplicity 6y ago
I've had a Brother HL-2170W for at least a decade. Bought a new toner cartridge once. The current one has been "low" for a couple of years. The printer just keeps working. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it lased another decade.
- calcifer 6y ago
  What sort of problems do you have with the 32bit drivers (beyond "I don't like it")?
  - boplicity 6y ago
    I haven't thought about drivers in a long time. It "just works" on MacOS.
  - syntheticnature 6y ago
    I think you meant to reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010133
    - calcifer 6y ago
      Indeed I did, thanks.
  - chongli 6y ago
    32-bit drivers? Most laser printer drivers are just a PPD file. You don’t need to install any executables or whatever. Heck, on a lot of printers you can just use Bonjour printing without installing any drivers at all!
    - wolfgang42 6y ago
      The cheaper Brother printers don’t have a PostScript engine, so you need a “driver” (really a CUPS filter) to rasterize the image and prepend the appropriate PCL commands. In the official Linux driver package, at least for my printer, this comes in the form of a rather complicated shell script that hooks together some binary blobs, and if you don’t have all the right 32-bit support libraries it just mysteriously fails to produce any output while CUPS reports that the print job completed successfully. Fortunately someone has made an open-source equivalent which is much less complicated and seems to work just fine.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Last time I checked, which was last year when I replaced our Brother printer/scanner with an HP inkjet, the linux drivers for brother were still only available in 32 bit format. I had put up with that for some time, mostly because Debian made it work, but that had to end somewhere.
- izacus 6y ago
  I use Oki units which also get cheap 3rd party toner replacements, have good OS support and need a simple PPD file for Linux CUPS. Worth checking out if they're available in your market.
umvi 6y ago
Alternatively, get ahold of an older model that works with 3rd party ink and never connect it to the internet
- Spivak 6y ago
  And if you need network connectivity a raspberry pi connected to the printer via usb is the best way to breathe life into old printers. CUPS has been really solid for me.
  - copperx 6y ago
    Most routers have an USB port to share printers, don't they?
shpx 6y ago
The big printer thread from last week (actually 2 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24977699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24977699
- ohazi 6y ago
  it's been a long week... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - MagnumPIG 6y ago
    A long year really
    - iamtedd 6y ago
      The Allied Mastercomputer is having his sick way with us.
  - vxNsr 6y ago
    Coulda sworn it was 2 weeks ago.
thanatos519 6y ago
Indeed. Who prints documents with inkjet? I have a Brother MFCL3730CDN CMYK laser for document scan/print/copy and Epson EcoTank ET-14000 for photo and art prints. A-fscking-mazing devices both. Both provide (to be found somewhere in the maze of modern hardware vendor websites) solid (modulo CUPS wrangling and vendor filesystem layout) Linux packages. I've only had one recent glitch when Brother introduced some sort of USB/network bridge daemon that occupied the port so VueScan (Software so good that I don't mind that it's not open source, because it does exactly what I need and more. A work of art worth every penny.) couldn't find the scanner.
- greyhair 6y ago
  I have the same Vuescan (awesome awesome awesome software) issue with my Canon MG6220. It "generally" works over Ethernet, but occasionally goes off the rails, and I have to scan over USB. Because of that, I have the printer installed twice, once on the Network (where it lives most of its life, shared) and once as USB, that I connect during really heavy scanning sessions, which is seldom.
- toast0 6y ago
  Inkjets are tempting if you don't print many documents because the initial cost is pretty low. And ink cartridges also tend to be low cost compared to toner at the unit level. Laser printers take up more space too. The problem is if you don't print a lot, the cartridges dry out, and the ink clogs in the printer and whatever else, leading to a big pain.
  - projektfu 6y ago
    The Xerox Phaser solid ink printers produced really pretty images. It's a shame they are discontinued. I think you can still buy the ink blocks but they are probably going to phase them out.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      That reminds me of a funny story. A previous employer had replaced a bunch of ancient HP LaserJets (we're talking LJ4s.. they were old) with these really nice Phasers. They printed fast, the output was gorgeous, and the drivers didn't suck. The replacement was facility-wide, so there were around 20 of these things. A month later, IT was tasked with re-replacing them for everyone but marketing overnight. Literally overnight, as in, we're paying overtime for this. The boss didn't know what was happening until a week later, but it was a fire drill of an intensity that you usually don't see outside of a full outage. It turned out that, while the Phasers do generate gorgeous hardcopy, the wax-like prints, can, with some effort, some skill, and a sharp knife, be popped off the page. A customer figured this out and had been effectively stealing service by way of paying invoices with numbers quite literally pulled off the page. The old Laserjets were placed back into service everywhere but the marketing group.
macjohnmcc 6y ago
The only thing weird about my Brother color laser printer was one day it told me I ran out of cyan. I press the button to indicate I changed it (it didn't verify) and it continued to print cyan for nearly a year. I don't print often and was still using the toner that came with the printer (less than a new cartridge would contain).
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Yup. Bought a Brother laser printer at least five years ago, and I haven't actually changed the toner yet. And unlike infrequently used inkjet printers, it still works well too.
indymike 6y ago
Even if you buy an Inkjet, Brother makes good ones (ok, not as good as the lasers) that do work with third party ink. I've owned some small (8.5x 11 us letter size) ones and I just got a big one (11x17 print area), and the experience has been really, really good. It's pretty cheap to operate, even with Brother brand Ink. Their Linux support (at least Ubuntu) isn't bad either.
phantop 6y ago
The only way I can ever justify buying a printer these days is snagging them off local school district surpluses. I managed to get two different Office LaserJets for like $10 each and they work wonderfully (and it will probably be cheaper for me to buy a new printer off the school than buy more ink when I inevitably run out).
athenot 6y ago
I picked up a Xerox color laser (Phaser 6510) a couple years ago during a sale and it's fantastic. Network printer, support double-side, great quality on ordinary paper and inexpensive toner (well, more than what my Laserjet 8000 toner used to cost but still not bitter). With my kid studying at home who can print directly from the iPad, it's great.
wvenable 6y ago
I did this a few users ago after the ink dried out again in my inkjet printer and I would have to drop another $100+ on ink. I don't print often but when I need to print I need to print. I spent a bit of change on a Brother Laser printer/scanner and I don't regret that purchase one bit. It's now been years and it still works great -- I've only replaced the toner twice now.
zwaps 6y ago
As a student I owned the cheapest OKI laser printer. Once it broke so I called them. On the same day, they sent an actual engineer to my apartment to fix it. Maybe they thought I was a business or something. No, just a guy in a rented room. I asked about it. The guy didn’t understand why I thought that was weird. I was baffled. Oh also there was none of that nasty HP business. Buy any fitting toner and out it in. I wonder if Oki still exists. If it does, here’s a recommendation.
- my123 6y ago
  They got out of the US printer market this year because of COVID: https://www.oki.com/us/printing/about-us/newsroom/news-and-information/press-center/2020/0901-END-OF-LIFE-NOTIFICATION-FOR-OKI-BRANDED-HARDWARE/index.html https://www.oki.com/us/printing/about-us/newsroom/news-and-i... They're still continuing in other markets though.
  - xbar 6y ago
    Sad. The OKI Microline 320 was a staple from my early 90s career in medical IT. It's still sold by Staples.
- dfox 6y ago
  It does and if you can get an OKI printer it is probably better choice than Brother. OKI and Brother printers are generally similar (in fact I would not be surprised if Brother printers are actually made by OKI), but OKI printers tend to have better firmware and actual licensed PostScript implementation from Adobe. And at least here (Czech Republic) you can often get OKI printers on sale with almost ridiculous discounts.
xbar 6y ago
This.
chongli 6y ago
The whole point of this HP inkjet plan is to print full page photos. If you’re printing documents just use a laser.
philistine 6y ago
I found my Brother printer in the trash ! I call her trashy. Trashy Brother.
nyanpasu64 6y ago
I've been avoiding laser printers since they can emit ultra-fine particles into the air, which could cause lung damage. I'm surprised to see not a single mention of this risk in the thread. Is my concern not shared by others, and do people think it's not a serious risk?
- copperx 6y ago
  That's concerning. If true, there could even be a risk for cancer.

by ohazi 6y ago

Wistar 6y ago

THIS. I gave up on HP printers in about 2007 when I realized that their required software was absolutely terrible, at least on my machine. It was huge install, and caused a number of weird problems. The Brothers I have work well with a minimum of problems although my Brother color printer required a new drum set awfully fast (and cost more than I paid for the printer). For inkjet, I use Canon and I love them, although the ink is expensive, especially the 8-color ink packs.

neurostimulant 6y ago
For inkjet printer, I think Epson's ink tank printer is great. The printer cost 3x compared to other cheap loss-leader inkjet printers, but the inks are cheap and you buy it by the bottle instead of by the drips in cartridges.
greyhair 6y ago
You and I are in a similar camp. I have a monochrome Brother laser (with Duplex) and a Color Canon Inkjet, both on wired networking. Both work well including printing from my phone. Not problems with either, I print mostly on the laser, occasionally on the inkjet. The Canon inkjet can sit idle for weeks at a time, and I still haven't had a plugged nozzle in eight years.

bhouston 6y ago

I've converted our office to Brother (4 printers), my parents to brother (2 printers) as well as bought 3 Brother printers myself over the last 12 years. Such an amazing printer and company. And remember it works flawlessly with Linux.

mattmanser 6y ago
In the big printer thread referenced, the consensus was that they do not work flawlessly with Linux.
ansible 6y ago
After the fiasco with an HP InkJet MFP, we went with Brother. Instead of constantly using steam to clean clogged jets, it just... works. Much less fiddly. The missus mostly prints from her iPad, phone, or Windows laptop, I haven't used it much from Linux.
beagle3 6y ago
I have recently bought an office class Brother printer. It works flawlessly on Linux; but it doesn’t work flawlessly on Macs, and I’ve found bug reports for the same thing going back to 2015. When you use the Mac OS built in “scanner” app to scan to PDF, it will scan in color even when you ask it to scan in B&W; unfortunately, this will confuse the app and the pdf will be corrupted. The recommended workaround is “scan in color” (which I do, and then use Ghostscript to convert to b&w), but it’s ridiculous. That said, as far as quality, speed, robustness and reliability, this is the best printer/scanner/fax machine I ever used. And it works perfectly well on Linux.
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  By "scanner" app do you mean Preview? My several-year-old Brother laser printer works fine in B&W mode on Catalina. Maybe this is just a thing with newer models.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    TIL: Preview can import from the scanner. I was using the scanner window available from the printer icon associated with the multifunction printer. Another comment mentioned the standalone "Image Capture.app" which was also news to me. However, all three are using the same underlying implementation. Scanning in color works. Scanning to JPEG works. However my preferred scanning mode (300dpi, A4, to PDF) produces the garbled image seen here[0], and apparently has been doing so since at least 2012 ... My impression is that preview/scanner/imagecapture all trust the printer to do the conversion to PostScript/PDF, but somehow don't manage to tell it to use B&W instead of color -- it seems like r/g/b pixels are treated as individual gray pixels. [0] https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&prod=ads2100_eu_as_cn&faqid=faq00002976_000 https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro...

boplicity 6y ago

I've had a Brother HL-2170W for at least a decade. Bought a new toner cartridge once. The current one has been "low" for a couple of years. The printer just keeps working. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it lased another decade.

calcifer 6y ago
What sort of problems do you have with the 32bit drivers (beyond "I don't like it")?
- boplicity 6y ago
  I haven't thought about drivers in a long time. It "just works" on MacOS.
- syntheticnature 6y ago
  I think you meant to reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010133
  - calcifer 6y ago
    Indeed I did, thanks.
- chongli 6y ago
  32-bit drivers? Most laser printer drivers are just a PPD file. You don’t need to install any executables or whatever. Heck, on a lot of printers you can just use Bonjour printing without installing any drivers at all!
  - wolfgang42 6y ago
    The cheaper Brother printers don’t have a PostScript engine, so you need a “driver” (really a CUPS filter) to rasterize the image and prepend the appropriate PCL commands. In the official Linux driver package, at least for my printer, this comes in the form of a rather complicated shell script that hooks together some binary blobs, and if you don’t have all the right 32-bit support libraries it just mysteriously fails to produce any output while CUPS reports that the print job completed successfully. Fortunately someone has made an open-source equivalent which is much less complicated and seems to work just fine.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

Last time I checked, which was last year when I replaced our Brother printer/scanner with an HP inkjet, the linux drivers for brother were still only available in 32 bit format. I had put up with that for some time, mostly because Debian made it work, but that had to end somewhere.

izacus 6y ago
I use Oki units which also get cheap 3rd party toner replacements, have good OS support and need a simple PPD file for Linux CUPS. Worth checking out if they're available in your market.

umvi 6y ago

Alternatively, get ahold of an older model that works with 3rd party ink and never connect it to the internet

Spivak 6y ago
And if you need network connectivity a raspberry pi connected to the printer via usb is the best way to breathe life into old printers. CUPS has been really solid for me.
- copperx 6y ago
  Most routers have an USB port to share printers, don't they?

shpx 6y ago

The big printer thread from last week (actually 2 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24977699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24977699

ohazi 6y ago
it's been a long week... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- MagnumPIG 6y ago
  A long year really
  - iamtedd 6y ago
    The Allied Mastercomputer is having his sick way with us.
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Coulda sworn it was 2 weeks ago.

thanatos519 6y ago

Indeed. Who prints documents with inkjet? I have a Brother MFCL3730CDN CMYK laser for document scan/print/copy and Epson EcoTank ET-14000 for photo and art prints. A-fscking-mazing devices both. Both provide (to be found somewhere in the maze of modern hardware vendor websites) solid (modulo CUPS wrangling and vendor filesystem layout) Linux packages. I've only had one recent glitch when Brother introduced some sort of USB/network bridge daemon that occupied the port so VueScan (Software so good that I don't mind that it's not open source, because it does exactly what I need and more. A work of art worth every penny.) couldn't find the scanner.

greyhair 6y ago
I have the same Vuescan (awesome awesome awesome software) issue with my Canon MG6220. It "generally" works over Ethernet, but occasionally goes off the rails, and I have to scan over USB. Because of that, I have the printer installed twice, once on the Network (where it lives most of its life, shared) and once as USB, that I connect during really heavy scanning sessions, which is seldom.
toast0 6y ago
Inkjets are tempting if you don't print many documents because the initial cost is pretty low. And ink cartridges also tend to be low cost compared to toner at the unit level. Laser printers take up more space too. The problem is if you don't print a lot, the cartridges dry out, and the ink clogs in the printer and whatever else, leading to a big pain.
- projektfu 6y ago
  The Xerox Phaser solid ink printers produced really pretty images. It's a shame they are discontinued. I think you can still buy the ink blocks but they are probably going to phase them out.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    That reminds me of a funny story. A previous employer had replaced a bunch of ancient HP LaserJets (we're talking LJ4s.. they were old) with these really nice Phasers. They printed fast, the output was gorgeous, and the drivers didn't suck. The replacement was facility-wide, so there were around 20 of these things. A month later, IT was tasked with re-replacing them for everyone but marketing overnight. Literally overnight, as in, we're paying overtime for this. The boss didn't know what was happening until a week later, but it was a fire drill of an intensity that you usually don't see outside of a full outage. It turned out that, while the Phasers do generate gorgeous hardcopy, the wax-like prints, can, with some effort, some skill, and a sharp knife, be popped off the page. A customer figured this out and had been effectively stealing service by way of paying invoices with numbers quite literally pulled off the page. The old Laserjets were placed back into service everywhere but the marketing group.

macjohnmcc 6y ago

The only thing weird about my Brother color laser printer was one day it told me I ran out of cyan. I press the button to indicate I changed it (it didn't verify) and it continued to print cyan for nearly a year. I don't print often and was still using the toner that came with the printer (less than a new cartridge would contain).

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

Yup. Bought a Brother laser printer at least five years ago, and I haven't actually changed the toner yet. And unlike infrequently used inkjet printers, it still works well too.

indymike 6y ago

Even if you buy an Inkjet, Brother makes good ones (ok, not as good as the lasers) that do work with third party ink. I've owned some small (8.5x 11 us letter size) ones and I just got a big one (11x17 print area), and the experience has been really, really good. It's pretty cheap to operate, even with Brother brand Ink. Their Linux support (at least Ubuntu) isn't bad either.

phantop 6y ago

The only way I can ever justify buying a printer these days is snagging them off local school district surpluses. I managed to get two different Office LaserJets for like $10 each and they work wonderfully (and it will probably be cheaper for me to buy a new printer off the school than buy more ink when I inevitably run out).

athenot 6y ago

I picked up a Xerox color laser (Phaser 6510) a couple years ago during a sale and it's fantastic. Network printer, support double-side, great quality on ordinary paper and inexpensive toner (well, more than what my Laserjet 8000 toner used to cost but still not bitter). With my kid studying at home who can print directly from the iPad, it's great.

wvenable 6y ago

I did this a few users ago after the ink dried out again in my inkjet printer and I would have to drop another $100+ on ink. I don't print often but when I need to print I need to print. I spent a bit of change on a Brother Laser printer/scanner and I don't regret that purchase one bit. It's now been years and it still works great -- I've only replaced the toner twice now.

zwaps 6y ago

As a student I owned the cheapest OKI laser printer. Once it broke so I called them. On the same day, they sent an actual engineer to my apartment to fix it. Maybe they thought I was a business or something. No, just a guy in a rented room. I asked about it. The guy didn’t understand why I thought that was weird. I was baffled. Oh also there was none of that nasty HP business. Buy any fitting toner and out it in. I wonder if Oki still exists. If it does, here’s a recommendation.

my123 6y ago
They got out of the US printer market this year because of COVID: https://www.oki.com/us/printing/about-us/newsroom/news-and-information/press-center/2020/0901-END-OF-LIFE-NOTIFICATION-FOR-OKI-BRANDED-HARDWARE/index.html https://www.oki.com/us/printing/about-us/newsroom/news-and-i... They're still continuing in other markets though.
- xbar 6y ago
  Sad. The OKI Microline 320 was a staple from my early 90s career in medical IT. It's still sold by Staples.
dfox 6y ago
It does and if you can get an OKI printer it is probably better choice than Brother. OKI and Brother printers are generally similar (in fact I would not be surprised if Brother printers are actually made by OKI), but OKI printers tend to have better firmware and actual licensed PostScript implementation from Adobe. And at least here (Czech Republic) you can often get OKI printers on sale with almost ridiculous discounts.

xbar 6y ago

This.

chongli 6y ago

The whole point of this HP inkjet plan is to print full page photos. If you’re printing documents just use a laser.

philistine 6y ago

I found my Brother printer in the trash ! I call her trashy. Trashy Brother.

nyanpasu64 6y ago

I've been avoiding laser printers since they can emit ultra-fine particles into the air, which could cause lung damage. I'm surprised to see not a single mention of this risk in the thread. Is my concern not shared by others, and do people think it's not a serious risk?

copperx 6y ago
That's concerning. If true, there could even be a risk for cancer.