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Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if y

by dsr_ 5y ago

Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done at a higher quality, with better ink and good paper, than you can do at your office or house -- unless you are big enough to utilize a whole flock of printers, or you are a professional. If you are a pro, you don't need this advice.

temporallobe 5y ago
My wife started her PhD program a few years ago and printed nearly all of her resources on our inkjet printer at the time - only to recycle all of it after the class was completed. We were spending ridiculous amounts of money and constantly going out to buy the darn cartridges. I don’t know why, but I had completely forgotten about laser printers, then one day I suddenly remembered from my childhood school days that everyone used laser printers, did some research, and bought one. The cost was more than triple that of a decent inkjet, but nearly three years later, and she has only had to buy maybe two toner cartridges and the darn thing is extremely reliable. Personally I wish she didn’t have to print so much, but it helps her quickly annotate, locate, and visualize large amounts of literature.
NortySpock 5y ago
Great advice, and I echo 95% of it. My observation is that I have found Wifi useful when I need the printer in an odd location in the house, and color is useful for non-professional usage like "the kids need to print out their report for school" and "the med school student needs anatomy diagrams in color" My trusty color Brother laser HL-3170CDW cost ~$300 at the time and has been trucking along for 7+ years now without a hiccup. If it dies, I'm replacing it with another Brother laser printer. EDIT: added cost of printer. The article is right: if all you are ever going to do is print your taxes and financial documents once a year, a ~$100 monochrome laser printer is fine.
- ludocode 5y ago
  Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines. For anyone who hasn't done it, it's incredibly streamlined. You don't have to talk to anyone and you don't have to wait in line. You just walk up to one of the many printers, put in your flash drive, tap your credit card and collect your printouts. I'm just not convinced that having the ability to print in color at home is worth the huge expense in ink cartridges or in a color laser printer. In fact schools have just had to learn to accept digital submissions due to COVID-19 so printing at home probably won't be necessary at all anymore. When our black & white toner printer dies we will probably not replace it and just go to Staples for whatever little printing we will still need.
  - NortySpock 5y ago
    "I plugged my flash drive into the printer station and all I got was my financial documents uploaded to a Russian server and 4 viruses written to the boot sector." -- my paranoid assumptions about public print stations with USB ports.
    - chii 5y ago
      it'd be interesting to see if this flash drive transport for documents evolves into an email address you send via your phone instead (so no hardware on your end needed).
      - singron 5y ago
        You can also print documents at staples that you email to an address. They reply with a 24 hour code that you can type into the printer. I'd love a service that would mail you the documents back in an envelope and was still as cheap ($0.15/page).
        fxtentacle 5y ago
        We use clicksend.
benesch 5y ago
Funny, I bought a Brother HL-1240 for $15 off of Craigslist five years ago and it’s still going strong. Couldn’t be happier. So much so that I bought a USB-Ethernet adapter (https://www.iogear.com/product/GPSU21/ https://www.iogear.com/product/GPSU21/) to avoid having to upgrade to a newer model with Ethernet/WiFi included. In the last five years I have printed a few hundred pages, experienced <5 paper jams, and spent $0 on ink. (The guy I bought the printer from threw in a toner cartridge for free. But I’m still on the original cartridge.)
- tfigment 5y ago
  Thanks. For usb hint. Have a HL-1440 for 15+ years never replaced cartridge but usb only is kinda limiting but it's reliable when I need it.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  I bought my HL-1240 ages ago, and printed thousands and thousands of pages before it finally died. I bought a newer model Brother, and have so far been equally happy, printing at the same rate.
loloquwowndueo 5y ago
+1, brother dcp-1512 which I got because it was cheaper than buying just the black ink cartridge for the HP inkjet it replaced. It’s hooked up to an old thinkpad and set up so we can AirPrint to it from our phones. Including one toner cartridge it’s probably cost under 70 bucks for 5 years of service.
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
I've had my Brother for well over half a decade, never needed to change it's original in the box toner... and it broke and doesn't feed paper now. :/
MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
People knock inkjets but I've loved my Brother inkjet. Finding cheap ink is not a problem; Amazon has knockoffs for cheap. And in spite of what others do I gladly print color at home for random purposes. Sometimes for a family gift, other times for kid projects or hobby stuff. Printing color on photo paper produces great results. I also enjoy using WiFi. It makes printing with a laptop less of hassle and gives you flexibility with where the printer resides.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >People knock inkjets but I've loved my Brother inkjet Brother are definitely the least scummy printer manufacturer by a country mile. Everyone I know with a Brother has always been pleasantly surprised by the quality, support (both my 2004 label printer and 2009 colour laser still get software updates!) and cost of supplies. Unfortunately, the Canons and HPs are definitely the most popular...
pmoleri 5y ago
+1 for brother laser +1 for duplex I actually find Wifi useful. Question, what's the deal with the toner cartridges plastic? It looks like a lot of thick plastic. I get to buy a new one and throw the old one, or refill one with the "not recommended non-original toner". Does the manufacturer offer some other environment friendly option?
- snuxoll 5y ago
  Brother offers free recycling for all their cartridges. https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/toner-ink-recycling https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/toner-ink-recycling Go here, print a label, put old cartridge in the box your new one was in and drop it off at the post office or have your postal driver pick it up.
  - pmoleri 5y ago
    It's good to know. Unfortunately, in Uruguay we're not part of the 28 countries where Brother has recycling in place [1]. And I don't think we get any real alternative except for rogue refilling of the cartridges, or just recycle it as regular plastic waste. Still, I consider having recycling in 28 countries to be pretty good. [1] https://global.brother/en/eco/product/recycling https://global.brother/en/eco/product/recycling
shp0ngle 5y ago
I would nowadays don't buy printer without a WiFi. I am so used to sending things to printer from around the house at this point. The rest I agree
- snuxoll 5y ago
  I mean, if you can just hook it up to wired Ethernet you can do the same thing. My Brother MFC-3770CDW only supports 2.4GHz which is hella unreliable, so I run Ethernet to my switch instead and still can use network printing (including AirPrint from my iOS devices) everywhere in the house. P.S. not all Brother printers have reasonable running costs - my MFC-3770CDW is outrageously expensive for consumables because it had a lower price tag than their higher end color laser MFCs. I needed a printer in a hurry because my old Brother Inkjet died and the better models weren’t readily available at the start of the pandemic, and it’s still cheaper than ink, but so make sure you do your research even with commonly trusted brands.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  The point is not to buy a printer with only ethernet. But it should also have ethernet as fallback. I would recommend the same, now that my printer can't connect to any wifi anymore for whatever reason, but it works again since I connected an old wifi repeater via ethernet.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  Years ago I bought a Epson WP4515 printer/scanner. It had Ethernet and no WiFi but it had to sit just by the PC so it wasn't an hassle back then. One day however I had to move things around and it would suddenly need a long cable to connect to the nearest Ethernet switch. Fortunately I had at hand a bunch of TpLink TL-MR3020 mini routers I had bought literally for coins at a flea market because I knew they support OpenWRT, so I grabbed one, installed OpenWRT and set it up to bridge the Ethernet input to my home WiFi, and bingo, the device was online without cables. If anyone is interested, those small routers are sold as 3/4G routers for being able to host a 3/4G dongle modem in their USB port but actually they contain no mobile modem, they just have 2.4GHz WiFi, one Ethernet port, one USB port. They are also ridiculously limited in HW capabilities, RAM and storage, etc, however they can run old OpenWRT versions, which makes them good for that use.
Lammy 5y ago
> If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. Middle-tier option: Walgreens Photo. Last time I wanted to print an 8x10" it cost $4 and I picked it up an hour later.
- dhosek 5y ago
  For photos, Walgreens definitely beats at-home printing.
bitexploder 5y ago
We have had the same Okidata led printer for almost a decade. Similar philosophy though. It’s a joy to use and works with Linux out of the box. Networked, etc.
ryandrake 5y ago
I've had the same black/white HP LaserJet 4000 with ethernet for close to 20 years, and it has been an amazing beast of a printer. Never needed anything else.
atlgator 5y ago
AirPrint is a must for me. I do not maintain a dedicated desk. I leave the printer on an end table in one room of the house and I work from all over the place. AirPrint allows me to print from any of my devices from anywhere inside my house.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  You don't need Apple Airprint for that. A regular Wi-Fi printer works fine, and it's not restricted to Apple devices.
Merad 5y ago
+1. I have a Brother HL-5250 that's 15 years old. I think I paid $250 for it, but it has to be one of the best pieces of technology I've ever bought. It's been a while since I looked at its internal counters but it probably has printed close to 50k pages. The printer itself is still 100%. About 5 years ago something gave out in the paper tray and it stopped feeding correctly, but these days I don't print more than a couple times a year so I just load paper manually in the front tray.
- fencepost 5y ago
  Brother HL-5250 Workhorses, I've seen one last until something well over 200,000 pages though it sounded terrible towards the end. When pricing them vs something like HP printers that take a maintenance kit, just figure the replacement cost of the printer IS the "maintenance kit" to replace worn parts.
noisy_boy 5y ago
Agreed - my brother HL-L2375DW monochrome laser works great with Pop!_OS (based on Ubuntu). I print over wifi due to lack of desk space and it is pretty much plug and play - I turn it on and within few seconds it is available as a printer in the print dialog. I am not a heavy user + I set it to toner-saving settings so still using the original cartridge it came with (bought in Aug 2019).
deleted 5y ago
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quickthrower2 5y ago
I’m pretty happy to get a brother colour laser printer for $300 I think because printing in colour when you want is great for kids homework and creative play, while being a good workhorse otherwise. My regret is the flatbed scanner I’d prefer one that can feed a few pages for me.
forcry 5y ago
>Printers. Yeah. And cars, for that matter. May be not right now, but soon enough.
geocrasher 5y ago
This is my exact advice (minus the duplex, ethernet, and brscript) and my friends are tired of hearing it. My HL-2170W from... 2008? is still going strong. I just spent $20 on THREE 2600 page refilled toner cartridges. The printer itself was free, and I had to put a drum in it once (which was the reason it was free).
philjohn 5y ago
I went for a massive Xerox Versalink for the same reason - it's not disposable garbage, the toner lasts an insane amount of time, and as long as you buy at least one toner cartridge a year you extend the onsite(!!!) warranty indefinitely.
nwallin 5y ago
++ I have a Brother printer without duplex printing. I kick myself basically every time I need to print because I almost always need to manually flip/reinsert. I dream of the day that my printer will die and I can buy a new Brother monochrome laser printer with duplex, but it's been over a decade and I'm pretty sure this motherfucker will outlive me. (it's also USB only, no ethernet/wifi/bluetooth and ... I dunno what BRScript is. These aren't issues for me because it's plugged into my media server which handles all the networking stuff.)
- AnthonBerg 5y ago
  Please forgive me for the brash and commanding tone of the unsolicited advice, but: Sell it!! Get one that has duplex. Someone else will love your non-duplex printer just like it is. Duplex is so absolutely and completely worth having if one is so inclined.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I generally agree, though I personally stopped caring and learned to love my non-Duplex Brother. We've all been conditioned to believe the bullshit about saving the trees, despite the reality being, paper manufacturing is very efficient and mostly uses its own specially-grown trees these days; plus, a typical office worker in a bank will print more paper a day than you'll use in a year. Point being, you aren't killing the planet by printing one-sided vs. duplex. The use of ink or toner is the same. So I don't mind anymore. I do occasional manual duplexing for convenience or out of courtesy (e.g. when printing contracts), otherwise I print single-sided, and keep the prints around after they've served their purpose. I have a small stack of one-sided prints which find their second life as source paper for further non-critical prints, or as drawing paper for my daughter.
    - AnthonBerg 5y ago
      Ah, makes sense – I am just now becoming aware of the fact that practically speaking, I print duplex only because it … reads nicer? The printed product is lighter and smaller and easier to staple, and feels like a book. For me the effect is like a “cleaner workspace” for reading. I’m sure this varies between people. (Incidentally, it seems that individual variety is most clearly represented in abstract activity. As an example, we all learn mathematics in our individual way. And reading is highly abstract! And what matters for reading efficiency probably varies a great deal from person to person.)
iampivot 5y ago
Try finding an A3 mono laser printer, if you need to print a3.
johnwalkr 5y ago
In Japan virtually every convenience store has a self service printer (¥10/page for monochrome). For the cheap inkjets mentioned in the article, it’s even worse than the author states. I know people that think they are getting a deal buy buying a new printer every time they run out of ink because it’s “cheaper.”
- simonh 5y ago
  Japan, and particularly Tokyo is special. Apartments are mainly glorified cupboards so most people will prefer to print out than dedicate precious space to an only occasionally used device like a printer.
AnthonBerg 5y ago
Same, except: Get a HP color laser printer that does duplex printing. (“Duplex”. Funny word. It seems to be latin for “can slurp the paper back into itself to flip it and print on both sides of the page”.) In all earnestness, I am 100% convinced that yours is the best possible printer advice for many people! Maybe the majority? People like me might have the competitive disadvantage of lower reading speed of black-and-white-only text and figures. Or the capacity to employ color for faster ingestion? For people who find that they benefit from readig in color, I emphatically recommend getting a color laser printer. With duplex printing. Specifically, the HP M254dw has been excellent. I followed online recommendations for it. It has been bulletproof. As a detail, printing on it in macOS seems nicer and smoother compared to the Brother printers I’ve used. iirc Linux printing just worked. Color has been worth having. For example, there are more and more computer science papers that have colored syntax in the typeset PDF. Printing these to a keel-stapled full-color book using the Booklet layout option in macOS is magic. It’s just great. I read a lot more papers with the capacity to print them like this instantly and on demand. Reading retention is better. Scribbling notes on the margin is magic too. And the little books make great gifts. —For the keel stapling, there are “long-arm staplers”. I believe they’re also called “lawyer’s staplers” or something like that? I got a Zenith 502 cucitrici da tavolo per cucire con precisione lungo la piega fogli piegati a quaderno. It’s a little Italian tank. It’s great! Beautifully designed. https://www.zenith.it/prodotti/cucitrici-da-tavolo/zenith-502/ https://www.zenith.it/prodotti/cucitrici-da-tavolo/zenith-50... They say you can’t buy happiness. I hold that it can be. It’s just not a given. You can’t just buy … anything. Certainly, a duplex color laser and a good long-arm stapler have brought me a measure of happiness.
- chana_masala 5y ago
  I agree, I read a lot more papers when I print them off. Thanks for the advice about the color printer - I also find my comprehension better that way. I've saved your recommendation for when I next am looking to buy a new printer.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  My last HP colour laser was a nightmare. It cost a fortune to run and was unreliable. The mono Brother I replaced it with has never missed a beat in the ten years I have owned it.
opheliate 5y ago
For colour printing, I found an Epson EcoTank on Gumtree that a local business was giving away for free, having found the process of replacing ink too tedious. For those who don't know, the EcoTank line don't use cartridges in the traditional sense, you just pour ink directly into tanks on the printer. It's a bit of a hassle to fill compared to just putting cartridges in, but for just printing stuff off for around the house, it's worked out so much cheaper for me so far. Plus there's no worry about proprietary cartridges being discontinued in the future. If you can find one for free/cheap, I'd say go for it :)
- slezyr 5y ago
  EcoTanks have a DRM chip on the ink dump container instead.
  - opheliate 5y ago
    Could you elaborate on this a bit? I’m not sure what you mean.
    - slezyr 5y ago
      Annoying dude, but he talks about this DRM and fixes his EcoTank issue here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA3wOmujZHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA3wOmujZHA
trasz 5y ago
Except this only makes sense in office-like environments. It’s not a solution for a typical home, simply because getting it to run is too complicated. Unless there’s a way to make it work like normal printer does, eg with AirPlay?
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Unless there’s a way to make it work like normal printer does, eg with AirPlay? It wasn't your distant forefathers in their "brutish, short, and dark" lives, nor even your own boomer parents in the hilarious 1970s, but people alive and walking among us even now (your boss, your children's school principal, your next-door neighbour...) who once upon a time -- not even all that long ago, actually right here in this same century we're living in now! -- regarded occasionally connecting and disconnecting an Ethernet or USB cable not as some freakishly onerous imposition but actually rather "normal".
  - trasz 5y ago
    But of course, same with horse carriages and Flash applets.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If you have any Ethernet network at all, it’s easy. Plug it into one of the unused ports on your router. It’s really quite simple (and inexpensive even if you have to buy a cheap switch or wifi access point).
- alistairSH 5y ago
  I have a Brother HL-L2380DW. It's a basic monochrome laser with duplex and WiFi. Setting it up was easier than any of my prior laser-jet printers (Canon, HP, both of which always had flaky software and drivers). My iOS devices print to it without any config - it just appears as an available printer and does its job.
reader_mode 5y ago
My problem with laser combos (printer + scanner) is that they are >50% larger than an inkjet with same features. Inkjet is just the right height where you can use it on a shelf/desk and it won't be unbearable + you can stack some stuff on top. WiFi kind of helps but still not a fan of having a giant box around for something that I rarely use (but still need often enough to justify owning)
dcminter 5y ago
This is good advice. Laser printer cartridges for office printers last a long time and are priced as a minor (but infrequent) consumable. Now, if you live in Tibet, have kids who need full-colour printing at 2am, or can't afford biscuits let alone printing supplies - then you know that. Quite why there's a pile-on to diss the advice is beyond me! Particularly the 'not outside US' crowd. Come on! HN has an obvious US bias and it's not interesting to be told that. By all means let's hear alternative advice, but be interesting. Apologies for the off-topic. As an info-nugget to compensate, I'm very happy with my HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw so that may be a good alternative for those who know they need colour. Its drivers (via HPLIP) work well with Ubuntu Linux, including the excellent scanner; the latter has proven to be extremely useful for both mundane form scanning and family photographs (where the colour reproduction is far more faithful than the handful of other scanners I had tried).
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I would never buy something else than a laser printer again. The alternatives are unreliable junks with gold priced cartridges that will dry on you at the sightless neglect. The machine will find a way to end up breaking, jamming or printing garbage at some point anyway, after what you end up buying the new one in a moment of panic, which again lasts barely the honeymoon period. But then, one day I decided to suck up the buying price, and went laser. My brother too. Since then, every page prints, fast, clear, like the first one. No jam, no breaking, just printing. And so many pages, like the cartridge could never end. One day though it did, so I prepared to bleed to death again, except it was $10 on amazon. I wish I could take a time machine and sing to my young self the gospel of laser printers.
- corobo 5y ago
  > I would never buy something else than a laser printer again. I rarely print anything, but when I do it's things like the entire GDPR. Fully agreed! No more switching it on after a year wondering if the heads will be able to clean themselves or if they're just completely caked in dry ink and a write-off. Just fire it up, print. Of course the initial setup was a pain in the arse, it is still a printer after all, but as printers go it's been the least painful printer I've ever had (for ref its a Brother HL-1210W I've got)
- leokennis 5y ago
  Disagree here. Sure, for pure BW printing, buy a laser. But I like to occasionally print a photo or a document in color. I am using a Brother inkjet/scanner/everything combo (https://www.brother.ee/printers/inkjet-printers/mfc-j5330dw https://www.brother.ee/printers/inkjet-printers/mfc-j5330dw) and it's magnificent. * From CMD+P to page rolling out of the printer is less than 5 seconds * It prints on anything you can imagine and scans from anything too. Duplex, envelopes, photo paper, weird formats etc. * No jams. No confusing setup. No dingy and confusing on screen menu but a good small touch screen. * It takes 4 separate CMYK cartridges so you can replace a color at a time. 3000 BW prints for €30 (€0,01 per page). Color cartridges good for 2000 pages go for €20. Concluding, laser printers have obvious benefits for certain printing use cases. No discussion here. But please do not conflate the butchering and crappyfication of inkjet printing by HP and Canon with inkjet being slow/annoying/expensive/useless in general.
jakub_g 5y ago
Since I got a WiFi printer (Brother), I print 99% of things straight from my phone, and no longer procrastinate printing stuff because I'd have to boot the laptop, find the cable, log in to download the document etc. It's worth it.
k__ 5y ago
I had two BW laser printers in my life and they both worked for >10 years with one cartridge. One I found in the trash, one I bought for 150€.
mnadkvlb 5y ago
Just want to add another advice for “brother” as well as any other brand laser printers. If your printer says it cant print any more as the ink is gone, just go search to internet to find how to reset the cartridge counter, and then the same (wink) “empty” cartridge will print for another couple 100 to 1000 sheets of paper. For me that meant 3 more years of printing and still going on reportedly “empty” cartridges. What These companies are doing is criminal and no different than dieselgate. Mis-reporting wrongly to throw cartridges to landfills.
- risfriend 5y ago
  Wow, thanks a lot, didn't know this. I've been forced to buy cartridges as I run out of ink way every few months, don't think the black HP cartridges today even last the promised 500 pages, they can literally configure it to their whim.
schwartzworld 5y ago
WiFi printing feels like an essential feature to me. Being able to print directly from a phone or tablet is huge.
- II2II 5y ago
  If WiFi printing is essential, then add it to your personal list of desired features. The point of the original feature list is to point out things that will save you money. The point of the anti-feature list is to point out things that vendors typically add-on to make their product more enticing yet don't necessarily add value. Take WiFi printing. The typical WiFi router has ethernet ports. In that case a printer with an ethernet port is WiFi accessible, is typically easier to setup to be WiFi accessible, and is indirectly upgradable when WiFi security standards change. (The latter is important if a printer lasts 10+ years.) It is also important to note the original desirable feature list can be modified. PCL emulation, rather than PS emulation, is typically fine. The point is to avoid printers where the drivers are vendor/model specific. USB only or USB/WiFi is fine, as long as you realize that network printing requires (or, at some future point, will require) setting up a print server. Edit: also, I cringe slightly at the Brother recommendation. I use their printers and only have good things to say about them. Yet the important thing is to avoid the games many vendors play. There may be other vendors who don't play games. More important, there is nothing preventing Brother from playing games in the future.
- jimktrains2 5y ago
  The printer doesn't need wifi if it's connected to a network bridged with a wifi ap, like nearly every soho router/ap combo or isp-provided modem/router/ap combo is by default.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
I wonder if I can get one of those that can also print A3-like sizes. When I last went printer shopping, there was a vastly wider gap between standard and wide-format prices for laser printers than for inkjets. Why use such large paper? Printing off the occasional orchestral score.
cryptonector 5y ago
Plus, no microdots, right?
acdha 5y ago
I second your advice but disagree on the WiFi point: there's a solid convenience aspect to anyone in the house being able to hit print on their phone with no further work. Guests can print boarding passes without asking, kids can print from their iPads, etc. with zero friction.
gldnspud 5y ago
I followed this advice right after the last time I spent 20 minutes having an ink-jet printer clean its nozzles thrice before I could print one sheet of monochrome text. I print infrequently enough that the nozzles would often dry up and get clogged. It had been so long since I looked at laser printers, I didn't realize their prices had become so affordable for home/personal use. Now, when I print something, I know it'll "just work", and that the text will be crisp and legible every time, with no banding and wasted paper. Plus, it's so much faster. The cost and reliability of toner vs ink is one thing... but the lack of stress surrounding the occasional small print job at home? As stated by a much-parodied ad campaign, "priceless"! (Edit: and I still have 60% capacity in the complimentary toner cartridge it came with!)
justsomeuser 5y ago
Why BRScript?
noir_lord 5y ago
Years ago the boss at the time wanted to do printing in a very dusty environment (stone, nothing flammable), specialist printers where expensive - my suggestion, buy a decent cheap brother printer and replace it when it died. They where still using them when I left years later. This is about the worst environment imaginable outside of trying to destroy them, a steel cabinet in an old workshop that wasn't really sealed from the elements where they where sandblasting stone and they just kept kicking.
hnu0847 5y ago
Why do you recommend BRScript/3? I'm not disagreeing, just unfamiliar with different print drivers. I did find a page on Brother's website [1], but it says the advantages of BRScript/3 are mainly related to color graphics. [1] https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=hl3450cn_all&faqid=faq00002367_001 https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=us&lang=en&pro...
boring_twenties 5y ago
Anyone have any suggestions for a B&W laser printer that will work "driverless" on Linux over USB?

by dsr_ 5y ago

temporallobe 5y ago

My wife started her PhD program a few years ago and printed nearly all of her resources on our inkjet printer at the time - only to recycle all of it after the class was completed. We were spending ridiculous amounts of money and constantly going out to buy the darn cartridges. I don’t know why, but I had completely forgotten about laser printers, then one day I suddenly remembered from my childhood school days that everyone used laser printers, did some research, and bought one. The cost was more than triple that of a decent inkjet, but nearly three years later, and she has only had to buy maybe two toner cartridges and the darn thing is extremely reliable. Personally I wish she didn’t have to print so much, but it helps her quickly annotate, locate, and visualize large amounts of literature.

NortySpock 5y ago

Great advice, and I echo 95% of it. My observation is that I have found Wifi useful when I need the printer in an odd location in the house, and color is useful for non-professional usage like "the kids need to print out their report for school" and "the med school student needs anatomy diagrams in color" My trusty color Brother laser HL-3170CDW cost ~$300 at the time and has been trucking along for 7+ years now without a hiccup. If it dies, I'm replacing it with another Brother laser printer. EDIT: added cost of printer. The article is right: if all you are ever going to do is print your taxes and financial documents once a year, a ~$100 monochrome laser printer is fine.

ludocode 5y ago
Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines. For anyone who hasn't done it, it's incredibly streamlined. You don't have to talk to anyone and you don't have to wait in line. You just walk up to one of the many printers, put in your flash drive, tap your credit card and collect your printouts. I'm just not convinced that having the ability to print in color at home is worth the huge expense in ink cartridges or in a color laser printer. In fact schools have just had to learn to accept digital submissions due to COVID-19 so printing at home probably won't be necessary at all anymore. When our black & white toner printer dies we will probably not replace it and just go to Staples for whatever little printing we will still need.
- NortySpock 5y ago
  "I plugged my flash drive into the printer station and all I got was my financial documents uploaded to a Russian server and 4 viruses written to the boot sector." -- my paranoid assumptions about public print stations with USB ports.
  - chii 5y ago
    it'd be interesting to see if this flash drive transport for documents evolves into an email address you send via your phone instead (so no hardware on your end needed).
    - singron 5y ago
      You can also print documents at staples that you email to an address. They reply with a 24 hour code that you can type into the printer. I'd love a service that would mail you the documents back in an envelope and was still as cheap ($0.15/page).
      - fxtentacle 5y ago
        We use clicksend.

benesch 5y ago

Funny, I bought a Brother HL-1240 for $15 off of Craigslist five years ago and it’s still going strong. Couldn’t be happier. So much so that I bought a USB-Ethernet adapter (https://www.iogear.com/product/GPSU21/ https://www.iogear.com/product/GPSU21/) to avoid having to upgrade to a newer model with Ethernet/WiFi included. In the last five years I have printed a few hundred pages, experienced <5 paper jams, and spent $0 on ink. (The guy I bought the printer from threw in a toner cartridge for free. But I’m still on the original cartridge.)

tfigment 5y ago
Thanks. For usb hint. Have a HL-1440 for 15+ years never replaced cartridge but usb only is kinda limiting but it's reliable when I need it.
JasonFruit 5y ago
I bought my HL-1240 ages ago, and printed thousands and thousands of pages before it finally died. I bought a newer model Brother, and have so far been equally happy, printing at the same rate.

loloquwowndueo 5y ago

+1, brother dcp-1512 which I got because it was cheaper than buying just the black ink cartridge for the HP inkjet it replaced. It’s hooked up to an old thinkpad and set up so we can AirPrint to it from our phones. Including one toner cartridge it’s probably cost under 70 bucks for 5 years of service.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

I've had my Brother for well over half a decade, never needed to change it's original in the box toner... and it broke and doesn't feed paper now. :/

MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago

People knock inkjets but I've loved my Brother inkjet. Finding cheap ink is not a problem; Amazon has knockoffs for cheap. And in spite of what others do I gladly print color at home for random purposes. Sometimes for a family gift, other times for kid projects or hobby stuff. Printing color on photo paper produces great results. I also enjoy using WiFi. It makes printing with a laptop less of hassle and gives you flexibility with where the printer resides.

AussieWog93 5y ago
>People knock inkjets but I've loved my Brother inkjet Brother are definitely the least scummy printer manufacturer by a country mile. Everyone I know with a Brother has always been pleasantly surprised by the quality, support (both my 2004 label printer and 2009 colour laser still get software updates!) and cost of supplies. Unfortunately, the Canons and HPs are definitely the most popular...

pmoleri 5y ago

+1 for brother laser +1 for duplex I actually find Wifi useful. Question, what's the deal with the toner cartridges plastic? It looks like a lot of thick plastic. I get to buy a new one and throw the old one, or refill one with the "not recommended non-original toner". Does the manufacturer offer some other environment friendly option?

snuxoll 5y ago
Brother offers free recycling for all their cartridges. https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/toner-ink-recycling https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/toner-ink-recycling Go here, print a label, put old cartridge in the box your new one was in and drop it off at the post office or have your postal driver pick it up.
- pmoleri 5y ago
  It's good to know. Unfortunately, in Uruguay we're not part of the 28 countries where Brother has recycling in place [1]. And I don't think we get any real alternative except for rogue refilling of the cartridges, or just recycle it as regular plastic waste. Still, I consider having recycling in 28 countries to be pretty good. [1] https://global.brother/en/eco/product/recycling https://global.brother/en/eco/product/recycling

shp0ngle 5y ago

I would nowadays don't buy printer without a WiFi. I am so used to sending things to printer from around the house at this point. The rest I agree

snuxoll 5y ago
I mean, if you can just hook it up to wired Ethernet you can do the same thing. My Brother MFC-3770CDW only supports 2.4GHz which is hella unreliable, so I run Ethernet to my switch instead and still can use network printing (including AirPrint from my iOS devices) everywhere in the house. P.S. not all Brother printers have reasonable running costs - my MFC-3770CDW is outrageously expensive for consumables because it had a lower price tag than their higher end color laser MFCs. I needed a printer in a hurry because my old Brother Inkjet died and the better models weren’t readily available at the start of the pandemic, and it’s still cheaper than ink, but so make sure you do your research even with commonly trusted brands.
alpaca128 5y ago
The point is not to buy a printer with only ethernet. But it should also have ethernet as fallback. I would recommend the same, now that my printer can't connect to any wifi anymore for whatever reason, but it works again since I connected an old wifi repeater via ethernet.
squarefoot 5y ago
Years ago I bought a Epson WP4515 printer/scanner. It had Ethernet and no WiFi but it had to sit just by the PC so it wasn't an hassle back then. One day however I had to move things around and it would suddenly need a long cable to connect to the nearest Ethernet switch. Fortunately I had at hand a bunch of TpLink TL-MR3020 mini routers I had bought literally for coins at a flea market because I knew they support OpenWRT, so I grabbed one, installed OpenWRT and set it up to bridge the Ethernet input to my home WiFi, and bingo, the device was online without cables. If anyone is interested, those small routers are sold as 3/4G routers for being able to host a 3/4G dongle modem in their USB port but actually they contain no mobile modem, they just have 2.4GHz WiFi, one Ethernet port, one USB port. They are also ridiculously limited in HW capabilities, RAM and storage, etc, however they can run old OpenWRT versions, which makes them good for that use.

Lammy 5y ago

> If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. Middle-tier option: Walgreens Photo. Last time I wanted to print an 8x10" it cost $4 and I picked it up an hour later.

dhosek 5y ago
For photos, Walgreens definitely beats at-home printing.

bitexploder 5y ago

We have had the same Okidata led printer for almost a decade. Similar philosophy though. It’s a joy to use and works with Linux out of the box. Networked, etc.

ryandrake 5y ago

I've had the same black/white HP LaserJet 4000 with ethernet for close to 20 years, and it has been an amazing beast of a printer. Never needed anything else.

atlgator 5y ago

AirPrint is a must for me. I do not maintain a dedicated desk. I leave the printer on an end table in one room of the house and I work from all over the place. AirPrint allows me to print from any of my devices from anywhere inside my house.

frosted-flakes 5y ago
You don't need Apple Airprint for that. A regular Wi-Fi printer works fine, and it's not restricted to Apple devices.

Merad 5y ago

+1. I have a Brother HL-5250 that's 15 years old. I think I paid $250 for it, but it has to be one of the best pieces of technology I've ever bought. It's been a while since I looked at its internal counters but it probably has printed close to 50k pages. The printer itself is still 100%. About 5 years ago something gave out in the paper tray and it stopped feeding correctly, but these days I don't print more than a couple times a year so I just load paper manually in the front tray.

fencepost 5y ago
Brother HL-5250 Workhorses, I've seen one last until something well over 200,000 pages though it sounded terrible towards the end. When pricing them vs something like HP printers that take a maintenance kit, just figure the replacement cost of the printer IS the "maintenance kit" to replace worn parts.

noisy_boy 5y ago

Agreed - my brother HL-L2375DW monochrome laser works great with Pop!_OS (based on Ubuntu). I print over wifi due to lack of desk space and it is pretty much plug and play - I turn it on and within few seconds it is available as a printer in the print dialog. I am not a heavy user + I set it to toner-saving settings so still using the original cartridge it came with (bought in Aug 2019).

deleted 5y ago

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quickthrower2 5y ago

I’m pretty happy to get a brother colour laser printer for $300 I think because printing in colour when you want is great for kids homework and creative play, while being a good workhorse otherwise. My regret is the flatbed scanner I’d prefer one that can feed a few pages for me.

forcry 5y ago

>Printers. Yeah. And cars, for that matter. May be not right now, but soon enough.

geocrasher 5y ago

This is my exact advice (minus the duplex, ethernet, and brscript) and my friends are tired of hearing it. My HL-2170W from... 2008? is still going strong. I just spent $20 on THREE 2600 page refilled toner cartridges. The printer itself was free, and I had to put a drum in it once (which was the reason it was free).

philjohn 5y ago

I went for a massive Xerox Versalink for the same reason - it's not disposable garbage, the toner lasts an insane amount of time, and as long as you buy at least one toner cartridge a year you extend the onsite(!!!) warranty indefinitely.

nwallin 5y ago

++ I have a Brother printer without duplex printing. I kick myself basically every time I need to print because I almost always need to manually flip/reinsert. I dream of the day that my printer will die and I can buy a new Brother monochrome laser printer with duplex, but it's been over a decade and I'm pretty sure this motherfucker will outlive me. (it's also USB only, no ethernet/wifi/bluetooth and ... I dunno what BRScript is. These aren't issues for me because it's plugged into my media server which handles all the networking stuff.)

AnthonBerg 5y ago
Please forgive me for the brash and commanding tone of the unsolicited advice, but: Sell it!! Get one that has duplex. Someone else will love your non-duplex printer just like it is. Duplex is so absolutely and completely worth having if one is so inclined.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I generally agree, though I personally stopped caring and learned to love my non-Duplex Brother. We've all been conditioned to believe the bullshit about saving the trees, despite the reality being, paper manufacturing is very efficient and mostly uses its own specially-grown trees these days; plus, a typical office worker in a bank will print more paper a day than you'll use in a year. Point being, you aren't killing the planet by printing one-sided vs. duplex. The use of ink or toner is the same. So I don't mind anymore. I do occasional manual duplexing for convenience or out of courtesy (e.g. when printing contracts), otherwise I print single-sided, and keep the prints around after they've served their purpose. I have a small stack of one-sided prints which find their second life as source paper for further non-critical prints, or as drawing paper for my daughter.
  - AnthonBerg 5y ago
    Ah, makes sense – I am just now becoming aware of the fact that practically speaking, I print duplex only because it … reads nicer? The printed product is lighter and smaller and easier to staple, and feels like a book. For me the effect is like a “cleaner workspace” for reading. I’m sure this varies between people. (Incidentally, it seems that individual variety is most clearly represented in abstract activity. As an example, we all learn mathematics in our individual way. And reading is highly abstract! And what matters for reading efficiency probably varies a great deal from person to person.)

iampivot 5y ago

Try finding an A3 mono laser printer, if you need to print a3.

johnwalkr 5y ago

In Japan virtually every convenience store has a self service printer (¥10/page for monochrome). For the cheap inkjets mentioned in the article, it’s even worse than the author states. I know people that think they are getting a deal buy buying a new printer every time they run out of ink because it’s “cheaper.”

simonh 5y ago
Japan, and particularly Tokyo is special. Apartments are mainly glorified cupboards so most people will prefer to print out than dedicate precious space to an only occasionally used device like a printer.

AnthonBerg 5y ago

Same, except: Get a HP color laser printer that does duplex printing. (“Duplex”. Funny word. It seems to be latin for “can slurp the paper back into itself to flip it and print on both sides of the page”.) In all earnestness, I am 100% convinced that yours is the best possible printer advice for many people! Maybe the majority? People like me might have the competitive disadvantage of lower reading speed of black-and-white-only text and figures. Or the capacity to employ color for faster ingestion? For people who find that they benefit from readig in color, I emphatically recommend getting a color laser printer. With duplex printing. Specifically, the HP M254dw has been excellent. I followed online recommendations for it. It has been bulletproof. As a detail, printing on it in macOS seems nicer and smoother compared to the Brother printers I’ve used. iirc Linux printing just worked. Color has been worth having. For example, there are more and more computer science papers that have colored syntax in the typeset PDF. Printing these to a keel-stapled full-color book using the Booklet layout option in macOS is magic. It’s just great. I read a lot more papers with the capacity to print them like this instantly and on demand. Reading retention is better. Scribbling notes on the margin is magic too. And the little books make great gifts. —For the keel stapling, there are “long-arm staplers”. I believe they’re also called “lawyer’s staplers” or something like that? I got a Zenith 502 cucitrici da tavolo per cucire con precisione lungo la piega fogli piegati a quaderno. It’s a little Italian tank. It’s great! Beautifully designed. https://www.zenith.it/prodotti/cucitrici-da-tavolo/zenith-502/ https://www.zenith.it/prodotti/cucitrici-da-tavolo/zenith-50... They say you can’t buy happiness. I hold that it can be. It’s just not a given. You can’t just buy … anything. Certainly, a duplex color laser and a good long-arm stapler have brought me a measure of happiness.

chana_masala 5y ago
I agree, I read a lot more papers when I print them off. Thanks for the advice about the color printer - I also find my comprehension better that way. I've saved your recommendation for when I next am looking to buy a new printer.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
My last HP colour laser was a nightmare. It cost a fortune to run and was unreliable. The mono Brother I replaced it with has never missed a beat in the ten years I have owned it.

opheliate 5y ago

For colour printing, I found an Epson EcoTank on Gumtree that a local business was giving away for free, having found the process of replacing ink too tedious. For those who don't know, the EcoTank line don't use cartridges in the traditional sense, you just pour ink directly into tanks on the printer. It's a bit of a hassle to fill compared to just putting cartridges in, but for just printing stuff off for around the house, it's worked out so much cheaper for me so far. Plus there's no worry about proprietary cartridges being discontinued in the future. If you can find one for free/cheap, I'd say go for it :)

slezyr 5y ago
EcoTanks have a DRM chip on the ink dump container instead.
- opheliate 5y ago
  Could you elaborate on this a bit? I’m not sure what you mean.
  - slezyr 5y ago
    Annoying dude, but he talks about this DRM and fixes his EcoTank issue here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA3wOmujZHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA3wOmujZHA

trasz 5y ago

Except this only makes sense in office-like environments. It’s not a solution for a typical home, simply because getting it to run is too complicated. Unless there’s a way to make it work like normal printer does, eg with AirPlay?

CRConrad 5y ago
> Unless there’s a way to make it work like normal printer does, eg with AirPlay? It wasn't your distant forefathers in their "brutish, short, and dark" lives, nor even your own boomer parents in the hilarious 1970s, but people alive and walking among us even now (your boss, your children's school principal, your next-door neighbour...) who once upon a time -- not even all that long ago, actually right here in this same century we're living in now! -- regarded occasionally connecting and disconnecting an Ethernet or USB cable not as some freakishly onerous imposition but actually rather "normal".
- trasz 5y ago
  But of course, same with horse carriages and Flash applets.
sokoloff 5y ago
If you have any Ethernet network at all, it’s easy. Plug it into one of the unused ports on your router. It’s really quite simple (and inexpensive even if you have to buy a cheap switch or wifi access point).
alistairSH 5y ago
I have a Brother HL-L2380DW. It's a basic monochrome laser with duplex and WiFi. Setting it up was easier than any of my prior laser-jet printers (Canon, HP, both of which always had flaky software and drivers). My iOS devices print to it without any config - it just appears as an available printer and does its job.

reader_mode 5y ago

My problem with laser combos (printer + scanner) is that they are >50% larger than an inkjet with same features. Inkjet is just the right height where you can use it on a shelf/desk and it won't be unbearable + you can stack some stuff on top. WiFi kind of helps but still not a fan of having a giant box around for something that I rarely use (but still need often enough to justify owning)

dcminter 5y ago

This is good advice. Laser printer cartridges for office printers last a long time and are priced as a minor (but infrequent) consumable. Now, if you live in Tibet, have kids who need full-colour printing at 2am, or can't afford biscuits let alone printing supplies - then you know that. Quite why there's a pile-on to diss the advice is beyond me! Particularly the 'not outside US' crowd. Come on! HN has an obvious US bias and it's not interesting to be told that. By all means let's hear alternative advice, but be interesting. Apologies for the off-topic. As an info-nugget to compensate, I'm very happy with my HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw so that may be a good alternative for those who know they need colour. Its drivers (via HPLIP) work well with Ubuntu Linux, including the excellent scanner; the latter has proven to be extremely useful for both mundane form scanning and family photographs (where the colour reproduction is far more faithful than the handful of other scanners I had tried).

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

I would never buy something else than a laser printer again. The alternatives are unreliable junks with gold priced cartridges that will dry on you at the sightless neglect. The machine will find a way to end up breaking, jamming or printing garbage at some point anyway, after what you end up buying the new one in a moment of panic, which again lasts barely the honeymoon period. But then, one day I decided to suck up the buying price, and went laser. My brother too. Since then, every page prints, fast, clear, like the first one. No jam, no breaking, just printing. And so many pages, like the cartridge could never end. One day though it did, so I prepared to bleed to death again, except it was $10 on amazon. I wish I could take a time machine and sing to my young self the gospel of laser printers.

corobo 5y ago
> I would never buy something else than a laser printer again. I rarely print anything, but when I do it's things like the entire GDPR. Fully agreed! No more switching it on after a year wondering if the heads will be able to clean themselves or if they're just completely caked in dry ink and a write-off. Just fire it up, print. Of course the initial setup was a pain in the arse, it is still a printer after all, but as printers go it's been the least painful printer I've ever had (for ref its a Brother HL-1210W I've got)
leokennis 5y ago
Disagree here. Sure, for pure BW printing, buy a laser. But I like to occasionally print a photo or a document in color. I am using a Brother inkjet/scanner/everything combo (https://www.brother.ee/printers/inkjet-printers/mfc-j5330dw https://www.brother.ee/printers/inkjet-printers/mfc-j5330dw) and it's magnificent. * From CMD+P to page rolling out of the printer is less than 5 seconds * It prints on anything you can imagine and scans from anything too. Duplex, envelopes, photo paper, weird formats etc. * No jams. No confusing setup. No dingy and confusing on screen menu but a good small touch screen. * It takes 4 separate CMYK cartridges so you can replace a color at a time. 3000 BW prints for €30 (€0,01 per page). Color cartridges good for 2000 pages go for €20. Concluding, laser printers have obvious benefits for certain printing use cases. No discussion here. But please do not conflate the butchering and crappyfication of inkjet printing by HP and Canon with inkjet being slow/annoying/expensive/useless in general.

jakub_g 5y ago

Since I got a WiFi printer (Brother), I print 99% of things straight from my phone, and no longer procrastinate printing stuff because I'd have to boot the laptop, find the cable, log in to download the document etc. It's worth it.

k__ 5y ago

I had two BW laser printers in my life and they both worked for >10 years with one cartridge. One I found in the trash, one I bought for 150€.

mnadkvlb 5y ago

Just want to add another advice for “brother” as well as any other brand laser printers. If your printer says it cant print any more as the ink is gone, just go search to internet to find how to reset the cartridge counter, and then the same (wink) “empty” cartridge will print for another couple 100 to 1000 sheets of paper. For me that meant 3 more years of printing and still going on reportedly “empty” cartridges. What These companies are doing is criminal and no different than dieselgate. Mis-reporting wrongly to throw cartridges to landfills.

risfriend 5y ago
Wow, thanks a lot, didn't know this. I've been forced to buy cartridges as I run out of ink way every few months, don't think the black HP cartridges today even last the promised 500 pages, they can literally configure it to their whim.

schwartzworld 5y ago

WiFi printing feels like an essential feature to me. Being able to print directly from a phone or tablet is huge.

II2II 5y ago
If WiFi printing is essential, then add it to your personal list of desired features. The point of the original feature list is to point out things that will save you money. The point of the anti-feature list is to point out things that vendors typically add-on to make their product more enticing yet don't necessarily add value. Take WiFi printing. The typical WiFi router has ethernet ports. In that case a printer with an ethernet port is WiFi accessible, is typically easier to setup to be WiFi accessible, and is indirectly upgradable when WiFi security standards change. (The latter is important if a printer lasts 10+ years.) It is also important to note the original desirable feature list can be modified. PCL emulation, rather than PS emulation, is typically fine. The point is to avoid printers where the drivers are vendor/model specific. USB only or USB/WiFi is fine, as long as you realize that network printing requires (or, at some future point, will require) setting up a print server. Edit: also, I cringe slightly at the Brother recommendation. I use their printers and only have good things to say about them. Yet the important thing is to avoid the games many vendors play. There may be other vendors who don't play games. More important, there is nothing preventing Brother from playing games in the future.
jimktrains2 5y ago
The printer doesn't need wifi if it's connected to a network bridged with a wifi ap, like nearly every soho router/ap combo or isp-provided modem/router/ap combo is by default.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

I wonder if I can get one of those that can also print A3-like sizes. When I last went printer shopping, there was a vastly wider gap between standard and wide-format prices for laser printers than for inkjets. Why use such large paper? Printing off the occasional orchestral score.

cryptonector 5y ago

Plus, no microdots, right?

acdha 5y ago

I second your advice but disagree on the WiFi point: there's a solid convenience aspect to anyone in the house being able to hit print on their phone with no further work. Guests can print boarding passes without asking, kids can print from their iPads, etc. with zero friction.

gldnspud 5y ago

I followed this advice right after the last time I spent 20 minutes having an ink-jet printer clean its nozzles thrice before I could print one sheet of monochrome text. I print infrequently enough that the nozzles would often dry up and get clogged. It had been so long since I looked at laser printers, I didn't realize their prices had become so affordable for home/personal use. Now, when I print something, I know it'll "just work", and that the text will be crisp and legible every time, with no banding and wasted paper. Plus, it's so much faster. The cost and reliability of toner vs ink is one thing... but the lack of stress surrounding the occasional small print job at home? As stated by a much-parodied ad campaign, "priceless"! (Edit: and I still have 60% capacity in the complimentary toner cartridge it came with!)

justsomeuser 5y ago

Why BRScript?

noir_lord 5y ago

Years ago the boss at the time wanted to do printing in a very dusty environment (stone, nothing flammable), specialist printers where expensive - my suggestion, buy a decent cheap brother printer and replace it when it died. They where still using them when I left years later. This is about the worst environment imaginable outside of trying to destroy them, a steel cabinet in an old workshop that wasn't really sealed from the elements where they where sandblasting stone and they just kept kicking.

hnu0847 5y ago

Why do you recommend BRScript/3? I'm not disagreeing, just unfamiliar with different print drivers. I did find a page on Brother's website [1], but it says the advantages of BRScript/3 are mainly related to color graphics. [1] https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=hl3450cn_all&faqid=faq00002367_001 https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=us&lang=en&pro...

boring_twenties 5y ago

Anyone have any suggestions for a B&W laser printer that will work "driverless" on Linux over USB?