8 ms·

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

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.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - gruez 5y ago
    1. obviously you don't put sensitive docs on that usb drive 2. autoruns haven't worked on USB drives since windows XP SP3. The risk of getting a virus in this case is minimal.
    - eurleif 5y ago
      https://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-your-own-bad-usb-0165419/ https://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-your-own-bad-u...
      - gruez 5y ago
        I appreciate the correction, but the risk still seems minimal. 1. The attack is very situational. There are hundreds of usb flash drive controllers out there (see: https://www.usbdev.ru/files/ https://www.usbdev.ru/files/). The chance that your flash drive a) can be re-programmed b) the malware author bothered making a payload for c) copier is infected are all very small. 2. The attack is very visible, since the user would notice the computer randomly opening command prompts and typing commands. It's also very easy to interrupt. Stray mouse/keyboard inputs would foil the attack, as will unplugging the USB drive. 3. Despite how visible the attack is (see above), the lack of empirical reports probably suggests it's not a real attack that's being carried out
        manwe150 5y ago
        That assume it presents as a HID, and not another device profile with more direct attack surface in the hardware or kernel. Windows isolates the USB drivers to thwart such attacks, but perhaps it could manage to attack memory directly through the PCI bus before the kernel’s involvement? I am not sure of the details, but agree that seems like a rather large amount of hacker effort, when they can currently attack over the internet and demand instant bitcoin payment.
        gruez 5y ago
        > Windows isolates the USB drivers to thwart such attacks, but perhaps it could manage to attack memory directly through the PCI bus before the kernel’s involvement? AFAIK how these attacks essentially work is by imputing key sequences to execute malicious code (eg. typing curl ... | bash into the terminal). There's no driver or pcie/DMA attacks going on.
- zizee 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 I'm not trying to be argumentative, and what I'm going to say might be a "well obviously, duh" comment: This advice is really only applicable to those who have convenient access to a "staples", which is probably only 20% of us here. It is also only convienient if you don't have to regularly print things, and/or need things printed quickly. Why am I bothering to write this? I guess I want you and others like you to not assume everyone is in the same situation as you. It's an easy trap to fall into, and especially dangerous if you are a builder wanting to take things to market (like so many people here on HN are).
  - derefr 5y ago
    > which is probably only 20% of us here Uh. Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world. They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries after electrification (just buy a printer and a computer, and charge $1 to print a page.) Every Internet cafe offers printing. Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing—and in fact many Internet cafes are just glorified print shops where you can pay to use the computers originally set up for printing. In villages of 500 people (such as the one I lived in as a teenager!), either the post office, the community center, or the elementary school (frequently all the same building) will own a printer, and allow people to pay to use it. Okay, you might live in a cabin 200 miles away from the nearest town. 80% of people are not in that situation. 80% of people on this Earth have access to someone they can pay to print something for them. > It is also only convienient if you don't have to regularly print things Don't have to regularly print things in color. Most people don't. Unless you do photography for money, color very likely isn't a crucial part of anything you're required to be printing. (It might be a nice-to-have part of things you're required to be printing; or it might be a crucial part of things you don't really have to be printing; but it's unlikely for color to be crucial, and for the print to be required.) I need to print things quite often, and yet I personally haven't needed to print anything in color... literally ever. (I did print things in color, when I used to own an inkjet, but in retrospect, I didn't need to have printed those things in color.)
- odux 5y ago
  This sounds awfully similar to 'why can't they eat cake'.
- tkgally 5y ago
  > ... put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines. In Japan, you can do the same thing on the multifunction printer/copiers that most convenience stores have. You can also upload the files in advance, so you don’t even need a flash drive [1 (English), 2 (Japanese)]. There are several such stores within a five-minute walk from my home in Yokohama. I do most of my printing there, though I do avoid them for confidential documents. [1] https://networkprint.ne.jp/Lite/start?lang=enus https://networkprint.ne.jp/Lite/start?lang=enus [2] https://www.printing.ne.jp/index_p.html https://www.printing.ne.jp/index_p.html
- astura 5y ago
  Flash drive is entirely unnecessary and, honestly, sounds like a pain. You can simply email your print jobs to Staples. However, the couple times I've printed at Staples I've had to wait in line - there's only a couple printers and I had to wait for other people to finish printing.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I bought an HP 3600N networked color laser printer in Nov 2006. Cost me $574.39 delivered and gives reliable and excellent quality output for about $38/year so far in capex. 3rd party toner cartridges run around $110 for all 4 (they're about half the fill of the genuine HP article for about 1/8th the price). In home use, I've replaced the cartridges twice, so I'm around $800 plus paper for almost 15 years of convenient printing at home. $38/year in capex and $12/yr in consumables. There’s no way I can justify leaving my house to color print in order to save $4.50 a month. Having the printer for two pre-teens during COVID schooling was a bonus as well, but it was long ago “paid for” by convenience and time savings.
- danieldk 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. [...] 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. Depends on how much you value your time. I would happily pay a bit more if it saves me 100+ trips to a copy shop over the lifetime of a printer. Besides that, ink tank printers like Epson EcoTank printers are really cheap per print because they do not use cartridges. E.g., an EcoTank all-color refill is 40 Euro and prints up to 4000 black & white and 7500 color pages.
- the-dude 5y ago
  That totally depends on where you live I guess.
- imagine99 5y ago
  This whole thread has got to be among the most, shall we say, eyebrow-raising ones I've ever read on HN. It has everything from "just drive 20 minutes to 2 hours to the next town to print a couple pages" to "just don't be poor" and "why do you even print". ;-) But disregarding the staggering amount of unwillingness to look any further than one's own nose, everyone considering printing on a public / shared printer should know one this: I can guarantee you that a copy of anything you output there gets saved. Not just statistics & metadata (page coverage, timestamp, copies...) but an actual picture of the page (at least as a thumbnail), regardless of what anyone will tell you. Even if the feature is not turned on for compliance reasons and gets collected by a central server, it will be stored on the printer's internal hard drive at least until the next maintenance cycle and can be retrieved for a significant amount of time. If you pay by card or connect to it with your phone and thus add another level of personal data, you might as well just put it up on your Facebook publicly and ask anyone to print & mail it to you. Modern commercial printers (such as those you will find at larger offices or at Staples) are basically full-blown PCs with a scanner and laser unit attached to them and as such nothing you put through there is ephemeral by default. It also means they are vulnerable to all kinds of horrible exploits that pretty much never get patched. Almost nothing stops you from refilling a $30 inkjet with generic ink cartridges at $5 a pop (even cheaper, although messier, if you refill yourself). Or, if you print more, by all means, get that $100 mono laser. But "just go for a drive and print at Staples" has got to go on that wall of worst HN ideas ever.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  It is not reasonable to drive 20 minutes there and back every time I need something printed. Colour printers are extremely useful, and I'm unlikely to go back to a monochrome one anytime soon.
MR4D 5y ago
Plug the printer into your WiFi router - instant WiFi. Cheaper, and much easier.
- mkl 5y ago
  Except then you need to put your router in the same odd location as the printer or run cables.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    You have a second router bridged to the main one. Wireless Ethernet ports for you to enjoy.
- DesiLurker 5y ago
  I do powerline ethernet adapter instead with my bro. definitely more reliable than wifi wakeup.
erwincoumans 5y ago
Same here, love the 3170CDW with wifi.
bombela 5y ago
I have the same printer. Sometimes it randomly locks up. And disappears from the network (ethernet, wifi is off). Otherwise it is precise enough for me to toner transfer masks to manufacture little PCBs with traces of 0.2mm. And with colors I can print in green to make a poor's man solder mask and silkscreen.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
An Ethernet printer can easily become WiFi with a bridge mode AP.
ashtonkem 5y ago
If you’re technically skilled, you could always make a print server out of a raspberry pi.
paranoidrobot 5y ago
Modern Powerline Ethernet adapters are really decent these days, and can even come with Wifi bridges/repeaters built in that can either replace, or 'mesh' with your router's wifi. I re-did the home network at a relative's place early this year when also replacing the laptop. Zero regrets. All the fixed devices now have either an eithernet port right near them, or good wifi signal. The devices that had flaky wifi were now meters from a wifi AP. Better still, it didn't take up any more power points as they all had pass-through power support. So plugged in behind the TV, and bedside tables and lamps.
- dijit 5y ago
  Powerline ethernet adapters have always depended very heavily on how the power is laid out in your home (and things like "noise") They can't, for example, jump breakers well. So YMMV, but in my experience they haven't improved much if at all, the only thing that could have changed is your placement, the noise on the lines or your home.
  - paranoidrobot 5y ago
    I'm comparing against three different generations (and brands). A very early powerline adapter that was I think 100Mbit, back in around 2004-2006 I think - it basically didn't work at all, and I got rid of it. In ~2017 a new set top box came with a pair, but much smaller and sleeker. They worked out of the box, but did need to be powered off and on every month or two. These new ones, they plugged right in, they delivered 800-900Mbit through iperf3, and the wifi thing, once configured with the right SSID and Password, worked great, and have been stable for about 6 months now. This is all in the same house, and no major rewiring or renovations have taken place, and using the same sockets. The new deployment included additional sockets in other rooms since it worked so well.
fencepost 5y ago
The problem with color laser printers (at least from Brother) is that the lifespan of a bunch of the parts is quite a bit lower than for the mono printers (lower as in 1/4 to 1/3 the life), and in some cases you need to replace them in sets of 4. My home color laser came from a client that replaced it with a mono multifunction - they rarely used color, but it was overdue for replacement of all 4 color drums and leaves a streak down the very edge of the paper. Replacing the parts just didn't make sense, so it got "recycled" to me instead.
lostlogin 5y ago
> if all you are ever going to do is print your taxes and financial documents once a year I get that you’re making a point about printers being rarely used. The exact detail though - are there places where printing of your tax documents is still required and they can’t be digital?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I print off my receipts and other schedules to hand off to my preparer (who does not accept outside PDFs from a security angle). The actual filings are digital, but the intermediate are paper.
- brewdad 5y ago
  I file electronically but prefer to keep a printed copy of my returns. They go into the same manila envelope that collects my receipts and tax forms throughout the year and then gets filed away until I need to refer to it. Filling out my kid's FAFSA this year was much easier with hard copy of my tax return rather than bouncing back and forth to a PDF. Maybe I'm just old.
- boring_twenties 5y ago
  Yeah, the USA. The IRS rejected my e-filed tax returns a couple of years back, and demanded everything in paper form. Hundreds of pages. The stated reason was due to possible fraud. Hilarious, in light of the fact that the return in question indicated tax owed, not a refund.
lelanthran 5y ago
> 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. $100? I've got a xerox phaser 3140 that I got off the returns table at a major store chain 10 years ago here in SA for 350 ZAR (about 25 USD). I've printed enough to exhaust the toner twice.
d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
+1 to the wifi. But without it, I've got a Google Wifi extender puck that has an ethernet port on it that can act as a wifi bridge. The puck is velcro'd to the laser printer so it will always be on the network. This has worked well for us for a few years.

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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- gruez 5y ago
  1. obviously you don't put sensitive docs on that usb drive 2. autoruns haven't worked on USB drives since windows XP SP3. The risk of getting a virus in this case is minimal.
  - eurleif 5y ago
    https://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-your-own-bad-usb-0165419/ https://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-your-own-bad-u...
    - gruez 5y ago
      I appreciate the correction, but the risk still seems minimal. 1. The attack is very situational. There are hundreds of usb flash drive controllers out there (see: https://www.usbdev.ru/files/ https://www.usbdev.ru/files/). The chance that your flash drive a) can be re-programmed b) the malware author bothered making a payload for c) copier is infected are all very small. 2. The attack is very visible, since the user would notice the computer randomly opening command prompts and typing commands. It's also very easy to interrupt. Stray mouse/keyboard inputs would foil the attack, as will unplugging the USB drive. 3. Despite how visible the attack is (see above), the lack of empirical reports probably suggests it's not a real attack that's being carried out
      - manwe150 5y ago
        That assume it presents as a HID, and not another device profile with more direct attack surface in the hardware or kernel. Windows isolates the USB drivers to thwart such attacks, but perhaps it could manage to attack memory directly through the PCI bus before the kernel’s involvement? I am not sure of the details, but agree that seems like a rather large amount of hacker effort, when they can currently attack over the internet and demand instant bitcoin payment.
        gruez 5y ago
        > Windows isolates the USB drivers to thwart such attacks, but perhaps it could manage to attack memory directly through the PCI bus before the kernel’s involvement? AFAIK how these attacks essentially work is by imputing key sequences to execute malicious code (eg. typing curl ... | bash into the terminal). There's no driver or pcie/DMA attacks going on.
zizee 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 I'm not trying to be argumentative, and what I'm going to say might be a "well obviously, duh" comment: This advice is really only applicable to those who have convenient access to a "staples", which is probably only 20% of us here. It is also only convienient if you don't have to regularly print things, and/or need things printed quickly. Why am I bothering to write this? I guess I want you and others like you to not assume everyone is in the same situation as you. It's an easy trap to fall into, and especially dangerous if you are a builder wanting to take things to market (like so many people here on HN are).
- derefr 5y ago
  > which is probably only 20% of us here Uh. Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world. They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries after electrification (just buy a printer and a computer, and charge $1 to print a page.) Every Internet cafe offers printing. Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing—and in fact many Internet cafes are just glorified print shops where you can pay to use the computers originally set up for printing. In villages of 500 people (such as the one I lived in as a teenager!), either the post office, the community center, or the elementary school (frequently all the same building) will own a printer, and allow people to pay to use it. Okay, you might live in a cabin 200 miles away from the nearest town. 80% of people are not in that situation. 80% of people on this Earth have access to someone they can pay to print something for them. > It is also only convienient if you don't have to regularly print things Don't have to regularly print things in color. Most people don't. Unless you do photography for money, color very likely isn't a crucial part of anything you're required to be printing. (It might be a nice-to-have part of things you're required to be printing; or it might be a crucial part of things you don't really have to be printing; but it's unlikely for color to be crucial, and for the print to be required.) I need to print things quite often, and yet I personally haven't needed to print anything in color... literally ever. (I did print things in color, when I used to own an inkjet, but in retrospect, I didn't need to have printed those things in color.)
odux 5y ago
This sounds awfully similar to 'why can't they eat cake'.
tkgally 5y ago
> ... put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines. In Japan, you can do the same thing on the multifunction printer/copiers that most convenience stores have. You can also upload the files in advance, so you don’t even need a flash drive [1 (English), 2 (Japanese)]. There are several such stores within a five-minute walk from my home in Yokohama. I do most of my printing there, though I do avoid them for confidential documents. [1] https://networkprint.ne.jp/Lite/start?lang=enus https://networkprint.ne.jp/Lite/start?lang=enus [2] https://www.printing.ne.jp/index_p.html https://www.printing.ne.jp/index_p.html
astura 5y ago
Flash drive is entirely unnecessary and, honestly, sounds like a pain. You can simply email your print jobs to Staples. However, the couple times I've printed at Staples I've had to wait in line - there's only a couple printers and I had to wait for other people to finish printing.
sokoloff 5y ago
I bought an HP 3600N networked color laser printer in Nov 2006. Cost me $574.39 delivered and gives reliable and excellent quality output for about $38/year so far in capex. 3rd party toner cartridges run around $110 for all 4 (they're about half the fill of the genuine HP article for about 1/8th the price). In home use, I've replaced the cartridges twice, so I'm around $800 plus paper for almost 15 years of convenient printing at home. $38/year in capex and $12/yr in consumables. There’s no way I can justify leaving my house to color print in order to save $4.50 a month. Having the printer for two pre-teens during COVID schooling was a bonus as well, but it was long ago “paid for” by convenience and time savings.
danieldk 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. [...] 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. Depends on how much you value your time. I would happily pay a bit more if it saves me 100+ trips to a copy shop over the lifetime of a printer. Besides that, ink tank printers like Epson EcoTank printers are really cheap per print because they do not use cartridges. E.g., an EcoTank all-color refill is 40 Euro and prints up to 4000 black & white and 7500 color pages.
the-dude 5y ago
That totally depends on where you live I guess.
imagine99 5y ago
This whole thread has got to be among the most, shall we say, eyebrow-raising ones I've ever read on HN. It has everything from "just drive 20 minutes to 2 hours to the next town to print a couple pages" to "just don't be poor" and "why do you even print". ;-) But disregarding the staggering amount of unwillingness to look any further than one's own nose, everyone considering printing on a public / shared printer should know one this: I can guarantee you that a copy of anything you output there gets saved. Not just statistics & metadata (page coverage, timestamp, copies...) but an actual picture of the page (at least as a thumbnail), regardless of what anyone will tell you. Even if the feature is not turned on for compliance reasons and gets collected by a central server, it will be stored on the printer's internal hard drive at least until the next maintenance cycle and can be retrieved for a significant amount of time. If you pay by card or connect to it with your phone and thus add another level of personal data, you might as well just put it up on your Facebook publicly and ask anyone to print & mail it to you. Modern commercial printers (such as those you will find at larger offices or at Staples) are basically full-blown PCs with a scanner and laser unit attached to them and as such nothing you put through there is ephemeral by default. It also means they are vulnerable to all kinds of horrible exploits that pretty much never get patched. Almost nothing stops you from refilling a $30 inkjet with generic ink cartridges at $5 a pop (even cheaper, although messier, if you refill yourself). Or, if you print more, by all means, get that $100 mono laser. But "just go for a drive and print at Staples" has got to go on that wall of worst HN ideas ever.
frosted-flakes 5y ago
It is not reasonable to drive 20 minutes there and back every time I need something printed. Colour printers are extremely useful, and I'm unlikely to go back to a monochrome one anytime soon.

MR4D 5y ago

Plug the printer into your WiFi router - instant WiFi. Cheaper, and much easier.

mkl 5y ago
Except then you need to put your router in the same odd location as the printer or run cables.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  You have a second router bridged to the main one. Wireless Ethernet ports for you to enjoy.
DesiLurker 5y ago
I do powerline ethernet adapter instead with my bro. definitely more reliable than wifi wakeup.

erwincoumans 5y ago

Same here, love the 3170CDW with wifi.

bombela 5y ago

I have the same printer. Sometimes it randomly locks up. And disappears from the network (ethernet, wifi is off). Otherwise it is precise enough for me to toner transfer masks to manufacture little PCBs with traces of 0.2mm. And with colors I can print in green to make a poor's man solder mask and silkscreen.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

An Ethernet printer can easily become WiFi with a bridge mode AP.

ashtonkem 5y ago

If you’re technically skilled, you could always make a print server out of a raspberry pi.

paranoidrobot 5y ago

Modern Powerline Ethernet adapters are really decent these days, and can even come with Wifi bridges/repeaters built in that can either replace, or 'mesh' with your router's wifi. I re-did the home network at a relative's place early this year when also replacing the laptop. Zero regrets. All the fixed devices now have either an eithernet port right near them, or good wifi signal. The devices that had flaky wifi were now meters from a wifi AP. Better still, it didn't take up any more power points as they all had pass-through power support. So plugged in behind the TV, and bedside tables and lamps.

dijit 5y ago
Powerline ethernet adapters have always depended very heavily on how the power is laid out in your home (and things like "noise") They can't, for example, jump breakers well. So YMMV, but in my experience they haven't improved much if at all, the only thing that could have changed is your placement, the noise on the lines or your home.
- paranoidrobot 5y ago
  I'm comparing against three different generations (and brands). A very early powerline adapter that was I think 100Mbit, back in around 2004-2006 I think - it basically didn't work at all, and I got rid of it. In ~2017 a new set top box came with a pair, but much smaller and sleeker. They worked out of the box, but did need to be powered off and on every month or two. These new ones, they plugged right in, they delivered 800-900Mbit through iperf3, and the wifi thing, once configured with the right SSID and Password, worked great, and have been stable for about 6 months now. This is all in the same house, and no major rewiring or renovations have taken place, and using the same sockets. The new deployment included additional sockets in other rooms since it worked so well.

fencepost 5y ago

The problem with color laser printers (at least from Brother) is that the lifespan of a bunch of the parts is quite a bit lower than for the mono printers (lower as in 1/4 to 1/3 the life), and in some cases you need to replace them in sets of 4. My home color laser came from a client that replaced it with a mono multifunction - they rarely used color, but it was overdue for replacement of all 4 color drums and leaves a streak down the very edge of the paper. Replacing the parts just didn't make sense, so it got "recycled" to me instead.

lostlogin 5y ago

> if all you are ever going to do is print your taxes and financial documents once a year I get that you’re making a point about printers being rarely used. The exact detail though - are there places where printing of your tax documents is still required and they can’t be digital?

sokoloff 5y ago
I print off my receipts and other schedules to hand off to my preparer (who does not accept outside PDFs from a security angle). The actual filings are digital, but the intermediate are paper.
brewdad 5y ago
I file electronically but prefer to keep a printed copy of my returns. They go into the same manila envelope that collects my receipts and tax forms throughout the year and then gets filed away until I need to refer to it. Filling out my kid's FAFSA this year was much easier with hard copy of my tax return rather than bouncing back and forth to a PDF. Maybe I'm just old.
boring_twenties 5y ago
Yeah, the USA. The IRS rejected my e-filed tax returns a couple of years back, and demanded everything in paper form. Hundreds of pages. The stated reason was due to possible fraud. Hilarious, in light of the fact that the return in question indicated tax owed, not a refund.

lelanthran 5y ago

> 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. $100? I've got a xerox phaser 3140 that I got off the returns table at a major store chain 10 years ago here in SA for 350 ZAR (about 25 USD). I've printed enough to exhaust the toner twice.

d0gsg0w00f 5y ago

+1 to the wifi. But without it, I've got a Google Wifi extender puck that has an ethernet port on it that can act as a wifi bridge. The puck is velcro'd to the laser printer so it will always be on the network. This has worked well for us for a few years.