6 ms·
> I fear each of their competitors is just as bad. I can't speak to current practices, as my current Brother printer is now 7 years old and is still on its se
by hoistbypetard 4y ago
> I fear each of their competitors is just as bad.
I can't speak to current practices, as my current Brother printer is now 7 years old and is still on its second toner cartridge. It's a B&W laser with wifi, a duplexer, and whatever discovery stuff that iDevices need to find and print to it driverless.
It replaced a very similar Brother printer that had gotten a solid 10 years of service, and which I chose to replace rather than repair when the fuser died mostly because I wanted the iDevice affordances.
Both of those printers also worked smoothly from Linux desktops, too, thanks to pretty good PostScript emulation.
Maybe they've gone to crap now, but I'm optimistic that if I needed another B&W laser, something like their current HL-2350DW or HL-2370DW would provide a similarly inexpensive, no-bullshit experience now.
The thing that worked for me was giving up on color printing. The supplies for that are eye-wateringly expensive IMO, and I seldom really need it. Last time I had a color printer at home, it was an Epson ink jet of some description, and my color prints were so infrequent that sometimes the cartridge would dry out after a few dozen pages. And worst of all, it'd refuse to do B&W prints if one of the colors was dry. I decided I'd just go to Kinko's if I needed a color document, or to one of several drug stores that lets you print photos if I needed photos. Black and White lasers are stable. Taking apart my Brother, it is extremely similar to the Canon engines from the 1980s. Which were themselves extremely similar to photocopiers that have been in production since quite a bit earlier than that.
B&W laser printing is such a well-solved problem, if you can stand to go with that you can save yourself a ton of aggravation and quite a bit of money.
- Akronymus 4y agoBrother is one of the VERY few companies I'd choose without thinking twice. At least in terms of printers. So far, only had good experiences. And now I realize that sounds like astroturfing.
- tailspin2019 4y agoAgreed. Brother (laser) printers are extremely reliable in my experience too. I’ve been using them for close to 20 years now. HP probably would have been my only other choice if/when I have to replace my superb (and crazy cheap) Brother B&W laser but after reading this post I will never go near HP printers again. Edit: just read about Brother’s nasty firmware update elsewhere in the comments here. Sigh. I guess I’ll just have to stop buying printers altogether.
- justinclift 4y agoUnfortunately, Brother also seems to have switched to pulling this kind of crap recently too. :( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
- Akronymus 4y agoWell... time to flip some tables.
- Psype 4y agoThere's still Ricoh. I literally found a big one in the streets that worked perfectly (I suppose the small company that was at this address needed something bigger). Generic cartridges are just find and you refill them easily.
- jleahy 4y agoI have a Kyocera color laser, no nonsense, it’s a great printer and works fine out of the box with both Linux and iDevices.
- seanp2k2 4y agoI’ve had good luck with the Epson LABELWORKS LW-PX400 label printer and they’re projectors, but yeah for printing now we just pay the $0.05c/page at ups or FedEx or wherever.
- chrisandchris 4y agoFascinating. I wouldn't at any time choose Brother. A friend of mine got a new Mac with a new OS. Printer was around 4-5 years old. There was no support on the new OS at all. With a lot of luck one could print b&w, but color never worked again. I never experienced that using HP or Xerox.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoWas your friend using os9 or something? Until it finally bit the dust last week I had a 10 year old Brother printer (MFC 7440 or something like that) that worked fine on both Windows and Mac versions up through High Sierra
- chrisandchris 4y agoCan't remember it exactly. Is already a year ago. It was some kind of color laser and the latest OS X at that time. The support forums were full of posts describing the same issue and the (only) unofficial solution was to fiddle with ither drivers or a generic PS and sonehow be lucky to make color printing work again. I gave up after an hour or two. IMHO, those are mostly personal experiences that lead to preferred manufacturers. For each story where one tells you he never had any issue you'll find one that for sure had issues.
- fsckboy 4y ago> There was no support on the new OS at all. With a lot of luck one could print b&w, but color never worked again. I never experienced that using HP or Xerox. the cost of the old Brother and then a new Brother at that point would have been cheaper than the cost of either the HP or the Xerox and if you were using linux (and almost as often Windows too), the old drivers would have still worked.
- zerof1l 4y agoI own a secondhand Brother inkjet printer. I bought it on eBay under the influence of posts like these. TLDR, they now DRM their cartridges. Each ink cartridge has a chip in it. One of the first experiences I had was my printer refusing a back ink cartridge. I had to throw away a full cartridge.
- arglebargle123 4y agoWe recently bought a brother aio to replace my mom's previous HP Deskjet aio, zero issues with it from phones, laptops, desktops, etc. I'd still recommend them in a heartbeat.
- philistine 4y agoAre you me?
- BeetleB 4y agoBrother is still good. The main issue is the usual one: It stops printing when toner is a bit low even though you could probably still print another 50-100 pages. But you'll find workarounds on the Internet.
- LastNevadan 4y agoI've owned two Brother laser printers in the past 15 years. I've run into this issue with the newer one: it will just refuse to print at a certain point. However, I was able to find a work-around (probably the same one you found) by typing some magic code I got from a YouTube video into the front panel and then it worked for awhile until I did replace the toner cartridge. Was quite frustrating but nowhere near as bad of some of the HP stories like this that I read on HN.
- laktak 4y agoMagic code? This is from the Brother support site: To enable Continue Mode, perform the following steps: 1. Press Menu. 2. Press ▲ or ▼ to select General Setup. Press OK. 3. Press ▲ or ▼ to select Replace Toner. Press OK. 4. Press ▲ or ▼ to select Continue. Press OK. 5. Press Stop/Exit.
- BeetleB 4y agoIt probably varies from printer to printer. I definitely needed to enter a magic code.
- Natsu 4y agoThat's pretty much what I did, save that I never had to replace my printer and I'm on the 2nd thing of toner since many, many years ago. For someone who doesn't print a whole lot, but occasionally needs to print a bit, it has been awesome. I got burnt out after dealing with an old Epson inkjet back in the day. Never want to go back to that.
- anothernewdude 4y agoMy laser printer is a OKI I think. It's similar. One toner cartridge, can't remember what year I bought it.
- derekp7 4y agoI have an older Brother HL-3070. Main issue is that when printing files of certain complexity, they print fine if I do it under Windows but it takes sometimes 5 minutes to render each sheet if doing it under Linux. Not sure if it is due to the printer's age, or what. The replacement printer is a new er HP M283 which hasn't had this issue. (I finally had to replace the Brother due to color streaking, even with replacing the drums and new toner cartridges, plus the toner was getting hard to find).
- yencabulator 4y agoI have a Brother HL3075CW color laser and scanner combo that's just under 10 years old. I've replaced the toner only once. I may not print much, but color is nice to have and not that expensive unless you print a lot. Tangentially, can we talk about old printers being too scary to connect to the network? No firmware upgrades ever. I've been thinking of setting up a RPi or something as a bastion host and print&scan server, preventing direct traffic.
- xanaxagoras 4y agoI do this to give a HL-2270DW air print capabilities. Tiny VM on my home server, works great.
- nine_k 4y agoI used two Brother laser printers heavily, a color one and a monochrome one. I went through multiple cartridges over several years, Brother's and third-party. Zero issues. Windows, Mac, and Linux drivers available. When a printer signaled that the toner should have run out, I checked the cartridge. It apparently had enough toner left, so I entered a special code and reset the counter for the cartridge. I can only recommend their laser lineup.
- jnurmine 4y agoI used a piece of tape to achieve the same thing. Printed for a few years (yes, a rare need) after that small operation. It's sad that manufacturers resort to these schenaningans at all.
- thayne 4y agoWell, that's a laser printer, which is very different from an inkjet. I haven't owned a printer in a long time, because I don't need to print often enough for it to be worth the hassle and cost, but the last time I looked into it (which was also years ago), brother inkjets were maybe a little better than other brands, but not by a lot, and that is a low bar. The problem with laser printers is that they have a much higher upfront cost, especially if you actually need color. Sure, they are probably worth it in the long run, but that bigger price tag stops a lot of people from getting one.
- h4waii 4y agoCan confirm, I have an HL-2390DW using CUPS shared to a numerous Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android devices with absolutely no issues, it takes 3rd party toner cartridges and works without issue.
- knaik94 4y agoI have a generation older Brother HL-2270DW and it also has never given me issues. The only thing missing is proper support for iOS cloud printing but that has been an issue in my household zero times. The included toner cartridge is smaller than even the standard side replacements Brother sells, I am not really sure of the reason. There might have been an update to add iOS printing to it via some software bridge, but I never checked. There are multiple tutorials online about setting up a Raspberry Pi (even a zero w) as an AirPrint server and interfacing with the printer via CUPS. This allows using a lot older printer models as well that don't have built-in wifi. https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/raspberry-pi-print-server https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/raspberry-pi-print-serve...
- seanp2k2 4y agoThis is the way. However, it’s a bit sad that all these decades later, quality color printing at home is still such a mess because of a few profiteering companies.
- gambiting 4y agoThey haven't gone to crap. I bought their basic laser b&w printer and it works without any of this nonsense.
- alexdbird 4y agoWhilst I also recommend Brother if people ask, and also go to a local bureau for colo(u)r, the mono laser printers I've had at home for the last 20 years have been HP, simply because those are the ones needing very minor repair that I've picked up for free!
- FlingPoo 4y agoI have 10-year-old Brother MFC-9970CDW, purchased June 12, 2012. Replaced a couple of toner cartridges over the years, and that's it. Still going strong.
- leokennis 4y agoCan also vouch for Brother. I have their J5330DW color inkjet. Everything works very solidly and I can replace all 4 cartridges (CMYK) separately. Depending on how much I print, that’s about €90 in ink per year.
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoSame here. I went through two Brother laser printers (wireless, scanner), the previous one having had an unfortunate mechanical accident (ach, children...). It works great. The only negative comment is that it starts to cry for a new cartridge some 6 months early, but I just go on printing and there are no problems (they even have a setting with what to do when "ink is low": stop and cry or go on)
- jkepler 4y agoI have a Brother color inkjet, since 2015. The first few years were great but now its been a royal hastle to get it to print more than a page or two at a time. I've been considering switching to B&W laser. Thanks for the model recommendations.
- watchdogtimer 4y agoThe problem I have with laser printers is they draw a lot more power than an inkjet. I can run an inkjet printer off my pedal-powered generator. I can't do that with a laser printer.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago> HL-2350DW They do. I have this model and aftermarket toners work effortlessly. I'll never buy HP or Lexmark. They're the worst.
- CogitoCogito 4y agoI bought a Brother printer about a year back and the toner stopped working because Brother decided it was "empty" instead of allowing me to continue until it fades and I decide it's "empty". (In this case, the print quality was perfect until it was declared empty.) So it seems Brother is not immune from giving into the temptation of turning into a terrible printer company. Hopefully they don't continue down that path. (I can't remember which model I have and am away on travel, but I can update assuming anyone cares...)