I have had great luck with Brother drivers on all the linux machines I've ever tried to use them with, so I would consider that a good option as well.

I have a Brother HL2270DW printer, does duplexing and wireless, looks nice, doesn't take up much space. Got it on sale at NewEgg for less than $100. Replaced the toner cartridge once with a third-party brand. It's been great.

I use Debian and Ubuntu, and the driver has mostly worked very well.

However, there have been a few times when, after upgrading Ubuntu, which upgrades CUPS, some very obscure thing in the driver was incompatible with something else in the chain of commands used to print a job (ghostscript, etc--there's quite a pipeline), and suddenly the duplexing would print an extra, blank page between pages, and every page was offset by about an inch to the side. I was able to find a bug report on Launchpad and manually edit one of the driver files myself to work around it, but it took several hours of fiddling, and it's nothing any "average user" would be able to do.

And, sadly, Brother hasn't released updated drivers for this printer in many years; they don't seem to care about keeping up with newer versions of Ubuntu or CUPS, etc.--at least, not for this printer.

And I haven't been able to get it to print on envelopes correctly, no matter what I tried. It just prints as if it's printing on a normal sheet of paper.

So, anyway, whenever it needs replacing, I will probably try to get a printer that just does plain old PostScript. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that if a printer correctly handles PS, then basically anything can print to it correctly, without having to worry about arcane, manufacturer-specific drivers.

Another thumbs up for Brother, their consumer laser printers are now comparable in price to inkjet printers, and the toner is much less hassle and significantly less expensive per print. I've had no trouble with drivers on Linux either.

I've been hearing good things about Brother, but all their (and AFAIK everyone else's) laser printers are still pretty hefty compared to inkjets, aren't they?

Being very space-constrained (London) and looking at very occasional use (I've managed without owning a printer at all so far) that's a bit offputting.

Yes, they are hefty. I don't know if you can find one that's only a printer. We have a printer/fax/scanner model that's now around 10-15 years old. I can tell it's getting ready to give up the ghost soon. We have actually had to use the fax part of it recently, too. The scanner in it is terrible for anything other than scanning documents to PDF. Completely unusable for photos. (Taking a few photos of a photo with my DSLR and doing an HDR merge produces great results, whereas using the scanner produces crushed blacks and blown-out whites with no way to fix them.)

Yes, you can buy just a printer. I'm not really fond of the all-in-one devices because they tend to be a mediocre everything and not a really good anything.

I will say this about my Brother all in one black and white laser- it does everything I need it to do well enough and I don't have to fiddle around with it to get it to work. Multi-page scan direct to PDF, fax, printing over WiFi (thanks to my router for that and Brother with some decent Linux drivers)- it does everything I want it to do and pretty good.

Can say good things about brother inkjet too. Was using J5?20 (don't remember exactly):

It auto cleans head while plugged in, can take a3 paper, in emergency can print decent photo in slow(best) mode, has huge black tank, and the size is not much different from other brands a4 inkjets. It weights a ton, though

Agreed, run 100% linux with a brother printer, works great. Setting it up was very simple.

I didn't consider buying HP for a second not because of their drivers but because I have an association of HP producing total garbage.

> I have an association of HP producing total garbage.

It's so sad what they did to their brand. A cheapish HP laser has been our main lab printer for 14 years and zillions of pages. When I bought it HP was the no-brainer buy. Is it really true that if I bought one now it'd be no good?

+1 Brother

I've got a 7 year old black and white laser multi-function and am on toner cartridge number two. Never had a problem and it plays with my router for printing over WiFi. I've had good luck with it in Ubuntu, OSX, and Windows.

Pretty sure I spent $149 with it on sale at Fry's when I bought it nearly a decade ago.

I have the Epson L210 Ecotank and have been very happy with it for my use, which is printing lots of pages (1000s). I would much rather pay for what I'm getting directly ($300 for the printer, $13 for 70ml bottle of ink) than plans for an "almost-free" printer and $60 cartridges to subsidize the printer. The problem with "free" in everything is that it's not and costs more than paying for what you really want to buy. As someone once said, "Expensive is expensive once. Cheap is expensive over and over again."

rihac.com.au - if you already have a printer we have ink tanks CISS systems that fit to most models. We are also annoyed about HP's little trick but its not the first time a printer manufacturer has tried something like this. there are always little obstacles that we have to tackle. With a decade of experience our tech team know all the tricks to get around these barriers.