Indeed. Who prints documents with inkjet?

I have a Brother MFCL3730CDN CMYK laser for document scan/print/copy and Epson EcoTank ET-14000 for photo and art prints.

A-fscking-mazing devices both.

Both provide (to be found somewhere in the maze of modern hardware vendor websites) solid (modulo CUPS wrangling and vendor filesystem layout) Linux packages. I've only had one recent glitch when Brother introduced some sort of USB/network bridge daemon that occupied the port so VueScan (Software so good that I don't mind that it's not open source, because it does exactly what I need and more. A work of art worth every penny.) couldn't find the scanner.

Inkjets are tempting if you don't print many documents because the initial cost is pretty low. And ink cartridges also tend to be low cost compared to toner at the unit level. Laser printers take up more space too.

The problem is if you don't print a lot, the cartridges dry out, and the ink clogs in the printer and whatever else, leading to a big pain.

The Xerox Phaser solid ink printers produced really pretty images. It's a shame they are discontinued. I think you can still buy the ink blocks but they are probably going to phase them out.

That reminds me of a funny story. A previous employer had replaced a bunch of ancient HP LaserJets (we're talking LJ4s.. they were old) with these really nice Phasers. They printed fast, the output was gorgeous, and the drivers didn't suck. The replacement was facility-wide, so there were around 20 of these things.

A month later, IT was tasked with re-replacing them for everyone but marketing overnight. Literally overnight, as in, we're paying overtime for this. The boss didn't know what was happening until a week later, but it was a fire drill of an intensity that you usually don't see outside of a full outage.

It turned out that, while the Phasers do generate gorgeous hardcopy, the wax-like prints, can, with some effort, some skill, and a sharp knife, be popped off the page. A customer figured this out and had been effectively stealing service by way of paying invoices with numbers quite literally pulled off the page. The old Laserjets were placed back into service everywhere but the marketing group.

Haha true. They’re much better for photo and presentation than for legal documents.

I paid like £30 for used laser colour printer couple of years ago and I've been printing a lot since then. Never had to buy any toner or other maintenance products, except for paper.

If you print only occasionally, wouldn't it be easier to just use a print shop? Not sure how common they are in the US though.

I detect an opportunity for Amazon to introduce Prime Printing with same day shipping.

Before I bought a laser printer, I used to just go to the library to print things, at least document-wise (probably wouldn't work for photos).

Libraries are literally everywhere in the US, they're more common than McDonalds.

If your library doesn't have a print service you can use a Kinkos instead. It's more expensive, but if you only print once in a blue moon it's cheaper and less hassle than an inkjet (which will be all dried out or the cartridge will be empty from running the nozzle cleaning cycle every few days) when you need it that second time.

Laser printers can sit idle much longer but they're bulky and sometimes energy hogs.

Is library printing not a thing everywhere?

I've always seen it at every library I've been at (both school and public), but I suppose it might be more of a regional thing.

I live in Chicago and there's a bunch of FedEx shops a bus ride away. They all have self-serve pay-per-page printers, just bring in a USB drive with whatever you want to print.

On top of those, a few months ago I found a PrintWithMe [0] station at a corner store that's only a 5 minute walk away.

[0] https://www.printwithme.com/

I have the same Vuescan (awesome awesome awesome software) issue with my Canon MG6220.

It "generally" works over Ethernet, but occasionally goes off the rails, and I have to scan over USB.

Because of that, I have the printer installed twice, once on the Network (where it lives most of its life, shared) and once as USB, that I connect during really heavy scanning sessions, which is seldom.

People with kids.

I have $200 OfficeJet that has a free fax service that I need once in awhile and I use the instant ink thing.

Laser MFPs are expensive and the toner is super expensive. Brother lasers are great as long as you’re ok with 600dpi.

Aren't there 1200 dpi BW laser printers?

Yes, just not the <$90 models often recommended. Laser costs go up fast, and good color quality is a physically large unit usually.

If you care about print output and print often, inkjet will get you better value.

> Who prints documents with inkjet?

Most people print with whatever their employer/university has.

so true - when i started working at home full time 3 years ago i purchased my first ever printer

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

And remember it works flawlessly with Linux.

I have recently bought an office class Brother printer. It works flawlessly on Linux; but it doesn’t work flawlessly on Macs, and I’ve found bug reports for the same thing going back to 2015.

When you use the Mac OS built in “scanner” app to scan to PDF, it will scan in color even when you ask it to scan in B&W; unfortunately, this will confuse the app and the pdf will be corrupted.

The recommended workaround is “scan in color” (which I do, and then use Ghostscript to convert to b&w), but it’s ridiculous.

That said, as far as quality, speed, robustness and reliability, this is the best printer/scanner/fax machine I ever used. And it works perfectly well on Linux.

My wife has a mac and it just has a terrible experience with our brother laser. The print queue just says "cannot connect to printer" but I can open up the printer's web server, use the printer setting to check toner level &c. Then a few hours or days later it prints spontaneously.

I thought it might be bonjour not working well over wifi, but the problem persists even when I assign the printer an IP address manually. I'm stumped.

What is the "office class" printer you have trouble with?

I've never seen this issue with my Brother MFC-2740DW using "Image Capture" on my Mac (which I assume you are referring to as the built-in scanner app). It's worked flawlessly for me (as did my previous Brother laser printer/scanner).

An MFC-L3730CDN .

I am still using Mojave; I was unaware of the "Image Capture" app - I opened the printer icon, which has a "Scanner" button on the right when you have a multifunction printer - but it appears to be the same underlying implementation, and it has the same bug, described here:

https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro...

perhaps it was fixed in Catalina; the page I linked (with the exact kind of corruption I just tested through Image Capture) is from 2012...

By "scanner" app do you mean Preview? My several-year-old Brother laser printer works fine in B&W mode on Catalina. Maybe this is just a thing with newer models.

TIL: Preview can import from the scanner.

I was using the scanner window available from the printer icon associated with the multifunction printer. Another comment mentioned the standalone "Image Capture.app" which was also news to me.

However, all three are using the same underlying implementation. Scanning in color works. Scanning to JPEG works. However my preferred scanning mode (300dpi, A4, to PDF) produces the garbled image seen here[0], and apparently has been doing so since at least 2012 ...

My impression is that preview/scanner/imagecapture all trust the printer to do the conversion to PostScript/PDF, but somehow don't manage to tell it to use B&W instead of color -- it seems like r/g/b pixels are treated as individual gray pixels.

[0] https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro...

I've been using my Brother laser printer for something like a decade now. I bought toner for it once in like 2013. Never had any problems. The linux drivers are through a third party repo but they work great.

In the days when you're expected to buy a new cell phone every two years and a new computer every four it feels like black magic that it just ... sits there ... and.. works.

After the fiasco with an HP InkJet MFP, we went with Brother. Instead of constantly using steam to clean clogged jets, it just... works. Much less fiddly. The missus mostly prints from her iPad, phone, or Windows laptop, I haven't used it much from Linux.

In the big printer thread referenced, the consensus was that they do not work flawlessly with Linux.

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

it's been a long week... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A long year really

The Allied Mastercomputer is having his sick way with us.

Coulda sworn it was 2 weeks ago.

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

For inkjet, I use Canon and I love them, although the ink is expensive, especially the 8-color ink packs.

For inkjet printer, I think Epson's ink tank printer is great. The printer cost 3x compared to other cheap loss-leader inkjet printers, but the inks are cheap and you buy it by the bottle instead of by the drips in cartridges.

You and I are in a similar camp. I have a monochrome Brother laser (with Duplex) and a Color Canon Inkjet, both on wired networking. Both work well including printing from my phone. Not problems with either, I print mostly on the laser, occasionally on the inkjet. The Canon inkjet can sit idle for weeks at a time, and I still haven't had a plugged nozzle in eight years.

I've had a Brother HL-2170W for at least a decade. Bought a new toner cartridge once. The current one has been "low" for a couple of years.

The printer just keeps working. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it lased another decade.

Yeah I've had a MFC-L2740DW for something like 7 years now, and it's an absolute beast. It was like AUD$250 or something on sale, does printing/scanning/copying/etc, has wifi, and works on all our devices flawlessly (windows, mac, linux, phones, tablets). I've bought toner I think once in that entire time.

What sort of problems do you have with the 32bit drivers (beyond "I don't like it")?

I think you meant to reply here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010133

Indeed I did, thanks.

32-bit drivers? Most laser printer drivers are just a PPD file. You don’t need to install any executables or whatever. Heck, on a lot of printers you can just use Bonjour printing without installing any drivers at all!

The cheaper Brother printers don’t have a PostScript engine, so you need a “driver” (really a CUPS filter) to rasterize the image and prepend the appropriate PCL commands. In the official Linux driver package, at least for my printer, this comes in the form of a rather complicated shell script that hooks together some binary blobs, and if you don’t have all the right 32-bit support libraries it just mysteriously fails to produce any output while CUPS reports that the print job completed successfully.

Fortunately someone has made an open-source equivalent which is much less complicated and seems to work just fine.

I think brlaser and brscan are the modern replacements.

I haven't thought about drivers in a long time. It "just works" on MacOS.

As a student I owned the cheapest OKI laser printer. Once it broke so I called them. On the same day, they sent an actual engineer to my apartment to fix it.

Maybe they thought I was a business or something. No, just a guy in a rented room. I asked about it. The guy didn’t understand why I thought that was weird.

I was baffled. Oh also there was none of that nasty HP business. Buy any fitting toner and out it in.

I wonder if Oki still exists. If it does, here’s a recommendation.

It does and if you can get an OKI printer it is probably better choice than Brother. OKI and Brother printers are generally similar (in fact I would not be surprised if Brother printers are actually made by OKI), but OKI printers tend to have better firmware and actual licensed PostScript implementation from Adobe. And at least here (Czech Republic) you can often get OKI printers on sale with almost ridiculous discounts.

They got out of the US printer market this year because of COVID: https://www.oki.com/us/printing/about-us/newsroom/news-and-i...

They're still continuing in other markets though.

Sad. The OKI Microline 320 was a staple from my early 90s career in medical IT. It's still sold by Staples.

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

With my kid studying at home who can print directly from the iPad, it's great.

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

I did this a few users ago after the ink dried out again in my inkjet printer and I would have to drop another $100+ on ink.

I don't print often but when I need to print I need to print. I spent a bit of change on a Brother Laser printer/scanner and I don't regret that purchase one bit. It's now been years and it still works great -- I've only replaced the toner twice now.

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

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

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

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

The only way I can ever justify buying a printer these days is snagging them off local school district surpluses.

I managed to get two different Office LaserJets for like $10 each and they work wonderfully (and it will probably be cheaper for me to buy a new printer off the school than buy more ink when I inevitably run out).

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

And if you need network connectivity a raspberry pi connected to the printer via usb is the best way to breathe life into old printers. CUPS has been really solid for me.

Most routers have an USB port to share printers, don't they?

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

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

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

I found my Brother printer in the trash !

I call her trashy. Trashy Brother.

This.