Printers are mostly-mechanical devices, with a little bit of electronics. Most consumer printer brands, though, are designed by computer hardware or consumer electronics companies who don’t know all that much about mechanical engineering. Meanwhile, Brother is a typewriter and sewing machine company—mechanical engineers make up the majority of their engineering competence.

So, IMHO, it’s no surprise that Brother gets design elements correct like “efficient use of toner” and “self-cleaning” and “optimizing for low wear on the print head” that other printer manufacturers struggle with.

(If anything, you’d fear that Brother’s software [e.g. drivers] would suck even worse than everyone else’s; but somehow, it doesn’t. Then again, hardware-headed companies do seem to treat drivers as literal drivers, while software-headed companies seem to treat them as a fat shim that value-adds and makes noise all the time.)

HP's historic printers were fantastic though. It's sad to see the company that produced the Laserjet III and battletank of a Deskjet (I think I saw the "plus", black only with two slots for font cartridges) fall so low.

> Most consumer printer brands, though, are designed by computer hardware or consumer electronics companies who don’t know all that much about mechanical engineering.

That was, until the rise of Darth Carly at the earliest, not the case for HP, which made a name for itself as a manufacturer of scientific and industrial equipment before expanding into computers and printers (and bringing that manufacturing expertise to those fields). HP's printer business is based on rock-solid hardware chops from decades ago.

Indeed, I was very much impressed with the software that came with my Brother label printer. The included P-touch Editor[1] is Windows-98-good, and if that's not enough, they also offer b-PAC SDK[2] to programmatically access the printer and templates made with the Editor.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdU9geyCyac

[2] https://www.brother.co.jp/eng/dev/bpac/index.aspx

I wonder how many management consultants HP has hired versus Brother to increase their quarterly revenues, etc.

>>Brother is a typewriter and sewing machine company

Do you think they still have any mechanical engineers working on typewriters? Which industry still has a need/requirement for typewriters?

I don't know if they still sell typewriters, but the GP is talking about their heritage, not their current focus.

Right now they make a lean, mean, CNC milling machine!

https://youtu.be/S3jqS5_awO8

You need a typewriter for those triplicate forms which some folks still require. Another amazing reason we still have a dot matrix printer and a daisy wheel on a shelf.

Take this with a grain of salt but I've heard that some kind of typewriters are still used in some countries for the top secret material.

I wonder: do they burn or otherwise destroy the ribbon after the fact?

Also I have to confess, I've definitely bought used (tape-based) answering machines/typewriters at yard sales a few times solely to listen to the greeting/messages or typed messages, respectively. Having the device itself is nice, too, of course. :)

It's an interesting slice of the lives of people I'll never know, like picking up discarded shopping lists.

Or when you want typewritten information but don't want to give that person access to a computer (such as a hacker).

> If anything, you’d fear that Brother’s software [e.g. drivers] would suck even worse than everyone else’s; but somehow, it doesn’t.

On Linux it certainly does. For some reason I can use network printing on my Brother laser from Windows and even Android, but not Linux.

See https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/436250 and https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSAirPrint — apparently the AirPrint universal-fallback file format "URF" is patent-encumbered, such that you can't really have a FOSS encoder for it without licensing the patent (just like the MP3 format, until recently.) So OSes that cost money can pay for licenses and so ship encoders, but FOSS OSes cannot.

(I'd nevertheless have expected AirPrint support to exist somewhere in Debian's multiverse repo — but it that doesn't seem to be there. Does nobody have that itch to scratch?)

Most brother printers just speak PCL or Postscript. You just need to figure out how to make it work. On my printer is means use the right queue as it detects one that doesn't work. Otherwise any PDL will work it seems.

I found that I didn't even need to manually install any drivers for my Brother laser printer. Once I got it set up on the wi-fi the Windows, Mac, and Linux machines in my house automatically detected it and were able to use it just fine with only the built-in drivers. That gave me a good feeling about investing in it.

It's quite a challenge to suck more than HP printer drivers, really.

That would have to be the iPhone app:

Detects my printer just fine, then spites me by refusing to do anything until I give away my email address.

No way! I'll probably try to find a guerillamail equivalent and use that to sign up if I need to use the app.

But that's only after you download 380 megabytes of a "driver".

I bought a printer at the beginning of COVID just to print Amazon return shipping labels, etc. that I used to take advantage of the office printer for.

All I really wanted was a wireless printer so I could stick it somewhere out of sight (small apartment) and be able to print easily. I settled on an HP because it was a good combination of cheap/decent reviews.

Setting it up was such a pain in the ass, including instructions telling me to install what I later found to be the wrong setup program. Now I have two separate programs (one that I can change printer settings including changing wifi networks, and another to use the scanner). It doesn't seem right and I feel like I should only need one, but whatever it works right now and I don't plan on changing anything until the printer or I die.

That feeling of dread and uncertainty is all too real for me.

The first tip I got from an older fellow computer nerd at the first company I worked at was: When customer asks for printer, suggest brother for laser and canon or epson for inkjet. So far I'm very happy I listened. The Brothers just work so never got so far as to try the canons. And I got no support calls about the printers either.

To a first order approximation, nobody actually needs an inkjet printer. The vast majority of consumers don't print enough photos to make inkjets worth it, once you include purchase price and wastage due to dried out ink, most people should get a laser printer for documents and send their photos to Costco or similar.

The cartridge does really last a very long time. I just replaced mine after about a year of intermittent use. I thought that that was fine, but then my wife pointed out that we were replacing the half-capacity cartridge that came with the printer. I expect this cartridge to last a good two or three years.

The AirPrint abilities have been a little spotty at times, though that might just be my WiFi. I might hard-wire a raspberry pi to drive it though.

Also, I have no incentive for anyone to buy a brother printer. Just another happy user.

Took me a year to print something for my mom the last time she needed it because I simply KNEW that inkjet was going to be impossible when I needed it. And, lo and behold it was.. It was a Canon Pixma G3200, one of the ones with the built-in inkwells. When I finally decided to face the frustration I knew the thing would present me with, it threw an error.

It took a fair amount of time to track down the error (a particular pattern of blinking lights) that meant "the ink cartridge is inserted incorrectly." Ok.... I thought to myself, this thing doesn't even have cartridges.

At which point I bought the Brother laser printer I currently have that has not failed me even once.

> I can confirm that my brother printer has worked for years, the ink lasts apparently forever

I've had to replace my (Brother) toner once in almost a decade. Granted, I do not print a lot.

And before you replace it you just take it out, shake it a bit and put it back in again for another 200 pages. Repeat until it starts giving you missing lines on the pages. This can be going on for many cycles. I just plopped in my spare that been sitting half a year waiting for it's turn when the printer started complaining about low toner.