Fast forward to today, I have never owned an inkjet printer. Over the past 30 years I’ve owned a total of 3 laser printers. The second was in 2005, because I wanted a scanner. The third in 2014, because I wanted network. So each one has lasted around 10 years each, and not because they broke, but because I wanted new features.
I have forever told anyone asking my advice on printers to avoid inkjets. When they do, they have problems with the ink, either drying out or having to replace them all the time.
I agree, inkjets should’ve died a long time ago. The only reason to buy one in the past was if you were on a tight budget and had to have color. But nowadays, color lasers are dropping, or it’s super easy to send something off to X to print it for you.
Up where I live there were a lot of HP employees in the LAN party scene pre broadband. Anyone would be frustrated and angry over layoffs, but what happened locally was a different level of disillusion and disappointment. It was brutal to just watch as someone adjacent, not going through it.
Fiorina got a lot of sexist nonsense thrown her direction, but at the end of the day, was still a terrible CEO. HP's capitalization grew by 3 billion dollars in a single day when it was announced she was on the way out. Markets certainly aren't oracles, but that's one hell of a shift.
I knew it was going to be great before even powering up for the first time.
> This was right before it got gobbled up by MBAs and celebrity CEOs, who spun it off into a hundred subunits hawking flimsy plastic trinkets and "business consulting".
Indeed. Very sad.
Nowadays I get by with a P2015dn because you have to have Ethernet, and it suffers from the wake-on-lan issue but it's tolerable. I'm afraid to try anything more recent.
But the thing I miss most is that it used to be cool to be a fan of HP. Now that's just nostalgia.
Had a Samsung laser printer that didn't last long and have had a Brother for years.
I fully expect the one I have to outlast me, the other is in a more hostile environment and might not, but it too seems to be doing just fine, print quality is still excellent.
Still have not changed the cartridge (apparently it is good for 10k pages).
I am starting to worry that all cartridge refill businesses will close before I need a refill..
If you add a page fed scanner, you’re looking at $400-500.
Surely, you’ll waste $100’s on dried out inkjet ink and buying a new inkjet printer / scanner combo every 2-5 years.
Replaced it with a Brother Color Laser MFC (with fax!) and everything just went swimmingly well.
Last I heard (2019), the HP had problems again and GA Dept just trashed the thing. The Brother was still working well.
Consumer grade lasers these days aren't quite the same creature as the tanks of old, but I see little reason to own an inkjet. For basic colour a laser does perfectly well, for many photos they do pretty good (inkjets are better for photos but only if you feed them expensive paper - output from a laser is sharp even on cheap bog-standard paper which an inkjet is actually worse on, and unless you print lots or often need hen now it works out better to get things printer elsewhere). Inexpensive lasers can be a minefield (some of the cheap ones are cheap for a reason...) and are more expensive to run than those tanks of old, but get a reasonable one and you'll be happy with it for years and they are a lot cheaper than running a 'jet for any use case.
I agree with you about the inkjets, I had one of these "photo" printers -- it may have even been from Kodak or something or Fuji. Great results, but since I printed 10 photos a year, same problem as the usual inkjets...and eventually I found the special ink and paper to be unlocateable.
18 years later, still works great and I've only changed the black toner once and never changed the color.
Of course the printer itself costs the same as 5 inkjets and when the toner does need replacing... ouch.
If you really want I suppose you could put it on a ZWave or Wifi switch so you could turn it on remotely.
Aren’t inkjets better for photos?
www.ldproducts.com/blog/pros-cons-of-inkjet-and-laser-printers/amp/
Most people don't print enough photos to justify the pain of owning an inkjet printer.
Thought admittedly if I replaced or repaired the power module, it probably would’ve went another 20 years at least.
Example pictures: https://geekanddad.wordpress.com/2014/03/02/
I have been able to scan all of my documents with their MFC line directly to my Dropbox (or box or drive or onedrive) account for over 6 years now, AND Brother Web Connect automatically OCR’s them.
The user manual clearly said no more than 100 pages at a time and less than a 1000 a day, no problem for a student.
Yet time after time someone would come in and want one for office work. We would point them to the better printers that have hard metal parts in all the key areas and would print all day nonstop if needed. Yet time after time they insisted on the cheap home Panasonic printer.
Then a few months later they would show up screaming and yelling that we sold them a piece of junk. Shame that the printer kept track of how many pages it printed. And the manual clearly stated the limits. We never saw the court cases they threaten us with. :)
It seems every day that there's some sort of outrage in a blog or article: "Did you know that [large organization] spends $[x] for their [equipment]? Wow, you can buy [consumer version] at Walmart for 1/100th of that price!"
No, outraged taxpayer, your school district isn't wasting money by purchasing a $10,000 copier. Your HP all-in-one can't replace their use-case, despite how you imagine it could.
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-deskjet-2755e-all-in-on...
... this:
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-laserjet-enterprise-mfp...
... and this:
https://www.office.xerox.com/en-us/multifunction-printers/al...
... is not some metal gears.
All three of those are machines with fundamentally different functions and capabilities.
I have (long ago) supported consumer grade printers in an enterprise environment. They're so bad as to be unusable. You spend way more than the $10,000 on the nice copier in lost productivity due to poor reliability and additional IT labor required to fix a fleet of inkjets.
With a $10,000 copier, you push out an group policy to install it on everyone's PC and it runs pretty smoothly and can take the load. If you put $100 inkjets on 80 different desks, you end up having to hire another FTE just to manage the cartridge replacements, driver installations, head cleanings, paper jams, etc. And the experience is worse for the end users too. If they need 250 handouts printed in the next 10 minutes, they simply can't do it.
I also take offense with he fact that the 3rd example does not even have a listed price - that is a BIG red flag for the habit of making the customer pay as much as possible.
And the HW cost is justified, the SW cost is NOT, the interface should be simple and clean. Why is it not? No, here vendors are to blame.
The difference in capacity alone between the HP all-in-one and the Xerox copier is literally the same in magnitude (60-80x) as the difference in capacity between a semi truck and a passenger vehicle.
These are different tools that literally do different things. You can't print 250 handouts with that HP all-in-one, and you can't transport 25,000 lbs of freight in a Camry.
A routine use-case for one of those large copiers is something like a person needing to give a 25 page document to 10 people on short notice. Not only is it not practical, it's not even possible with a consumer inkjet. A high end workgroup copier will spit them out in a short moment, already stapled (or bound!) and ready to go. Do you realize how silly it would be to make 10 people with 6-figure salaries stand around waiting for a consumer inkjet, even just one time? You'd be wasting thousands of dollars to save pennies.... and that's assuming you don't consequentially impact your ability to generate revenue. I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for a b2b sales team relying on a consumer inkjet to submit proposals on time.
> And the HW cost is justified, the SW cost is NOT
These aren't separate itemized costs when you buy a printer. You either get the Xerox printer with the Xerox software, or you get the HP Deskjet with the Deskjet software. You don't get to choose to use the DeskJet Printer with the Kerberos integration from the Xerox software. The teenager working at Best Buy is not going to be able to help you find a copier with software that is HIPAA compliant.
> I also take offense with he fact that the 3rd example does not even have a listed price - that is a BIG red flag for the habit of making the customer pay as much as possible.
It's an example of a ~$10000 copier. The price isn't listed because customers don't buy this type of machine directly through Xerox anyway. These types of purchases are done through formal proposals through Xerox vendors.
Large businesses don't buy things the way you do. They submit RFP/RFQs to vendors.
When you hit 100 pages for 20 people though... ;-)
But I agree with the general gist of your post. Desktop personal printers are simply not built for _regular_ high load.
This of course depends on how frequently you are going to use it, how hard, for what, and how severe or expensive the consequences of it breaking on you unexpectedly are.
‘Commercial’ or ‘pro grade’ is usually more durable and expensive because the market demands it - employees are often harder on equipment than someone who bought it directly, it gets used at a much higher duty cycle, maintenance is often neglected at least as much as a residential user, etc. and the market is willing to pay more because it breaking stops them from making money, or requires them to spend more money on labor getting it fixed.
They also tend to have horrible UX or require specific steps to work, since they know it is being bought for it’s utility not because it is pretty (most of the time), and someone will have to figure out how to use it or get figured after the company is already paid.
They still do get scammed sometimes of course.
The printer equivalent of harbor freight tools has a place if you’re going to toss it in a year anyway due to a move, or need it for a single job and then never again, as long as it isn’t a safety/critical path item anyway.
"Hello Best Buy / Staples / Office Depot salesperson, I need a printer."
"Well, I'd recommend (insert whichever manufacturer currently cutting retail most margin)."
"No, a friend had a bad experience with them."
"Oh, then (insert second highest margin)."
(Repeat)
Most large corps have done the math and know their TCO all in is much lower (since they have the scale that they need to hire staff and explicitly account for dealing with issues like printer problems).
The printer companies have also done their market research and math, and know how much they can squeeze out of these corps while still having the math clearly make sense for them.
Can you imagine the logistical and end user support nightmare if they gave everyone their own cheap inkjets? Lolz.
It’s bad enough as it is, and per-page the problems are way less frequent.
Regular people go to a big box store, look at the items on the shelf, read the marketing material on the box, and fork out $79.99.
To get a good deal you have to calculate TCO which requires understanding consumable prices, yields, and print volumes, and doing the math to figure out all of your options.
Being mad is easy. Being analytical requires work.
aka print volumes and cartridge yields, as I said.
In any case, if you're not calculating TCO, then you're not calculating TCO. Brand loyalty is just brand loyalty, even when tech savvy people do it. There are economical and uneconomical printers from nearly any brand depending on use-case.
If it takes a decade for someone to figure this out, and most people are buying things like this in the late teens to early thirties, then no matter what you’re going to have ~2/3 of the market who hasn’t figured it out.
Also, a lot of folks get drawn like a magnet to new and shiny, or whatever the latest marketing spiel is and don’t even think of the long term impact. Like the vast majority.
Problem is that it needs to "clean" the print heads frequently. It uses up ink every time it cleans. So if you're not printing frequently, 95% of your ink will be used up by letting the printer do its thing.
I tried just leaving it unplugged for a long time once, and sure enough the print head clogged. It took a lot of printing and cleaning (and wasted ink) before it became 99% usable again.
But the Brother B&W laser we got? It Just Works.
It's quite mysterious and I'd like to know the reasons.
I wanted it now though, and locally could only really find a good deal on a Canon. I'm extremely happy with it, prints great, fast enough for me, can get knockoff toner for cheap on Amazon that hasn't given me any issues, and the wifi networking is rock solid. Duplex printing, flatbed scanner, the works etc for $100.
It also has a pretty thorough administration panel built in, though as a home user I only clicked around it for fun.
So now both Canon & Brother are on my recommendations list when anyone asks me what printer to buy.
I’m used mine with macOS, iOS, Linux and Windows.
So no multi-gigabyte downloads, no proprietary cloud photo storage and no telemetry.
I’ve had that in the past with both Epson and Canon inkjets.
Is the Canon laser any better?
I’m so sold on Brother now I don’t think I’d trust Canon again.
The days of needing drivers & manufacturer specific software are long gone at this point unless you have a very weird or specific setup. Heck, I can even scan without any special software. They all still prompt you to install their junk in the manuals, but you don’t need to.
I got a brother laser that doesn’t complain about generic toner.
The only thing I miss about not having an inkjet is color printing and at-home photo printing, but there are so many on-demand online print shops nowadays, I can't say it's a big deal.
I do go through the attic every now and then and toss stuff that hasn't been used for ages.
I battled with colour HP, Canon and Epson inkjets for so many years, then eventually snapped 2 years ago and bought a mono Brother laser MFD for a ridiculously cheap £150 - wow, no more buying ink every month, no more "head cleaning" or "head alignment" every.single.time I want to print something, no paper jams, no stress when you just want to print one damned page!
Just... a perfectly working device! And the ink lasts ages too - the smaller cartridge that came with it lasted a year, then I bought a standard sized one that's still going strong. I really can't rate Brother highly enough - zero issues, everything works perfectly.
My only mistake was not switching to a mono laser printer sooner!
It took a few weeks until everything was fixed again for me, I had to reinstall drivers from Apple and HP multiple times. But my mom still hasn't gotten her HP inkjet to work since then.
Add to that the fact that they sent firmware updates that caused printers to stop working with 3rd party ink -- I'm never buying anything from HP again.
Inkjet technology is fine, it was the exploitation of it by HP which lead to copy cats that really made it ridiculous.
I've got an HP inkjet wide format plotter (36" wide) that was built both before HP was all in on ink as a profit center and built by a different division (plotter division). It has been a reliable workhorse for over 20 years now and while I don't use HP ink any more (they don't sell it) third party ink works fine.
I replaced my desktop printer with an Epson Eco-tank printer. They claim it comes with 2 years of ink (at my rate that is probably 4 years :-) and they the ink is not expensive. So there are people trying this model of "let's not bother screwing people on ink" and I'm trying to reward them by buying their printer.
Also the integrated scanner worked out-of-the box for me under Debian, after I compiled and installed utsushi [1] from sources (edit: I'm only scanning from the utsushi command-line, no experience WRT integration with sane etc.).
I was at the point of swearing never to buy Epson inkjets, or any inkjet again. Then they released the eco-tank. I reluctantly made the purchase, almost expecting to be let down, but glad to say all is well.
The comedian Jimeoin even did a TV ad for the eco-tank range (here in Australia at least). It became a worldwide joke about tossing out printers when ink ran out. Maybe that's why they chose him for the eco-tank campaign.
The HP inkjet "plotter" works by rasterizing the plot in the host computer's memory and then sending strips of raster to the plotter. The dot resolution of the print head (replaceable, but not part of the ink system) matches the 0.7mm resolution of the pen plotters it replaced.
Never ever ever buy a cartridge inkjet printer.
instead buy a tank printer (eg Epson Eco-Tank). They are more expensive. You fill up the ink from a bottle.
Cartridge printers are sold at a loss and designed to make a profit from the cartridges. This is why printer manufacturers are constantly fighting third-party cartridges with unnecessary firmware "upgrades". Additionally, the printer will use some of that ink to clean the printer heads so the printer will run out of ink even if you don't print anything.
Also, retail printers are typically sold with less-than-full ink cartridges.
It's a good example of how consumers buy based on price rather than value. But don't confuse cartridge vs tank inkjet printers. They're completely different beasts.
I don't remember if it just stops the printer from complaining about the level, or if it refuses to print with a low level.
Consumers mostly tend to make their purchase decisions on the margin, and so the razors-and-blades model works well.
I guess there may be a few recent exceptions to this like the Epson Ecotank, although I don’t know how profitable that has been for them.
The reason being people in my country don't really care about warranty, would go out and buy a cheap cartridge-based printer, then bring that printer to some hack shops that will "convert" that printer into a tank-based one, allowing you to use any third-party ink.
So manufacturers keep absorbing loss on their lower-than-cost printers and couldn't make a profit from ink sales.
That's why cartridge-based printers are slowly being phased out for ink tank printers... So manufacturers can grab profit directly from printer sales :-)
But they’re not the ones cranking out the $20-$50 inkjets that litter the shelves at Walmart/Best Buy
But most of the time, it's fine, and the ink is cheap.
It costs HP/Canon at least (if not more than) $49 to build a $49 inkjet all-in-one.
> I really don't see a reason for inkjet printers to exist, I hope they will disappear from the market.
Perhaps you should investigate why they exist. Seems too naive to wish for their disappearance due to lack of knowledge.
https://www.precisioncolors.com/
I've been using these for years for Photo printing. Can vouch for excellent quality and affordable price. You need a color calibrator to calibrate these inks + paper.
The sad thing is that there aren't any good review sites.
I use this spectrophotometer for calibration: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1369004-REG/x_rite_eo...
Honest Question: Would inkjets remain cheap if they all accepted $STANDARD bottles available everywhere and compatible with all printers.
It's probably possible to design an inkjet printer that actually works as well in the real world as a laser printer, but it would threaten the business model of all the printer manufacturers so I'm not holding my breath.
Not sure if you are aware, but you can get 8x10 prints from a dye sub. For the dye sub market, their prices have definitely gotten much cheaper relative to themselves. They are more expensive that shitting $99 ink jet, but that's the point of this thread.
That said, once you get up into the (semi-)pro photo/art printers, they're fantastic for that application. i.e. very much not an office printer. The ink per ml in the bigger cart sizes is often one or more orders of magnitude cheaper. You still need to run them enough to keep the heads nice and clean, but they also usually have decent auto-cleaning support built in to help maintain the print head so long as it's getting used periodically.
The HP cartridge holds an approx 9ml, so that gives an idea of how long those bottles should last(Also colour is 9/3 ml colours). Once these are done, I can just go ahead and get just a few more bottles which drives the price down further.
I've had no issues in printing apart from the first time I had done it. I obviously would recommend getting one of those brother Ink tank ones, but there's no need to trash an HP if you can figure to do this and keep a backup cheap maintenance printer.
Btw, I still use the stock cartridges that came with the printer, saving on a ton of cash and pain of hunting for cartridges.
P.S: I've tried this on 2 other models too with no issues
My brother MFC has lasted over 10 years now - no repairs needed. It's so old it only allows WEP wifi connection and my kid loves the beeping noises the fax button makes.
The thing is pretty cheaply built so it's janky as all get-out, but ink included, I haven't touched the expense of the cheapest laser printers— maybe half. I'll upgrade when its limitations outweigh the benefits.
(watch out— it won't work on every model. It looks like some cartridge companies sell refillables for models they know won't work without official cartridges, so do some reading!)
In SF you can print at the library which I've done once.
The ink is very inexpensive, you can purchase individual ink bottles (about $3 per bottle, and on average will last about 1000-2000 pages) and not the whole set, and the printers actually were built quite tough.
Sure, they're more expensive than the cartridge-based ones (4-5x the price), but one gains economy of operation + more well-built devices.
Now, it is true that inkjets are fussy and you need to keep printing with them to keep them operational, but I managed to clean out a very dry nozzle twice with nothing more than a pack of lint-free paper, some specialized cleaning fluids, a pack of syringes, and a thin rubber tube, simply using guides found on the Internet. And I haven't had any mechanical failures yet that weren't caused by the paper feed roller being worn out (which is expected) despite both printers being used daily for years.
Maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe Epson did really good with these two models in particular, I don't know.
I print infrequently, but need to have color prints available at any time for family, so I got a color laser printer something like 15 years ago. It has wireless so it's on our wifi and I've never had any issues with it, nor have I even run out of the original toner.
It was definitely worth it, I never want an inkjet again.
For another thing, being able to print proofs in your own office is important. Having to run to the drug store to check color output is an awful pain.
Lastly, professional photo printers are often larger than what a drug store has, or at least higher quality at that large size.
Give us another couple thousand years or so.
People have legitimate reasons to want their own high quality color printers, even if that is its own pain, too.
I think the disconnect here may be that most people rarely print glossy, so stopping by a store isn't a big deal for the vast majority.
If you're really printing glossy on short order demand then of course owning the machine might make sense.
I’ve done extensive price comparisons based the cost of paper and ink. For different brands and models of printer, I’ve done comparisons of the number of pictures you have to print to break even, compared to the cost of taking it to a shop and having them print it for you. I included discount online printers as well.
These comparisons include the cost of paying for all consumables—usually ink, but some printer models have additional consumables which you have to include. These comparisons also factor in the difference between the included inks and the ink refills (some printers ship with ink cartridges that are less full than the refills).
It is not hard to come out ahead, doing your own prints. When I was doing this comparison, it was only economical to go to the store if you were sporadically printing the smallest picture sizes. For a medium picture size like 8"x10", you could be using high-quality paper and inks at home and still spend less money than bargain online print services.
As a rough estimate, printing yourself with high-quality inks and papers can come out to around $0.02 per square inch, or $1.60 for an 8"x10" photo. Right now, an 8x10 is $3.56 on Shutterfly, or $2.99 on Snapfish. That’s a pretty stark difference.
So you save about $1.40 per photo, and you can use this to calculate how long it takes to amortize the cost of the printer hardware. For a $250 printer, like a reasonable low-end Epson or Canon photo printer, that’s just 180 prints.
YMMV. I expect most people don’t print photos at all these days, and only put photos on their phone. I personally don’t see the point in printing out 3.5"x5" photos if I own a tablet or phone with a screen that large. So, my expectation is that people who print photos are making albums of family photos, or perhaps they’re amateur photographers or digital artists. Someone with a passing interest in photography or making photo albums, who prints, can easily blow through 180 prints to break even on a printer purchase. If you just have a few picture frames around the house you want to fill, obviously just go to a shop.
When I purchased my printer, I was comparing against more expensive local photo labs, rather than the cheapest online services. I was also comparing 11"x14" prints, which typically cost around $10 each, versus $3 at home. The purchase of a $700 printer is amortized after only 100 such prints, in this scenario.
I print photos all the time. My mom doesn't want to look at a computer just to see a photo. I don't want to give my photos to a third party.
I mean, you can see the photos, and they’re clear enough, it's just nowhere near the quality that you can get for the same price.
You might get refill for 100 photos for like $40, maybe a bit less. Then you pay for the paper. Limited size options. Looks great, though. Drugstore prices are around $0.25 and local labs are around $0.40, which are more economical options.
I’ve only ever used dye sub for photos that needed immediate turnaround.
How often do you print photos that you can't?
It's somebody else who owns much hiqher quality printers that you would buy, and who charges everybody for a markup (so it gets spread).
It's usually cheaper to print in such a service than to buy printer+ink+paper and print - and with better results.
This is just completely untrue. What kind of machines do you think they have back there?
Photo labs typically have two types of machines: something like a Noritsu which prints onto standard RA-4 paper with lasers, and ordinary inkjet printers, like the ones from Epson or Canon (like what I’ve purchased for myself—I’ve occasionally seen the same exact model behind the counter at photo labs—the same printer I have at home).
The advantage of the Noritsu style machines is that you can churn out hundreds of 4"x6" photos per hour. It’s not higher-quality than inkjet… actually, inkjet prints are better, and you can do that at home. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense—the Noritsu is constrained by RA-4 chemistry, but the Epson / Canon ink can be anything that you can squirt out an inkjet head.
You can calculate the break even point for inkjet printers. If you’re printing, say, 8x10s, then break-even is somewhere around 200 prints, over the lifetime of the printer, compared to using the cheapest discount services online. This is if you decide to get a photo inkjet printer (around $300), account for the cost of ink ($0.01 per square inch) and high-quality paper (also around $0.01 per square inch) and compare it against online services (around $3 for the cheapest 8x10s).
If you aren’t printing many photos or are sticking to the super-cheap 4"x6" size, go ahead and take your photos to the lab. But the photo lab ain’t magic—it’s mostly just equipment that you could reasonably buy for your home.
They're still useful for cheap printed confections. You can use them with edible ink and paper. It's quite nice to print photos on cakes and stuff.
I had a laser printer before at home before, and it's slow to warm up, tonner is 10x as expensive as refilled ink head and I kinda fear the tonner particles getting into the air and I breathing them. Page output is similar for much higher price.
Quality is better, but for home use I'd only consider laser printer if I was still making PCBs at home.
I purchased a large format printer in 2007 to print tabloid size photos. And then I purchased another in 2015 with a scanner. I believe the large format one still worked, but it was large (obviously) and I had less need for it or space for it with kids around.
The current one is almost 7 years old. I keep looking at laser printers, but until this one actually dies, there is no point to replace it and I would lose the option to print photos.
Since I've seen a few negative experiences in this topic, as a contrasting anecdote I've had the one inkjet (Epson) for the past 15 years which has worked fine all through and been useful for printing images and also for the time I used the feature printing on discs.
If you haven't tried replacing toner without replacing cartridge (the only way to achieve this level of cost efficiency), there may be some intermediate steps that are good to know about:
Despite costing more than traditional inkjet printers, I find that build quality is not that great (cheap creaking plastic, scanner bed occasionally detatching from its hinge).
Another issue I have with it is that ink level reporting is inaccurate; indeed, the manual itself recommends to visually inspect the tanks, which are semi-transparent and can be observed without opening the printer. However, I found that it's impossible to do that because dried ink covering the inner surface of the tank makes it impossible to distinguish the actual ink level line. Because of that, I have to remember to look inside the tanks to check if a refill is needed from time to time.
That said, ink lasts ages and refilling is cheap compared to cartridges, so overall I'm happier with it than with any other traditional inkjet printer.
If you don't need color printing, laser is the way.
The printer itself is quite well-built, never clogged even if I don't use it for weeks. (I do cover it with a table cloth if not in use, though)
In short, I'm quite satisfied and will definitely recommend Brother printers to others.
I’d love a master jet but it’s just not in any way affordable / practical.
Meanwhile, I ended up with an HP OfficeJet Pro 8620 that was recommended years ago by The Wirecutter and I use HP's ink subscription service. It's never failed on me. It never jams. No fuser or toner to worry about. Ink just magically shows up at my house when I need it. The old cartridges go back to HP for recycling. It is the most reliable printer I have ever owned, and I've owned dozens of printers since the early 1980s of almost every technology. I love it. It is one of the few devices in my home that I can say it Just Works. I will be sad if it ever dies and I can't fix it.
Edit: I purchased the HP for $150 in May 2016 on closeout from Office Depot. I've been on the $5/mo or $10/mo plan since then depending upon family needs, so let's say I've spent another $500 since then on ink costs, so I'm at ~ $650 since May 2016. I've printed 16,083 pages, so my lifetime per-page cost is ~ $0.04.
Maybe my mistake was going with a cheap color laser. But I've been thrilled with this particular HP and the convenience of their ink subscription program. Meanwhile, Brother's customer service on the laser printers which failed under warranty was terrible. It was the Brother HL-3170CDW. This isn't my review, but it matched my experience, except I mistakenly bought a second printer so I could re-use supplies I already had for the model:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R32TEW142QU2G6/re...
Edit: reworded for tone. Thank you for the feedback below.
I’ve had 2 b&w laser printers my entire life, both Brother (after getting annoyed with Epson inkjet printers that were “affordable” in high school). The first got me through engineering school printing maybe 300+ pages a year, so like 2000 pages. Did not replace the toner once and don’t recall any meaningful problems. That printer stayed with my mom and works to this day for her odds and ends (maybe has had one toner replacement). The second is a printer I bought after I moved to California when I ended up needing a printer (went without for a while). It has also lasted a very long time without issues although maybe the toner hasn’t lasted quite as long (but I’ve done things like print out game manuals). It sucks that Google cloud print went away but that’s not Brother’s fault. The wifi connectivity is serviceable although a PITA to set up after a move. Other than that, works flawlessly. No drivers, no maintenance, nothing. Just print, wait ~10s and the printer starts printing at a quick pace.
My point is we all have our stories about the printers that work or don’t for us. Objectively though laser printers have lower maintenance on all fronts and used to have a higher upfront cost (although these days, they seem competitive). I’m not sure why you got a couple of lemons. I don’t claim the entire Brother product line is gems either. But I do my research and look for a no-frills standalone H&M’s laser printer that seems particularly beloved by the community. Some times you might need to look for it second hand if it’s not being sold right now or look for it’s spiritual successor. Hasn’t failed me yet but I also don’t buy and use enough printers at volume to have a complete comparative picture.
HP's service bills by page count, not by ink usage. So as you increase print volume, the unit economics get worse. I use it for photo print applications that don't require high quality or a print size greater than US letter. For that, which maximizes the ink-to-paper ratio, it works out splendidly.
(I suspect it works out as well for HP as for me, because the program also requires spent cartridges be returned in prepaid packaging. This allows them, and their expensively precision-manufactured print heads, to be refilled and reused.)
I did the math and showed my work. $0.04/page over the last 5 years.
I 5 years that I want to a laser printer I spent 100$ for the printer itself, and 20$ for 2 toner from Amazon, and I'm on the second one and it's still half full.
After having 5 broken printers in the garage I said enough, that is a useless waste, and invested some money in a mid range laser printer (only b/w, but I don't need to print in color anyway) that doesn't give me any problem, and with a toner that costs 10$ on Amazon (not original, but who cares?) I print 2000 pages. That means that in 5 years that I own it I only changed it 2 times.
I really don't see a reason for inkjet printers to exist, I hope they will disappear from the market.