Fed a diet of the necessary consumables-- toners/drums, fusers, rollers, separation pads, etc-- a 1990s LaserJet will outlive us all. For me, "peak LaserJet" was probably the LaserJet 4 w/ an integral JetDirect. The 4000 that followed was pretty solid and faster but more plastic-ey than the 4.

Not surprising at all--HP in the early 1990s was still very much an engineering-focused company (both H and P were on the board until `93) that made high-quality, durable products. 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".

What happened to HP is so sad. They made fantastic products, especially their high precision stuff. Those oscilloscopes still fetch a decent price on ebay because they're so dang good.

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 got an HP Laserjet in the late 80s for a computer center I ran at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was the best piece of hardware I've ever purchased. The clincher was the care with which they packed it and the simple instructions to take it out of the box and get it running.

I knew it was going to be great before even powering up for the first time.

Agreed. I used to have a DeskJet 500 which I sadly got rid of years ago. It had much better build quality than modern inkjet printers.

> 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.

I have a 15 year old Wi-Fi Brother Laser that is still going strong. I’ve replaced toners a few times and the drum once. I’m sure it will last another 10 years. They still sell a brand new model that is almost identical.

Brother makes surprisingly solid machines for their low cost. I've got a Customer w/ a few of the small Brother machines (HL-L6200DW) on a factory floor printing hundreds of pages / day each. One of the units finally failed w/ >200,000 page count. Being a ~$250 printer and I didn't feel at all bad about them throwing it away.

Would you have the model numbers for yours and the newer model? Thanks in advance.

I can perhaps give the model number of mine — it’s a Brother HL-2270DW laser I purchased in 2014, has wired ethernet in, wifi connection, and has been in use ever since. Most of the time it was on wifi and I can confirm wifi also works without any glitches or problems.

The 5mp was a straightforward parallel printer that fully supported both PCL5 and Postscript and was affordable. I think that was the peak.

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.

I think it was a 4 that I had for ages. This was even in the days when taking something like this in to be repaired was still a thing.

Had a Samsung laser printer that didn't last long and have had a Brother for years.

Agreed on the 4, those things were indestructible. I had two in the office in IJmuiden, ended up donating one when our main HQ moved to Canada. Both the donated one and the one that I still have are still running today. Toner cartridges are still available, both the originals (a bit pricey) and lots of aftermarket options for about half the price of the branded one.

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.

I have a 4L but the paper feed has weird jam issues over time.

Check the alignment of the paper feed sprockets, likely there is some remnant of an old sheet of paper in there or a bunch of lint. You do need to maintain such a device over the longer period, it's not exactly magic!

Yep. HP, Agilent, then Keysight, which is the only good part left of the original HP.

I own a HP 4050N that I paid 5 euros at a bank bankrupcy in 2008.

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..

A fun thought, but my HP LaserJet 4050N from ~1998 crapped out after ~16 years.

Ah, just out of warranty... too bad, really! But do not despair, you could probably fix it if you set your mind to it, or make one working one out of two broken ones, assuming you can find another broken one.

This was years ago. I went without for a while but recently decided my demand for color printing and scanning in my home exceeded my supply of cash needed to get a crappy injket. Even used color laserjets are hard to come by for mortal prices.

Keep an eye on bankruptcy auctions, those tend to have lots of good hardware which gets sold at very low prices. The more obscure the auction house the bigger the chance that you will score cheaply.

How cheap are you insisting on? Single function networked color laser printers are in the mid $200’s, new.

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.

Cheap laser printers, like cheap inkjets, use the cheap razor/expensive blades model, too (and leverage the popular understanding of the semi-knowledgeable that that is an inkjet but not laser issue to get away with it.)

watch craigslist and such. I got a brother 4040C N for $20 with full toner.

HP LaserJet print quality these days is worse than their laser printers back in the early 2000s. It’s quite sad. The products are flimsy and under engineered. The prints aren’t as sharp and the inks are as expensive (sometimes even more than) as before. They rev versions of printers and make them incompatible with previous cartridges that technically fit, but are no longer in the supported model list. Scammy as hell.

True. Last time I had an experience with an HP Color LaserJet was in 2009. It has expensive consumables, totally fragile, and often causes problems.

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.

Funny enough I had bought my fair share of inkjets and had been disappointed for the obvious reasons stated here. However one day somewhere around 2005 I found an HP LaserJet III on garbage day near my house and took it home. To my surprise it worked fine and even had toner. I was STILL using it without a toner change 10 years later when I moved cities, and gave it to someone. I could leave it off for a year and print 50 pages. Never a problem. Pretty good for free.

I ran an LJ-III for a fair few years while I still have an inkjet for colour bits. Got it free when a local company was upgrading and going to bin it. Despite the heavy service it had done in the previous environment it still worked like a charm. It was eventually getting close to needing a new drum and so forth which might have been relatively expensive, but at the point I bought an inexpensive colour laser, gave the LJ-III away and took a lump hammer to the inkjet.

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.

Nice! I like how you describe them as tanks of old. Very apt description. :)

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.

I bought an HP color LaserJet in college because my inkjet printers needed constant head cleaning and took forever.

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.

Isn't one of the big issues with old laser printers that they consume obscene amounts of electricity (>100W) when in stand-by?

I've never measured but probably. I think that is more a problem for businesses though. For home use though, I just shut it off when not using it.

If you really want I suppose you could put it on a ZWave or Wifi switch so you could turn it on remotely.

That’s exactly what we’ve done. Threw a HomeKit controlled plug behind it, added automations for it to be on when high probability of being used and off otherwise. Beyond that, it’s only a, “Hey Siri, turn on the printer” to start printing.

Funny enough, I never owned an inkjet. My parents bought a HP LaserJet 5 when I was 13. That thing was a tank. It lasted a good 15 years before it finally broke. I think in that time, we only changed the cartridge less than 10 times.

10? I changed it 2 times in 16 years.

> I agree, inkjets should’ve died a long time ago.

Aren’t inkjets better for photos?

www.ldproducts.com/blog/pros-cons-of-inkjet-and-laser-printers/amp/

Sure, but as I said above, unless you're printing a lot of photos, you're better of sticking to photo printer services (online or in-store) for printing photos.

Most people don't print enough photos to justify the pain of owning an inkjet printer.

Still on my first b/w laser printer from 15 years ago. Got it setup with CUPS to enable air print hosted from my Linux home server

This. Bought an HP LaserJet in 1998. Only just replaced it this year with a newer one for more features and higher res.

Thought admittedly if I replaced or repaired the power module, it probably would’ve went another 20 years at least.