I’ve replaced the mix of HPs and Canons in my house and office with Brothers. They’re like, oh, you made your own toner with crayon and coffee grounds? Ok, I can work with that.

Yeah +1 for Brother. Either they just permit third party cartridges or their protection is so minimal everyone can bypass it. Cheap toner cartridges work perfectly for me.

Only issue is that the printers themselves are really hard to get now. In particular the colour lasers. If I find them it's at a crazy price. So I bought a b/w again. Must be the supply chain thing.

PS the old one was not even broken after 10 years but I got sick of not having network printing :)

You should buy a Raspberry PI and have it act as a network print server for your printers without Ethernet. This is what I do in office environments with similar situations. It works surprisingly well.

I tried that but it was one of those "Win printers" without local processing, and there were no drivers for ARM.

Someone in Germany made some open source drivers but it didn't work properly for me. Eventually I found a networked one on sale and I gave the old one away.

I had the same experience with an old HP 1200n, which was an otherwise rock solid printer, but I couldn’t get it to play nicely with AirPrint for love or money. I tried every permutation of CUPS + strange, half-baked drivers I found somewhere. I bought a little commercial print server that listed it as compatible but printed everything in 1/2 size. It was worth the price of a new printer to have one that Just Worked with my family’s devices.

Probably easily fixed with a Raspberry Pi (probably even a Zero W or something like that) and CUPS?

Tried that but it had too quirky drivers.. Just couldn't get it going properly. It was one of those $50 printers that renders everything on the client. Brother actually did provide Linux drivers (which is amazing compared to the likes of HP, Lexmark etc) but not for ARM, only intel.

Eventually someone made open source drivers but half the time the printer wouldn't respond.

It's now in the hackerspace where they use it for making overhead sheets for PCB printing. So it's still having a purpose in life, I didn't throw it away :)

Yeah, I got a Brother laser printer about 10 years ago. Still works just fine. I think it has the original toner in it.

Mine is 20 years old, it is a HL-1250 with an cheap ethernet dongle on the parallel port. I changed the drum and toner 3 years ago, third party, 30€ for both, works perfectly.

I guess my next printer will be a Brother, if I ever need a new printer.

I have a black and white Samsung laser (SCX-3200) that just went and went. It's in the garage. USB only, generic PS and PCL emulation, $5 refill kit available where the only gotcha was you need a chip that always reads full.

I was really disappointed when HP took their printers over.

We replaced it with a color laser (Canon MF632Cdw) because my wife wanted to print sewing patterns, and I'm not near as impressed with it. No real problems, though, other than the mess that seems to be UFR II on Linux.

Brother is a great choice. My wife had a black-and-white for years, and I bought a color a few years ago, replacing an HP PageWide that had been nothing but problems. Both have been fantastic.

Brothers also reject third party toners. My dad has had multiple occasions that his Brother printer rejects third party cartridges.

i use an hp 5820 inktank printer. i just buy a squirt bottle once a year o so. never use its conected features or warranty account or wifi. just a dumb printer

Yes. I can attest to brother being nice.

Epson is also passable.

My parents got an antique Epson, must have fifteen years or more. Every time I visit, I'm so impressed that thing works totally flawlessly, compared to the PITA that is our Canon which is fuzzy all the time with the inks.