1. Buy a Brother laser printer

2. Put it on your Wi-Fi

3. There is no step three

This is basically like when people say dishwashers don’t do a good job because they’ve only bought ones designed by American MBAs. HP and Epson made good products in the previous century but are now customer-milking operations and it’s better to pretend they don’t exist.

Problem is high powered industrial dishwashers can't handle decorated plates ... pardon me, I meant to say color lasers can't handle photos well. If you're primarily printing texts and diagrams on A4 copier paper, this is total non-issue. But if you're looking to print nice colors, not necessarily.

I use my home printers to print forms and documents and other things in black and white; if I had a color laser it'd be similar.

Photos are printed at walmart, it's way too cheap for the quality to even bother with anything else.

True - color laser printers aren’t great photo quality but I stopped making home prints a decade or so back because the economics were brutal and when I do want to make prints I want them to be larger which just made it worse. Outsourcing that to Costco was much cheaper and easier than fussing around with ink cartridges, clogs or smears, etc.

I bought a Brother laser printer in 2018. I print maybe 3-4 times a year from home, and the damn thing works every time.

I've done nothing to it but put paper in it. The highest praise I can give a printer is: "I don't hate this one"

Get an old brother laser printer, they are rock solid.

Better yet, setup Airprint as well. The novelty of printing from my phone never wears off. (coming from an old head).

I just crossed the decade mark with my Brother HL-2240, purchased in June 2013. I put a Raspberry Pi + CUPS on it for network printing. The resolution is a little low and I wish I had color, but I did buy the printer for literally $60 new.

I really feel like the brother laser printer recommendations should all come with model numbers as not all brother laser printers are created equal. i have a DCP-L2550DW, and i'm not sure i'd recommend it.

Interesting—out of curiosity, what is your primary complaint with the DCP-L2550DW? I have one too and use it seamlessly for printing and scanning on Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. My third party toner refills have worked great and the machine itself was rather inexpensive. Not invalidating your experience, as I may have just gotten lucky, but would be interested to know what issues it’s created for you.

the main complaint is that the feeder never pulls paper in the same orientation twice. i've tried printing on labels with various levels of not success. while the print quality is fine (no complaints there), if you are printing with pre-cut media, getting it to align is tough. i've used Avery media and then used their templates as well as measuring and making my own templates. the top rows will be with in the pre-cut, but they start to "drift" off so that by the end of the page they are off a full 1/16" meaning each row is not off by the same distance. if i select all items and then "squeeze" by pushing the bottom up 1/16" in illustrator, this seems to work. if i use that modified file on other printers, they won't print the same way.

i've also tried making cards by printing on both sides. creating a 2-page file with the mirrored offset like normal print would use, they don't line up. if i remove the mirrored offset (not a professional DTP, so whatever this called), it still doesn't line up. so i had to fiddle with it to get double sided prints to line up. on a different printer, the normal mirrored offset works as expected. i can then put the print on the guillotine and cut on the crop marks, and it all works. not with the 2550.

Only as anecdata, I am using Brother (B&W) laser printers since many years in the office and almost all worked and work just fine, but I had some bad experience with DCP-8110DN and MFC-8520DN models:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22083421

It seems like all the models sharing the same printing engine suffer from the same defect (fuser heats a bit too much and the sleeve and roller fail much earlier than expected).

That was fine for me until I had a special tax circumstance that couldn't be e-filed, hello gazillion pages! amongst the other random things I was printing at a library or fedex this pushed it over the edge

laser printers are the way

Half my family now owns the small desktop sized sub-£200 Kyocera laser printers. It was honestly revolutionary the first few times I was able to connect to their WiFi, hit add printer on my phone or laptop, press print, and it just worked with no drivers or network troubleshooting or anything.

They completely blow any consumer inkjet out of the water in ease of use, not having to install bloatware with popups telling you to buy more ink and preventing you from printing black and white when the magenta ink is "only" at 25%, printing speed, and the fact they don't outright break forever if you go 6 months without printing (where an Inkjet would often get irreparably clogged and be ruined).