Highlighting this. My local library lets you print 100 pages per month for free (color printing counts for three pages), which is more than enough for my needs these days.
Because of this laser printers are actually profitable to sell. So they don't have to loss leader their income from you.
So a big big +1 for Brother laser printers !
Anyone who hasn't had the pleasure yet, there is a reason this gets brought up without fail when talking about printers. I have no idea if it's particular to laser printers, Brother laser printers or both, because that was the last printer I bought so far, I have no other experience other than the horrors of ink printers.
They work great when they work, but you can never update your firmware.
I'm also reasonably happy on quality, results, speed. Annoying is just that this model (MC532) is too rare to be in common printer libraries (notably for Linux), so for each setup I have to first visit the manufacturer site and download the drivers, and even then it's not smooth. Nonetheless got this to work for win 11, Manjaro, Ubuntu and chromebooks.
- In the UK, Royal mail will now print the label for you, when you order a collection. DPD claims to do so when you drop off but the shops often turn out not to have a printer
- Libraries print more cheaply than shops, neither are suitable for printing where confidentiality is required (your doc is likely to hang round on some random insecure PC)
- They don't advertise it, but some print-to-mail companies (eg CFH docmail) will do print runs down to a single copy. This is considerably cheaper than your local shop, for more than a couple of sheets at least, but has a latency of 5 days. It's suitable for confidential prints (for most plausible threat models), due to their scale. Also, if you intended to mail the doc anyway, you can send it direct from them.