If you don't need an all-in-one printer, then the Brother HL-L2350DW is great. The best thing about it is that it prints. These accolades are really the bare minimum you'd expect from a device called a "printer", but that's where we are in the world of consumer electronics.
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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I made the mistake of recommending Brother printers without identifying the exact version. The Brother printer my coworker bought took a page from HP'd bullshit. He returned it after a week.
Imo - Look for ones that don't need internet or just perform 1 extremely specific thing. Or in my case, I printing a lot of b&w docs as cheap as possible.
My recommendation would be the brother laser printer HL-L2300D from 2014. The 2350DW looks similar and is more recent from 2021 and might be okay too.
It bugs me to hear that. My mantra for years has been "Buy a Brother printer, they just work". Do you know what model of Brother had a HP style limitation, and what the limitation was? I'd like to educate myself before I recommend them again.
I don't think it's the same printer/issue but recently my brother printer that I bought in '21 decided it was out of toner and refused print without replacing the toner. I forget what setting I had to find to reset it but it works fine now, on the same toner cartridge I bought with the printer (I don't print often).
Off the top of my head it was a dcp-l2550dw, can't check it right now.
It was mildly annoying to deal with, I remember the instructions not working exactly and having to troubleshoot, I can't recall what I had to do to fix it. I can imagine somebody with less time on their hands just giving in and replacing the toner.
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I bought a brother laser printer when I started working from home full time over the pandemic. Best printer I’ve ever had. Does it’s job and asks for very little.
It's crazy how as soon as printers became reliable to function, companies purposely made them shit again.
You're certainly not wrong. I have two Okidata 320 Turbos in my basement that were manufactured some time in the late '80's that still work just fine, if I ever have occasion to fire one up (which is almost never). They don't need a single damn thing, ever, except some tractor feed paper and a ribbon. They'll probably outlive me.
I remember when printing something meant using this paper.
I had a dot matrix in the newsroom I worked in mid-90s. We had to cut the printout down and tape it to 8x11 paper to fit in the document stand in the broadcast booth ...
Nothing like being 45 seconds to air and hoping "BRRRRT BRRRRT BRRRRRRRRT" finished up real soon
Never jammed, never went offline, never ran out of Cyan ...
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I have a 2700DW and have been happy with it for years. I recommend Brother to everyone, but I'm curious what Potatos_are_not_friends has to say about their experience below.
Some Brother printers received a firmware update that locked out 3rd party toner supplies. Wasn't a nice thing to do.
I still recommend them, but less enthusiasticly then I did. It's not the sure-thing no-shit printer brand they used to be, but they do make some great printer models if you get the right one.
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I bought a Brother 2270DW laser printer over a decade ago, and it is still going strong.
We've got three of these or in our office for just that reason. I can say by way of largely meaningless observation that there was at least one design revision of these things in recent years, because the current ones have been cheapified by removing the little one line LCD display and replacing it with a couple of blinkenlights. I much prefer the older ones with the display, because the readout can at least in theory give you a clue as to what the damned thing has its knickers in a twist about this time.
Two of our units turn into print job motels on a regular basis, as in print jobs go in but they don't come out (usually with no error thrown). Unplugging the printer and plugging it back in causes it to spit out all of the print jobs that were stuck in it, which typically total in the dozens because our (l)users' only method of troubleshooting if something did not print the first time is to try to print it again seven or eight more times. The third one we have doesn't do this, but it's in a location where it is used a lot less which may be a contributing factor. I wonder if this is some kind of variable overflow issue or something.
We have a couple of their multifunction machines around, too. Whatever implementation Brother uses to link the client software on the PC and the machine itself is also hot garbage. In particular, ours constantly lose association with their PC's for the "scan from console" feature, for no readily identifiable reason, and there's evidently no way to force it to reassociate other than uninstalling and reinstalling the PC software suite which is a monumental pain in the taint to be doing on a regular basis.
The dinky Canon ImageClass I have squatting in my personal office, however, has never given me any issues.
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Thank god, this has been one of the most anti consumer things of our time and it needs to stop.
founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard were so customer trusting and had such probity that it revolutionized corporate america and empowered startups to bootstrap from nothing. if they saw what became of their reputation they would've forced a name change. thanks Carly Fiorina for destroying an amazing institution. I hope your resume refuses to scan.
They were engineers, and made stuff they liked and were proud of, and it showed. When they exited the leadership roles, the MBAs took over and it was all downhill from there.
You know, I’m starting to have a stronger dislike of MBAs than I do lawyers. Even though lawyers were the traditional wiping boys.
Lawyers get a bad rap. If you are ever falsely accused of a crime, you're going to really wish you had a lawyer.
MBAs are agents of decay and corruption.
Being falsely accused of a crime really isn't much of a problem until a lawyer is complicit in the accusation. False accusations usually end early in the investigation unless the accuser is coached on how to tailor their accusation to fit the law. Your lawyer is solving problems that only exist because of lawyers.
Let's not forget that "politician" is just a fancy term for a lawyer who hates working with clients.
MBAs are, indeed, agents of decay and corruption, but they only play on a field that was designed and built by lawyers.
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It’s amazing how so many MBAs can tank a business. I’m seeing the same thing in my organization: as the number of people who have ever worked in the field decreases relative to the MBAs, things get worse, in both cultural and functional ways.
Half the PMs in my company have MBA degrees and they're all morons.
Want to cosplay as a person with a MBA from Wharton?
Snort a bunch of coke, drive a expensive car you bought with loan money and micromanage while vaguely gesturing and quoting Wolf of Wall Street
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You still see a lot of businesses today using HP lasers from as early as 1990. Crazy that operating systems today still support some seriously old printers. It's also remarkable how good HP used to be before right around the time they merged with Compaq.
This is great news... if HP loses we might all be rewarded $1.89 for years of extortion-level ink prices! Problem solved!1!!
Back in the day we would at least get enough $ to buy a Happy Meal.
Don't worry, the lawyers who win these type of case will be able to afford lots and lots of happy meals. They typically are the only ones who ever make out in the end.
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I'm in IT, and anything HP can just fuck off.
Edit to add: Never buy any printer that comes with an ink/toner subscription service.
"Hey, can you scan this document for me?"
I'm sorry, your magenta ink is low.
"But ... I'm not printing anything? None of what I need uses ink."
MAGENTA. I REQUIRE MAGENTA.
Magenta for the magenta god.
Cyan for the cyan throne.
This is great news, but at the same time, I plan on enjoying my Brother printer for the foreseeable future.
Did they do anything about the cartridges yet? Some printers detect when cartridges have been refilled by the user and are programmed to stop working then. Even at consumer level, the prices of a cartridge is criminal compared to a bottle of inkjet ink, with enough for many dozen refills.
Cartridge: $50
10 fl oz of printer ink: $12
Some printers detect when cartridges have been refilled by the user and are programmed to stop working then.
This is absurd. I would like to hear how this benefits the consumer without attempting to talk about "quality" or something. This would be like my car not starting cause I didn't use Shell gas.
What's more upsetting is that printers are client side all the way. There is nothing about them that needs to teach or to the Internet to print pages. The printer itself handles the "letting you print." So the thing sitting on your desk, that you own, is choosing this for you.
What’s more upsetting is that printers are client side all the way. There is nothing about them that needs to teach or to the Internet to print pages. The printer itself handles the “letting you print.” So the thing sitting on your desk, that you own, is choosing this for you.
Seems like one of those things some bearded nerd would get very upset about.
Oh, I can’t wait to get a $10 check while the lawyers get $30,000,000.
They’ll charge you to print that check
Hp is a piece of shit
I need more.
This whole "buy the whole product but block features from working without paying a fee" bullshit needs to stop. No questions.
Cars need to be next.
Whats fucked up is this type of bullshit has been a damned meme for over a fucking decade and they're just now allowing a class action to go to trial. At this point lots of other printer makers have followed suit in some form or another.
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HP used to be good circa 2005-8. I used to have a HP mini and it had great build quality. dK what happened and after 2010 all of the stuff they sell is pure garbage honestly.
At this point HP isn't a printer company. They're an (overpriced) ink subscription company that makes DRM-ridden printers designed to keep you on their subscription model.
Given how many other printer companies are following suit it seems that this is unfortunately a lucrative business model.
I noped out of printers a long time ago. Staples prints whatever I need on the cheap, compared to ink cartridges.
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Relevant/important watch for everyone who's not already familiar: https://youtu.be/AHX6tHdQGiQ "Ink Cartridges Are A Scam"
He talks about basically the computer coding "bricking" the system if you try to do anything other than spend more money on their racketeering; their "razor and blade cartridges" profit model of selling the one item for cheap then price-gouging the fuck out of a required component to keep it working
The most amazing and surprising achievement they have made is to convince customers they are too be trusted. HP has been shit for decades now.
Us nerds called it back when they merged with Compaq. Great, we said, two once decent but now shitty companies can combine their stupidity into one new mega-stupid mega-corporation. They've barely done a single thing right since. It sure as shit didn't take long for us to get proven right, but somehow they're still shambling along. This just goes to show that no matter what nerds think, what's "best" for a product or industry and what actually turns out to be profitable are rarely actually the same thing.
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