Throughout my life i have set up a multitude of different printers. None of them have been a pleasant experience. Why is this, and is there a printer that is actually good?
Order of priorities:
- Free/open software and hardware
- Available ink/toner and spares
- No connectivity “dumb as a rock”
Print quality really doesent matter unless it is really bad. Of course, im willing to make sacrifices on all of these points, but you get the gist.
Any suggestions for models that comes even close to any of these requirements?
The closest thing you’re likely to get is a black and white Brother laser.
It’s as open as a printer is likely to ever be in terms of driver support, the availability of parts is reasonable, and you plug the thing in via USB and then forget it exists until you need to print something.
I have a 2300D I’ve had for most of a decade now and the only thing I’ve had to do is put paper in it.
That’s a good unit! The fuser assembly in that one is bulletproof. I won’t recommend or buy anything except for Brother laser printers.
Got the same printer, it’s also great if you don’t print a lot. I’m still on the same third party toner from 7+ years ago. Never again will I buy an inkjets printer.
The whole reason I bought a laser printer. I was sick of paying $20 every time I printed something once a month or so. 100% worth it.
2350dw, use the wifi, just works on all platforms including bsd.
I swear by Brother printers. They work well with open source software. Older ones are dumb as a rock and it’s easy to find toner for them. They’re also workhorses.
Did we ever find out what Rage Against the Machine was raging against? I think it was a printer.
This joke was stolen.
Never went wrong with a Brother laser printer.
I gave up years ago. The best printer is pay by the page at your local office or FedEx ofc. Unless your printing and scanning constantly, every printer ends up being more expensive or frustrating.
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I’ve had a great experience with my Okidata MC362w. It’s a color Laser jet multifunction printer. I’ve had it for about a decade. I get non OEM toner from a reputable source at great prices.
People who run printer companies should be incarcerated and forced to hand copy the source code of the linux kernel with a very small pencil.
Several years ago, I decided to finally buy an all-in-one so I could print my favorite photos and do some scanning. I did what I thought to be pretty adequate research to find a model where the ink wasn’t too expensive. It was Epson x-something.
Printed a few pictures but then, foolishly allowed to update software.
After that, it doesn’t scan (scan!!) if one of the inks is low. When I bought it I thought, if nothing else I will have a scanner. Wrong!
It turned out to be impossible to obtain the epson ink cartridges. No retail location near me sold them. Not on amazon. They sold it on the epson website. I ordered some. When the delivery came I was at work. So what this shipping company does is leaves a note saying “you can pick up your parcel at our facility” with an address that was miles away from my house in an industrial park hardly served by public transit. They were only open during business hours so I would have had to book a day off work and the google maps estimate was >3 hours round trip. I don’t even think I ever got a refund for the package which sat at the courier for 2 weeks and got returned to epson.
At the time I bought the printer, it was possible to use 3rd party ink. However their “security update” robustly protected against this. I had intended to buy the epson ink but I was never able to. So I tried 3rd party. It didn’t work, the printer wouldn’t use it because it could tell it was not epson brand.
There was no way to do a factory reset on the device, which IMHO is crazy for all kinds of reasons. The ink vendors had stuff up about how you could use some closed-source hack tool to force it to down grade. It primarily ran on windows which I don’t have. Also it seemed to me that the application could be doing literally anything to the printer, it was mysterious. I tried some things I read about how to force it to return to original hardware but it never worked.
I spent sooo much time researching, troubleshooting, reading on forums, shopping etc. And some money, I think about $100-150. What I got for it was a half dozen prints, mostly testing out how the printer worked. 2 of these were worth keeping in any respect so I have 2 photos that costed >$50 and many hours of work each. After a few years I gave up and threw it out.
I have the HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw I love it. I got it new last year. Sure its been complaining about low toner for 90% of that time but it still prints and they look great. I don’t have hp software installed, I have the wifi turned off and just use the ethernet hookup. airprint from my phone works great also. Its never once refused to print because one of the toner colors are empty. Sure it complains but it still prints. I can’t say the same for any inkjet I have ever owned.
Never buy consumer grade printers. If the ink is more expensive than the printer you are going to get hosed in the long run.
I had a brother laser before but it pulled so much current at warm up that it caused a brown out that tripped all the ups’s in the house.
Also don’t buy direct from HP that was a shit show, it never showed up and took an act of god to cancel the order and get my money back. I went with amazon after that, at least it there was an issue I could easily return it to amazon.
old dell printer
I like my canon with the megatank. No more cartridges. You can buy cheap 3rd party inks and refill when needed. It’s not open source but the drivers aren’t invasive. It has wifi but I didn’t set it up and just use usb.
Did we ever find out what Rage Against the Machine was raging against? I think it was a printer.
This joke was stolen.
Point 1 doesn’t exist.
epson dot matrix… used to be used to print carbons for medical billing all over the place… i wonder if those are still a viable solution… they tick all your boxes as the drivers were incredibly simple/generic.
I wish there was a 2D printing community like for 3D printing where you could build your own printer and run it off a Raspberry pi.
