Best printer 2024 for printing printers who love to print in 2024
May 5, 2024 11:45 AM   Subscribe

It’s weird because the correct answer to the query “what is the best printer” has not changed, but an entire ecosystem of content farms seems motivated to constantly update articles about printers in response to the incentive structure created by that robot’s obvious preferences. Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting! Anyway, here’s the best printer for 2024: a Brother laser printer. You can just pick any one you like; I have one with a sheet feeder and one without a sheet feeder. Both of them have reliably printed return labels and random forms and pictures for my kid to color for years now, and I have never purchased replacement toner for either one. Neither has fallen off the WiFi or insisted I sign up for an ink-related hostage situation or required me to consider the ongoing schemes of HP executives who seem determined to make people hate a legendary brand with straightforward cash grabs and weird DRM ideas.
Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers / After a full year of not thinking about printers, the best printer is still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale. [Previously]
posted by Rhaomi (67 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've got three of 'em. Bog standard brother laser printers with duplex.
You can get a special USB cable on Amazon with that ridiculous printer cube on one end and a combination of whatever USB connectors you need for your phone/tablet/laptop.
I grab one whenever they're on sale for $70.

We will be printing this way until some Gen alpha genius reinvents the printer and the revolution will press forward.
I give it twenty years.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 11:58 AM on May 5


Still the best but not immune from enshittification; Brother pushed out a firmware update sometime in the last couple years to disable the secret printer menu to override the page count that controls the "toner low" and "toner empty" errors. Fortunately most of their toners rely on a physical page count wheel that can be trivially reset by anyone with a screwdriver and five minutes of free time, but still... jerk move, Brother, jerk move.
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 11:59 AM on May 5 [8 favorites]


Hmmm, points for being straightforward - a laser printer is the way to go - but is the second half of this article just regurgitating what googles AI has to say about a particular brand of printers?

The problem of AI spam is a big difficultly for me when doing some maintenance on my house plants. Every article wants to give me a history lesson and brief overview of… whatever. It’s made the internet useless for plant related searches so I’m sure it’s even worse for this stuff.
posted by The River Ivel at 12:00 PM on May 5


I always get asked by coworkers what brand of laptop to get and I hem and haw about most consumer brand laptops being interchangeable junk and throw out a few names of companies that suck a little less.

I get asked which printer to get and I point to the Brother printers around the office. It isn't even a question. That HP can even still sell printers while Brother exists is a crime.
posted by charred husk at 12:01 PM on May 5 [10 favorites]


Unless you can get an HP LaserJet 4+. I killed a man by throwing one out a seventh story window and then used it to print out his death certificate.
posted by charred husk at 12:03 PM on May 5 [68 favorites]


And what's sad is I just went along with the Brother thing before realizing this post was actually about AI and the unhealthy feedback loops it creates on the modern internet. I do think Brothers are the best, though.

Whenever I try to explain the dangers of AI and feedback loops I like to use the website edhrec.com as an example, even if it isn't actually AI. EDHrec scrapes online Magic: The Gathering commander decks on various deckbuilding sites like Moxfield and Archideckt. It then lists all the most commonly used cards for each commander.

Now if you really know how to use the advanced sorting functions this can be useful. However there has been the effect where people go the EDHrec, choose a commander, build a deck using the cards listed there which then reinforces the cards that are already being recommended.
posted by charred husk at 12:13 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]


is the second half of this article just regurgitating what googles AI has to say about a particular brand of printers?

Yes but Nilay (who runs The Verge) says he is about to do this immediately beforehand:

I am including a box with buttons to buy a Brother laser printer; the buttons kick us back small affiliate fees if you press them and buy a printer. Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out. [emphasis added]
posted by good in a vacuum at 12:15 PM on May 5 [19 favorites]


The only reason I don't have that Brother printer is that I have two of those Samsung printers, one twenty years old and one fourteen years old. The twenty-year-old one had a heavy Victorian ceiling collapse on it and barely noticed. They take the same toner cartridge and continue to just work.
posted by Hogshead at 12:39 PM on May 5 [5 favorites]


Best printer is whatever printer the local library lets me print on for $0.10/page, which given my printing needs costs me $1/year.
posted by joeyh at 12:41 PM on May 5 [6 favorites]


I always liked the IBM 3800 best. 216 pages per minute, but a little beyond my budget.

Does anyone know if Brother makes their own print engines?
posted by MtDewd at 1:01 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]


This is sad.
posted by betweenthebars at 1:19 PM on May 5


The only reason I don't have that Brother printer is that I have two of those Samsung printers, one twenty years old and one fourteen years old..

Yep, I have one that’s old enough to drink. I replaced a roller, and I think it’s on its fourth toner cartridge.
posted by dirigibleman at 1:28 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]


Laser printers can last for decades. We're still using one that someone gave us when their startup shut down fifteen years ago. The major driver for new laser printer sales is "forgetting" to update the drivers for the latest version of Windows/MacOS.
posted by phooky at 1:30 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]


The amazing thing about this advice is that it hasn’t changed in the 15 years since a colleague told me emphatically that a Brother laser printer was the only valid option for home printing. The idea that HP and Epson are still able to sell ink jet options that print 80 pages and then demand refill ransoms is crazy.
posted by rh at 1:34 PM on May 5 [5 favorites]


I just take a USB key to FedEx Office fdba Kinko’s . . . 10c/page too
posted by torokunai at 1:38 PM on May 5


Always impressed by Brother's down-to-earthness, but I think Dell was once expriencing some brief Brother-like madness let the 3100CN escape into the wild by accident. Because if you bought one, then you basically never needed to buy a laser printer again. I've been running mine for 20 years. People like to use the word "tank" to describe robust printers, but after multiple coast-to-coast moves (it weighs around 32 Kg/70lb), I am particularly sensitive to its tank-like bulk, have dropped it a few times, yet it still runs. No fancy web server interface -- just simply accepts PCL or postscript sent down the wire to a raw TCP/IP address (9100) and then renders it to a page. Arrived with an unpopulated, simple PC133 SODIMM slot to expand the memory (ludicrously expensive at the time, then later ridiculously cheap). Has four individual CMYK toner cartridges, no sensor chips to complain if you just refill them. Linux is fine with CUPS, of course, and even though Dell claims the printer is incompatible with Windows after 7, some other guerilla faction within Dell also released the "Open Printer" driver that, I'm reliably informed, lets the 3100CN work with whatever is the latest Windows version.
posted by meehawl at 1:49 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]


Brother did recently make a slight update to the styling of the classic black cube, which threw me off for a good 20 seconds helping an artist friend install one (turn in on;-)

But omg we really need to transition back to gopher or something to fake out the AI entrepreneurs.
posted by sammyo at 1:51 PM on May 5 [4 favorites]


I just take a USB key to FedEx Office fdba Kinko’s . . . 10c/page too

I don't currently print often enough to need a printer in my house, so this is also my solution. Even my little town of 10K people has a copy shop that is also where you drop off packages for UPS or whatever, just a mom-and-pop place, but they can do all kinds of fancy stuff with their big fancy machines.

Fedex Office also has the advantage of being able to print on all kinds of things. I keep meaning to order some yard signs with messages on them like "Vote For People Who Want To Live In A Democracy" or whatever on them.

Anyway I have lived parts of my life when owning a printer was paramount. Right now, for me personally, it is not.
posted by hippybear at 1:51 PM on May 5


We got our current Brother off the curb in front of my doctor's office, under the rain. I had to clean the fuser with alcohol because the printer had worked a long life, and replace the drum because it's a consumable. It had lived a long working life. Fortunately, the clinic was also throwing away an assortment of replacement drums and toner cartridges.

My Brother printer is one of three that were on the curb that day. My wife was very kind and patient at being asked to get in the car and drive to me because I needed to collect "trash from the street", and loves that we got to replace our 10+ year old HL-L2305W for a faster, more capacious ex-office pro-level Brother.

The other two curb printers also got cleaned up and loaded up with the curb consumables. They now live very productive lives at a friend's house (the find was before COVID, and the lockdowns gave them an urgent incentive to let a stray printer into the house) and at the Sticky Institute, a Melbourne beacon of joy who received 80.000+ prints to teach kids how to produce fanzines with.

We gave our HL-L2305W to our neighbours, together with the spare 3rd party toner we had bought too much of. Unless the Earth swallows our neighbourhood, their descendants will be able to keep printing on that thing.
posted by kandinski at 2:08 PM on May 5 [6 favorites]


This reminded me of how I used to work for a startup that, thanks to being cheap and acquiring the debris of other failed enterprises, ended up with three laser printers, all which used Postscript(TM) clones, and all of which were slightly buggy. The end result was that most documents would print on any printer, but some documents would trigger a bug in one of the postscript clones and couldn't be printed on that printer. A few documents could only be printed on one printer. One of these beasts was a Sun SPARCprinter, which ran a postscript clone called NeWSprint, but I can't remember the others.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 2:33 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]


Nb check the Brother site for refurbs. There are often deals on lightly used printers that come with a spare high capacity toner for good price. I got one that I plugged in and told it the wifi password and everything prints to it perfectly, even the phones.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:36 PM on May 5


This reminds me of the story of the long-ago tire company whose tires were too good; people just bought one set for life. And so they went out of business.
posted by gottabefunky at 2:46 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]


Well, I mean, that's basically what's happened with Instant Pot. Their product was designed well, everyone who wanted one bought one, and they have no market left. They're trying other things to survive as a company, but if you build a solid product that can last a lifetime, it becomes difficult in the marketplace.
posted by hippybear at 2:52 PM on May 5


Well, I mean, that's basically what's happened with Instant Pot.

Bullshit. It was private equity.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 3:07 PM on May 5 [13 favorites]


And what's sad is I just went along with the Brother thing before realizing this post was actually about AI and the unhealthy feedback loops it creates on the modern internet.

No biggie. It appears nearly everyone here is going down the same path.

Thanks Rhaomi for the post, and the previously.
posted by intermod at 3:07 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]


Their product was designed well, everyone who wanted one bought one, and they have no market left.

You're missing a private equity step in there...
posted by advil at 3:08 PM on May 5 [5 favorites]


The last time we did this I just happened to be in the market for a printer. So I bought a Brother laser printer. It's ... fine.
posted by chavenet at 3:24 PM on May 5


So I bought a Brother laser printer. It's ... fine.

That means it's perfect. It's exactly what you want. Other printers are horror shows in so many ways, so having printer that you don't really consider its existence and it's fine... that's perfect.
posted by hippybear at 3:27 PM on May 5 [7 favorites]


Not to be That Guy but, well... I bought an HP Laserjet Pro 200 color printer 10 years ago, and while I'm not an absolute printin' maniac, it continues to serve me perfectly well. Zero problems with print quality, jams, or WiFi connection. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:35 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]


Hey, if your HP Printer was made before the days when they were scanning cartridges and phoning in to the mothership and preventing you from printing unless you bought a subscription... then you're golden. I had HP inkjet printers 20 years ago that were complete workhorses up until they stopped making ink carts for them and they were non-fillable otherwise.
posted by hippybear at 3:40 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]


Actually, not to abuse the edit window, but there was a problem with those old HPs in that the yellow ink would somehow either dry up or run out before all the others,, and the carts were bought in packs not individually. So I'd end up buying packs of carts just for the yellow, and had a surplus of the other colors. Of course, it won't run without the yellow so...

This was probably an early version of the enshittification of HP. I think they were using yellow ink to print watermarks on pages that weren't visible unless you knew to look for them, and so that's why the yellow would be used up more quickly.
posted by hippybear at 3:43 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]


Do we even need search engines anymore? Seems all the search providers want to synthesize information with an AI to keep eyes on their own AI-generated content, rather than sending eyeballs to some third-party AI-generated content that they can't monetize as efficiently.

Given the power of modern PC's, I could achieve the same thing by just running my own AI and having It make shit up, just like they do, and I would only be slightly less accurate and twice as amused

Also, considerably less like to lead to a Skynet.

Oh, and Brother all the way. I have a Brother inket that's about 5 or 6 years old and it just needs some ink and it will be just about as good as the day I bought it.

Almost any printer brand is better than HP.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 4:54 PM on May 5


Setting search results to only search from 2000-2022 excludes AI content. Hopefully the internet giants will keep letting us do this, unlike boolean operators.
posted by ockmockbock at 5:58 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]


My Brother laser printer has some sparkly purple tape on its front, with golden letters written upon the tape declaring it to be

FRATER
PRINTY
♥︎♥︎♥︎


Frater Printy just quietly prints stuff when we need to print stuff and it's a delight. The only problem I've ever had is when there's a cat snoozing on top of him blocking the paper's path out.
posted by egypturnash at 6:03 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]


Our cat loves our Brother printer. Every time he hears it turn on he runs over and jumps up to watch it print.
posted by fimbulvetr at 6:34 PM on May 5 [7 favorites]


I am in absolute shock that HP is still able to sell a single printer in 2024. How is anyone, anywhere, still justifying buying a new HP?

But what really horrifies me is how getting a printer set up is still a nightmare. We've been printing since before we had integrated circuits, how the hell have we not gotten this right yet? This should be the simplest thing to ever be done on a computer, the most difficult part should be just pulling it out of the box.

Instead we have bullshit drivers, wifi connectivity that's somewhere between impossible and a battle to get set up. I worked for an MSP just two years ago and they had an ironclad rule: we did not support wifi printing. Because it was so horrible and such a waste of tech time.

I do not understand how we can have smartphones and printers as shitty as current printers at the same time.
posted by sotonohito at 6:45 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]


I gambled on an $8.99 Brother laser printer at Salvation Army a few months ago and won. It works, the toner cartridge has some life left in it, and I can even print from my phone!
posted by needs more cowbell at 7:00 PM on May 5 [7 favorites]


I have a ~20 year old HP Laserjet 8150N, I picked it up for $50 because I need to print A3 (big, for Americans). My spine nearly fell out my bum getting it up the stairs but it just sits on the bench and works. I think it says it's got 10,000 pages left on the toner cartridge, which will see out what I need it for.

If that's your memory of HP I can understand going and buying another one.
posted by deadwax at 7:02 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]


My spine nearly fell out my bum getting it up the stairs

I suspect this is a medical condition unrelated to the printer, and recommend you see a physician.
posted by hippybear at 7:04 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]


I suspect this is a medical condition unrelated to the printer, and recommend you see a physician.

It's simple physics. Your arms push your spine down via your shoulders. Your legs hold it up from the bottom. It's gotta go somewhere.
posted by deadwax at 7:13 PM on May 5 [4 favorites]


Your arms push your spine down via your shoulders. Your legs hold it up from the bottom. It's gotta go somewhere.

Most healthy humans have a large bone complex that involves the pelvis and hips, and if your spine is being pushed down through the bottom of that, that's at a minimum a calcium deficiency but maybe also a genetic issue.
posted by hippybear at 7:24 PM on May 5


My prior HP was from what might be described as the single digit era? I think it was a 4P. It had postscript back when that was important for Linux compatibility. It was extremely heavy and I liked it quite a bit. I can't remember what happened to it, but apparently the company and products aren't what they once were and I know use a Brother like everyone else. It's not ios compatible but I'm loath to replace it and that's really an extremely marginal feature for my purposes.
posted by Wood at 7:27 PM on May 5


It looks like "I don't own a printer" is the new "I don't own a TV."
posted by jonathanhughes at 7:31 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]


Most healthy humans have a large bone complex that involves the pelvis and hips

yeah but you’re biased, hippybear
posted by sixswitch at 7:49 PM on May 5 [4 favorites]


Laser printers can last for decades.

The Laserjet Series III were perfect. As close to indestructible as matters, painless and seamless. As flawless as any networked device has ever been.

I don't even know what else to say about them. HP could have spun out the Series III into its own company that only made that model, unchanged, forever. Declare victory and retreat from the field, printing is a solved problem, HP goes to make other things better. Alas.
posted by mhoye at 7:59 PM on May 5 [4 favorites]


How we vibing on colour laser printers? Is Brother still the go-to at this point? My Canon is extortionate on ink. I occasionally want to report it to the cops for attempted robbery.

Man, I miss the rock-solid printers of both HP and Apple. My roommate had an HP printer for 10+ years which crapped out on him and I will never forget his words, "You're dead to me. Dead." I have never felt more sorry for an inanimate object before that time.
posted by jadepearl at 8:40 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]


In 1999, when my startup was purchased by a big public company that had their own printers, I may have absconded with the laserjet 4000n from my former office that BigCo was going to scrap. I gave it away fairly recently because I was moving and I didn't really want to deal with that beast (which needed a new drum anyway). I have no doubt that it's got another 25 years of life left in it.

Sometimes I wish I still had it, but a modern laser printer uses a lot less power, and takes up a lot less space.
posted by toxic at 8:41 PM on May 5


Oh gawd, I've been using an HP2600n color laserjet since 2007ish. Finally had enough of reconditioned toner cartridges. They have an impossible to clean out waste bin that starts spewing toner right away. Went out and bought a Brother. The Brother requires macOS 11…but most of our computers are stuck at macOS 10.15, so had to return the Brother. Not buying new macs just to print, thanks anyway. Ordered a set of factory new HP cartridges: $300, same as almost twenty years ago, same price as the new Brother. Took apart the HP2600n and cleaned the parallax mirrors—a one hour operation. Installed the factory new cartridges. Prints just like new.
posted by jabah at 9:58 PM on May 5


I replaced an HP that stopped acknowledging cartridges were installed with a Brother laser. It just works, no annoying software required. HP can bite my shiny metal ass.
posted by tommasz at 2:33 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]


I'm sure the author of the most devastating review I've ever seen had HP in mind:

"Imagine if your printer was also your car. That's what owning a Tesla is like".
posted by DreamerFi at 3:01 AM on May 6 [8 favorites]


I used to have a decent inkjet printer but didn't use it enough so every time I needed to print, the cartridges had dried out. I gave it away and bought the cheapest wireless Brother, which is still on its original cartridge (although is telling me 'toner low', even though it's still printing just fine). I don't update the software or firmware at all, to stop Brother from sneaking in blocks on third party cartridges. I also immediately disabled the Deep Sleep function, which is stupid - why would you need to go and press a button to get it out of Deep Sleep, when the whole point of a wireless printer is that you send something to print from one room and then go and pick it up off the printer?

I recently helped a friend choose a printer, and we noticed that all the ones from Amazon or big box retailers came with an unwanted subscription to Brother cartridges. Instead we bought a slightly older (but new-in-box) model from a third party Amazon seller, which didn't have the subscription option.
posted by essexjan at 3:22 AM on May 6


I had an HP 3505 colour laserjet that I used like 15 years ago for production printing of greeting cards for artists. It was a great machine, fast, good registration, self-calibrating, rarely misfeeding even thick card stock. And I could refill the carts with third party toner and just tell it to ignore the low toner warning. Unfortunately many of the parts were made of a plastic blend that got quite brittle over time and the drum shutter actuating pawl snapped so the big service door wouldn't properly close, and the whole thing became a 70 pound chunk of garbage because some idiot took a one cent shortcut in materials. I mean, sure it might be possible to replace that 12 inch long plastic stick, but it'd be replaced with new old stock and just as brittle, and it would have taken three hours of service because that one part was like threaded through, around, and behind everything in the engine. So, it's like, fuck HP again. Great technology though. Hell of a machine. Paid for itself many times over. I just got rid of the carcasse a couple weeks ago because I finally realized I was not going to ever get around to repairing it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:22 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]


So I bought a Brother laser printer. It's ... fine.

Speaking as a person with an HP printer that constantly goes off the WiFi and then is "in an error state" for no reason and that I have to reinstall the printer in windows before printing everytime I go a week without printing something, that sounds like absolute heaven.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 5:23 AM on May 6 [3 favorites]


This is not about printers. But it is exactly about why search, and specifically Google, is awful. Bless Nilay Patel for writing the thing that ecomm editors everywhere wish they could write.
posted by heyitsgogi at 6:00 AM on May 6 [4 favorites]


I always recommend Brother lasers, mine is probably a decade old. I must say, though, that because I needed to do a bunch of color printing, i got an HP that is quite good. They don't seem to be as greedy with toner as they are with inkjet.

The only drawback is that laser printers aren't really suitable for photos, so i send those out to a lab.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:38 AM on May 6


ARE WE NOT MEN? / WE ARE PRINTERS
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:58 AM on May 6 [3 favorites]


I just take a USB key to FedEx Office fdba Kinko’s . . . 10c/page too

I have a black & white HP laserjet that's probably 10 years old -it's fine, but for color printing - CVS/Walgreens run deals all the time for color prints, including things like photobooks - often for free. I just printed a bunch of pictures the other day - I think it was 35 cents.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:34 AM on May 6


My printer of the year is the Prusa Mk 4.
posted by kaibutsu at 7:34 AM on May 6


Remember not to update the printer firmware if you (plan to) use 3rd party Brother laser toners.

If you print a lot or at least once a week, you could/should consider the "ink tank" printers as the cost per page is significantly better than laser. For the Epson Ecotank variety, €40 of (B + color) ink will give you thousands (13K) of color prints while you can buy one new genuine Brother toner for €40 which is good for 1200 prints. That's an order of magnitude difference for ink per page and the color printing makes the ink tank printers a bit more versatile.

I would say that the correct answer to "what's the best printer in 2024" might have changed for larger households and small businesses.
The Brother lasers are still an obvious choice for sporadic printing. But the reason many only print sporadic is because prints were to be avoided because of the unpleasant properties of ink jets; some of those don't apply anymore.
posted by Akeem at 7:37 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]


I love the performance of this article making fun of gaming SEO rankings. It's a modern spin on the What Times Does the Super Bowl Start? SEO games from ~ten years ago.

I thought the addition of AI-generated crap was new, but The Verge did the same in 2023 with ChatGPT. I'd also thought they'd been playing this printer review game for several years but as recently as 2020 The Verge ran a ordinary printer review article and I can't find this meta-commentary on SEO and printers before 2023.
posted by Nelson at 8:31 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]


Our cat loves our Brother printer. Every time he hears it turn on he runs over and jumps up to watch it print.

My cat Boo in 2009. He is still with us, a very old man.
posted by neuron at 9:26 AM on May 6 [6 favorites]


I once had a laser printer long ago. I got rid of it because it always gave me headaches.

It turns out I may have not been imagining this. It may have been putting out a lot of PM2.5 particles.
posted by eye of newt at 9:34 AM on May 6


deadwax: "I have a ~20 year old HP Laserjet 8150N, I picked it up for $50 because I need to print A3 (big, for Americans). My spine nearly fell out my bum getting it up the stairs but it just sits on the bench and works. I think it says it's got 10,000 pages left on the toner cartridge, which will see out what I need it for.

If that's your memory of HP I can understand going and buying another one.
"

Yep. Had a LaserJet 4M+, 90,000+ page count and still going. Firmware datecode was sometime in 1993. Replaced it a few years back with a newer (and much smaller) HP LaserJet - the old one had no power save mechanism, so the fuser was always on. It was a hulking beast but unable to be killed. It just sucked too much juice for me, the closet where it sat next to our home server was always too warm.

The newer HP was acquired apparently just before they forced everyone into accepting their shit firmware lock-in*, but on the plus side, it DOES work way better as an AirPrint device than the 4M+ did. When it eventually dies, I will pour out no ink over it's memory, I will recycle it's corpse and pick up a Brother (unless they also suck by then).

*There was a cheaper version of the same printer, but I did my research - the cheaper version required users to allow HP to manage the toner. Fuck that noise.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:01 PM on May 6


I killed a man by throwing one out a seventh story window and then used it to print out his death certificate.

A similar thing happened to me with a LaserJet II, except that it killed two. One was a person on the sidewalk below and the other was a Bactrian camel wandering the Gobi Desert, which was killed after the printer tunneled its way through the Earth.
posted by wierdo at 12:31 PM on May 6


How we vibing on colour laser printers?
Main problem with color laser printers is that you get 4 times the consumables and 4 times the points of failure. I'd say they're still more reliable than most inkjets, but they don't really come out to be cheaper in the long run unless you do a *ton* of printing, and maybe not even then. I've resigned myself to getting color printing done elsewhere if I really need that.
posted by Aleyn at 5:01 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]


I bought a Brother Compact Monochrome Laser Printer, HL-L2350DW from Amazon on January 29 for $130. It's now $192.
posted by neuron at 10:48 AM on May 7 [1 favorite]


Laserjet 4000N, checking in. Before that, I had a 4050. Are the roller kits still available? Last service it needed was to pop apart the semi-slip feed rollers and empty out a bit of the extra steel powder and stop it multiple feeding - half hour job, no specialty tools. Love it.
posted by anthill at 5:15 PM on May 7


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