I am always reminded of this tweet from ProZD when printers come up:
i’ve got a billion dollar idea, imagine a computer printer but like, it actually fucking works, it prints every time like it’s fucking supposed to without issue, it just does that no fucking problem, companies, feel free to take this idea, this one’s on me
This type of printer exists. It’s called a Brother laser printer.
I have a brother laser printer for years, can confirm.
My friend has one that’s like ten years old, works fine too.
The software is a bit janky and all that but it works.
My monochrome Brother Laser is around 15 years old. Works great on Linux, as it should on any cups system. It’s still the same printer or was 15 years ago, drivers shouldn’t change.
I think I’m on the 3rd drum for that thing. Lord knows how many pages. Just keeps trucking.
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I’ve got one new enough to have networking, that’s still pretty old. It needs zero configuration using ethernet and just works on mobile devices (iOS & Android) without issue.
I have a Brother laser printer. It regularly goes into such a deep sleep that no force on this Earth can wake it up when it’s time to print, because it’s too deeply unconscious to respond to “wake up” signals from computers. It cannot print without first being brought out of its coma by a troubleshooting software.
So I’m not going to put that in the category of printers that just prints every time like it’s supposed to without issue.
Huh, that’s strange. Does pressing the power button not work? Are you using wifi or Ethernet?
I think there’s a way to disable the deep sleep mode.
Nope, pressing the power button doesn’t work, and I’ve tried it on both wi-fi and ethernet, with the same problem either way. I am pretty much resigned to the fact that I do not get along with printers.
Strange. You could try go to its web UI (just go to the printer’s IP in your web browser) and disable both sleep and auto power off, and see if that helps? You can also change those option through the menu on the printer itself.
I don’t print a lot (average 1 page a day), so having the printer actively “awake” and consuming electricity all the time is pretty wasteful. So that wouldn’t move it into the category of “not evil” for me.
That makes sense. Too bad the sleep mode isn’t working well for you :(
I recommended Brother laser printers to some older relatives and this happened. The printers required a power reset every few days.
It’s good relative to what we have now, but it can’t hold a candle to some of the warhorses we had in the past.
Brother still can’t do inkjet right? I read somewhere there’s a big patent that lets only a select few companies be able to sell inkjet printers.
I used to have a laser printer, and they’re great for documents, but now what I print most are photos, and for that pigment-based inks rock.
I have an Epson printer but even if they’re nowhere near as bad as HP, Epson also has some weird shit from time to time.
I own a brother inkjet and it works fine, although it complained when I put the wrong brand of ink in it.
Ooo fun, a printer that never goes out of sleep mode… Nah fuck that brand, it shouldn’t have taken an hour for my brother laser printer to start up. Soo stupid man. Whenever I need something printed I just put it on a USB stick and get it printed at my local library. It’s faster anyways, and I don’t have to deal with my stupid hibernating brothers printer
Printer companies are probably the reason most people no longer own a pinter.
The main issue with a lot of “printers” nowadays is that they’re usually not just printers anymore - it’s a printer/copier/scanner with faxing capabilities. The more complicated shit you cram into a single machine, the more likely something else completely unrelated will break.
I have a HP laser printer that is literally just a printer with the Wi-Fi turned off and it’s been working well on the odd occasion I needed to use it. Only reason I got it was because the Bother printer I wanted wasn’t on sale and this HP was going for under $100, so I went for it since I needed it at the moment and figured I could use it until it either dies or HP decides to not offer the toner anymore, whichever happens first.
Nah the main issue is they’re designed to be shit, to force you to spend more money.
Firstly there’s no reason the loss of say a scanner should result in failure of the printer functionality, that’s poor design. Secondly, why are so many of these extra features failing when so many people rarely if ever use them? Sounds very much like planned obsolescence. Printers are a total scam.
My $300 Brother laser printer that does everything works just fine because it wasn’t designed to be a money-siphoning piece of shit.
I had one of those printers in the 90s.
I laugh at this every time I see it, but I also like to point out that Rage was, in fact, extremely explicit about what machine they were raging against.
I don’t know. It’s commonly accepted that their lyrics have a bit of an anti-estabishment sentiment, but statements such as “believin’ all the lies that they’re tellin’ ya / buyin’ all the products that they’re sellin’ ya”, or even “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” (stated by the machine) can just as easily applied to most situations where a printer is involved. Maybe there’s somehing to it?
You know the printing industry is messed up when “Our printers are less hated” is not satire.
WTF, I thought HP had the MOST hated printers?
Epson is getting away with its ecotank models, and Brother lasers have been the go to for a lot of people.
Brother is the go to because their stuff is basic and functional.
All the other companies have “innovated” to the point where their shit is unusable for daily use.
Yep, Brother rocks.
Too lazy for my usual lengthy monologue about Brother when this comes up, but works well with Linux, far more reasonable ink cost than any other brand I’ve tried, and the even low end ‘inkvestment’ model we have has really lived up to its claims regarding ink longevity. It doesn’t even hassle you when you use off brand ink, but I only tried hat once since I had so little complaint about the Brother ink. You do lose ink level indication, which is annoying, but that’s it, and manually checking level is also easy with this style of printer.
You do lose ink level indication
If you’re talking about the laser printers, the toner level is available in the printer’s web UI and via the network. I have mine integrated into Home Assistant.
It has a web UI?
Yes!
I have mine integrated into Home Assistant.
Oh that’s neat. How did you accomplish that?
It’s a built-in integration: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/brother. For me, Home Assistant automatically detected the printer on the network and showed a notification in the app / on the site about a new device being found.
It provides pretty much all the data you’d want… Remaining drum life, toner level, page count, status (sleeping, idle, printing, paper jam, out of paper), and I think a few other things.
My kids started school and I had a need to print lots of medical forms and other paperwork, I bought a brother laser printer. Because it was basic and functional and didn’t try to force me into an ink subscription that gave them permission to disable my hardware.
I have a cheap Canon Pixma inkjet that doesn’t seem to be enshitified. Probably about 3 years old at this point though.
Shoot ink on paper. That’s all you need to do. Don’t give me a built in screen, or onerous firmware, or any of that nonsense.
I got my ecotank two years ago and haven’t had a reason to buy ink since. I still have plenty of the ink that came with it. The most frustrating thing has been that I have to let it run through a cleaning cycle when I haven’t printed in a while. Well, that and the fact it took me a second to realize it doesn’t support WPA3.
The cleaning cycle thing is pretty common with any inkjet. My old HPs all do it when I havent used them in a while.
I want to love my ecotank Epson. The software is butt ugly, but works. The printer itself isn’t the nicest looking, but works.
But man, the print quality. No matter how many times I run a cleaning cycle, it’s still a smeary mess within two pages and the deep clean doesn’t work. Neither the instructions in the manual nor found online work.
I think that’s just how epsons are. My first two printers were Epson and they both started smearing ink after a few years.
I have a Epson L1300 ecotank, and never managed to get that poop work on Linux and the software is annoying on Windows… And every time printing, I need to start with cleaning the nozzle multiple times before the print quality is even half decent
They must be going for the mainstream audience that just knows printers suck. That, and anybody who knows enough to see how funny that sentence is, has already sworn off HP forever.
Absolutely the most hated. The marketing chuds are gaslighting by claiming to be less hated. Nah, nah brah. Seriously the most hated. By FAR.
I hate HP’s so called smart apps.
HP’s website wouldn’t let me download a driver, but insisted on using their app to detect the printer model (which I already know) and then try to open the corresponding download page for that model (which I already vsited).
Off course the app open the wrong URL and lead to a 404 error. I had to download drivers from another source.
We have HP workstations. Last week HP auto installed its smart printer app and then popped open. We don’t have HP printers, just Canon. So I uninstalled it, and all the HP diagnostic / support account apps. They sent a feedback form, so I explained that on principle I’ll never buy HP printers because of the ink subscription. Hopefully enough people send the same message.
Fuck printer companies
Yeah!
Bold coming from the top innovator of printer behavior that deserves hatred…
After reading stories like this, I more and more convinced that if we want to have a free market, we need to limit the size of companies allowed to participate in it. Because if you have 2 companies controlling the whole market, they can and will produce “dynamic security”-type of garbage.
This is honestly the realization we really, really need to have as a species. It kind of feels like the lesson a lot of what we’ve seen this year has driven home, and it’s something I’ve started hearing echoed, so maybe we’re starting to get there.
This whole obsession with everything needing to constantly expand is absolutely destroying us, our environment, and everything good that we make.
We’ve got to start going in the other direction.
We’re in this situation because the government gets kickbacks to craft policy in favor of businesses instead of the market overall or the consumers. No way they’ll limit the size of companies.
I’m not sure what’s worse, that “less hated” would be a serious brag in the printer industry, or that it’s not even true for the ones claiming it
I don’t think they misread the room at all. HP is pretty much at the top of the heap due to its corporate hardware installs and support contracts (which aren’t going away any time soon). Their lower end stuff is all over the home office and small office markets. Their older stuff is used by much of the open source community. The number of folks who’re going to switch to another manufacturer in disgust because of the tone of this marketing campaign will barely put a dent in their revenue streams for the next fiscal year, perhaps a fraction of a percentage point.
Incidentally, “we suck less than our competitors” is not a new marketing technique. It’s probably the second oldest marketing technique.
what’s the oldest
Drawing people in with open questions.
I would have guessed it was titties
“We’re the best, and here’s why…”
I despise printers. I have never owned one that wasn’t evil.
I was you once. In 2018, I bought a dumb, black-and-white laser printer (Brother HL-L2300D). It has done nothing but print whenever asked. I’ve only had to change the toner once (to be fair, I print infrequently). It doesn’t require special software. It was cheap. I highly recommend going this route.
I have a Brother black-and-white laser printer, and it is, in fact, evil. I commented about it in this thread in fact: it never prints when it’s asked to because its deep sleep is so deep that computers can’t communicate with it without the use of troubleshooting software. So it doesn’t fit the requirement of “prints without any problems”.
If it is network connected, consider giving it a static IP in the router. I can imagine the computer being confused by the printer having a new IP since last time (can happen with automatic IP), when you try to print something.
All the devices on my network have static IPs. We have a system.
I’m sure your issue is valid on your particular system, but I have two Brother L2300D printers in different locations and my experience has been exactly zzzzz’s above. I have changed the toner once for each in years, and it’s always reliable. It may be you having a rare issue.
I’m sure there are owners of every brand of printer that are perfectly happy with them. :)
Of course lemmings always recommend brother
I’ve worked on a LOT of printers. Brother makes an extremely good product
You’ve sold me. I hope to move out soon. I might invest.
TSE
I’ve been a lemming for less than a year.
I’ve been on the same black & white brother laser printer for well over a decade! It’s on toner cartridge #3.
Lemmy attracts BrotherBro’s (maybe we can make a better name)
I mean I’ve had my Brother long before I knew about Lemmy. I have never had it not print the thing I wanted it to print. Before that I had about half a dozen inkjet printers that worked maybe 40% of the time in the first few months and then dropped steeply when the print heads got gummed up, or the feed got jammed. But the Brother has been working a treat for five years and counting.
I think the only printer I had that wasn’t evil was my Commodore MPS-1200.
Those were the good old days. Printers were definitely less evil back then. But then, so was technology in general.
Remember when Domino’s Pizza admitted that their pizza was shit, and that they’d work really hard to make it less shit? How’d that work out for them?
Uhhhh, actually really well? I mean it’s still shitty pizza, but they legitimately turned their entire company around, and prevented bankruptcy and going out of business lol
If you think American Domino’s is bad, you should try Australian Domino’s. It’s way worse.
Funniest comment I ever read on youtube “The Noid doesn’t need to ruin their pizza, they already do a good enough job themselves”
Honestly I like it now. I didn’t really eat it before 2011 but since about 2014 it’s been good enough for 6.99 medium 2 topping pan pizza. Also pan pizza is the only way to go. Their thin or regular crust is fine but for the price I’d rather have pizza hut.
Domino’s is expensive, delicious addictive shit that’s always available on short notice
Great in an emergency, probably not very good for you though
6.99 for a medium 2 topping pizza isn’t expensive compared to my other options. Also it’s pizza, you shouldn’t eat it every night.
Assuming that’s dollars and not pounds that’s alright, but often if I’m getting Domino’s it’s delivery for one reason or another and that often ends up expensive, especially if you want to customise it
That’s hilarious. I thought I for sure the article would be The Onion.
The HP LaserJet 4si was the peak of printers. It’s been all downhill since then.
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