my parent bought a HP deskjet printer for us, but the ink is so expensive that any picture needs be small that the ink don’t run out as quickly. and the software is garbage too.
Obligatory “buy a Brother B&W laser printer” comment
They’re actually more economical than modern HP printers because of their anti-consumer BS.
My color brother laser is great. I needed color but either option is the better one
I got a used brother that had ever only printed one toner cartridges worth of prints, for 15€. It even has wifi, definitely one of the better buys I’ve made. I only need to print a handful of times a year so I anticipate it’ll last me for years and years.
canon ones are decent too (if thry didn’t change them since i bought my iSensys MF3010, that thing still works great, except drivers. They work perfectly but are almost impossible to find on the canon website nowadays; works fine on linux too without drivers)
Obligatory “buy a bottle printer” comment.
My Canon wouldn’t scan a document to store on my PC because I was out of yellow ink
I haven’t given them another cent and it’s been 15 years. Fuck you Canon. Fuck you HP
my lazer canon mf3010 scans just fine even without a cartridge installed at all.
I kinda like that printer actually.
no drm, no wifi, no fancy-ass touchscreens, no bullshit.
it just prints and scans.
never complains about low ink until it’s so low the text is barely visible anyway.Maybe they changed it, but it wouldn’t let me back then. Definitely not going back
I had this situation with my Epson
Ecotank?
Had this problem with Epson many eons ago. It’s wild to think about throwing away CMY cartridges when it still has usable ink.
When you lack black ink, the printer judt grabs the other colors until it makes black. Wich is kind of annoying since it’s the cheapest toner.
buy a Brother, or better yet a laser printer.
I’ll only buy Brother printers now. The print quality is pretty good and they just work on my Linux desktop.
How hard is it to refill ink cartridges for Brother printers?
I can’t speak for all of them, but mine is pretty easy. Their ink cartridges are expensive too, but there’s really good third-party options on Amazon
It’s fairly easy (drill hole, inject ink with syringe, seal hole with soldering iron) but it’s pretty messy. It’s good to have a work area you can fuck up and latex gloves are a good idea. I don’t know how to reset the chips, but I keep a set of new full cartridges separate from the ones I refill and when the dialog shows up saying the printer is out of ink (even when the refilled cartridges are nearly full) I just pop in the new carts and print one page of something, then put the refilled carts back in and they’ll work for a few weeks until I have to do it again.
Well worth it financially - a set of new carts is $70 whereas $30 of raw ink + syringes will refill the carts like 10 times or so.
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Right on brother!.. Write on!
Even scanning over the network works on Linux on my Brother MFP. I really didn’t expect that.
I got an AIO unit and the scanner even works over the network.
I have a brother laser printer. Best printer I’ve had so far. 3 years on the same toner cart; at my pace I’d have replaced the ink 2 or 3 times already.
I was in the market this year so shopping around laser color ones I noticed the reviews for even the Brother said it would brick your printer if you use 3rd party toners. So just look before you buy. I ended up buying their more expensive one because of that, but still not entirely sure its 3rd party compatible. Ill research whether thats the case when my toner needs replaced.
This is not only HP my old Epson too. Now my Xerox laser try to print even if no more toner inside 😅
I will never not tell people how my old HP still works on cheap refills. HP will never see another dime from me.
They were once capable.
As somebody who didn’t, for once, have this specific problem today, but had a printing problem nonetheless, I feel so triggered by this post.
Why the actual fuck is printing so much harder today than it was a decade ago. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills that we are halfway through 2023 and I have more printing issues than I did even 4-5 years ago, let alone back in the golden days of literally never having printing issues in the first half of my lifetime.
Who needs color anyway? A black laser printer is the way to go :)
Low on cyan!!1!
I have a b&w laster printer, an old Kyocera relic from the mid-2000s. Got it from a previous job that was remodeling their offices. I refuse to let go of it, I don’t care how many brown-outs it causes when I’m printing something (seriously, it dims the lights when it fires up).
I’ll only replace it with an equally beefy color laser printer.
Yeah. The vast majority of people have no real reason to own a color printer. Black and white laser does the job and only if you need to print something like photos at home, should you even consider an inkjet.
Even then it depends how many you want to print.
Often will work out cheaper to have somebody else print them and post them to you.
Yeah but it’s almost always something I need quick, like a shipping label or something. It’s really more about convince than anything else for me.
Do y’all not have libraries
I once got a used dye sublimation printer because it was cool until I had to replenish the toner-like stuff. Shit’s expensive
This is how printers get introduced to VERY FAST crowbars.
Get a laserjet.
Whenever these plastic fucking pieces of shit misbehave, I get interested in thermal depolymerization again. I’d like to start removing microplastics from our environment, slow as it takes. I need to build an electric kiln and some way to keep the decomposition chamber inside oxygen-free…
MAGENTA!!!
I fking love that skit xD
(if that was what you were referencing)Honestly, yours is better. I was thinking of Shaq
They have to print the invisible printer identification dots somehow.
huh
Printers print very small dots on the sheet of paper you print so it canbe identified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
TIL
Those are yellow, the cyan is mixed with black
They can be both yellow or cyan, any of the low-saturation ink colors really.
We’re not going anywhere until you pay up!
And that isn’t even getting into their drivers and software. Foolish me bought a printer with a scanner and thought I’d be able to just install one little piece of software and be able to print and scan. How silly of me to forget that I to search Google to find instructions that weren’t provided by HP, and download an application that the printer’s instructions did not tell me to install, in order to get the it working.
I almost want this printer to die just so I can never own an HP printer again in my life.
If you use Windows, you can just do the following:
- Go to the control panel, then devices and printers.
- Right click on your printer, but make sure it is connected first.
- You should be able to see “Scan” as one of the options, click on it.
And you’re done! You do not need any special programs or anything like that because Windows already has a built-in one.
I always like when I have to open their installer executbale in a utility like 7zip (beause they are 99% really just a self-extracting archive like zip with the actual installer inside), yank out the driver and INF files so i dont have to install some call-home telemetry nonsense to be able to print.
