This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I bought two printers in the last 2 decades. One looked like the model in the article, which I gave to a family member. The other one is a Brother Laser printer with a scanner.
I'd rather get a 50 pack of markers and start coloring in my printouts than buy a crappy inkjet printer. Plus it's bonding time with my nieces and nephews. I pay them in cookies.
Just get a 3d printer and put it in 2d print mode as needed so you aren't gunking up your home and network with so many devices.
Google's LLM got one critical fact wrong, of course. If you only need occasional color printing, an inkjet is still the wrong answer. The right answer is probably just to have Staples or your local print shop print for you, honestly. The ink dries out in disused inkjet machines and that'll cause you no end of headaches. Or force you to buy a set of expensive cartridges just to print one damn page, because the last thing you printed was three months ago.
Color laser printers aren't even that expensive anymore. Sure, a set of color toner cartridges may cost well north of what a set of inkjet cartridges would run you, but the difference is that the laser toner will probably last many home users a lifetime.
I'm buying my 3rd brother printer today, I got rid of my first when consolidating households even though it was working fine and only needed new toner once in 10 years. Recently I convinced my MIL to ditch HP but she insists we need a color printer so I'm picking up a second hand mfc-9340cdw to finally break free of instant ink. I look forward to not thinking about printers for another 10+ years.
Hey, I own that printer! It's a good printer.
Remember kids, always buy laser, never inkjet.
We have three of them at my office. I am certain we exceed the duty cycle they were designed for by several times. The one at the front desk has been bitching about needing an imaging drum replacement for I think three years at this point, and it still prints just fine. I'll put a new drum in it when the existing one stops working.
Yup, I've had a previous model (HL-2170W) since like 2006. The nic is dying now, but the printer works fine.
Brother printers are the only brand anyone should buy.
Same, and the only maintenance I've ever needed for mine is putting paper in it
Hey, I had to change the toner in mine!... once... after like a decade.
Glad to see the perfect Brother laser printer + Linux combo getting a well deserved press attention, again like in 2023 :)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot.
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!
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.
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.
Brother laser printers are strong contenders, especially for black and white printing needs, but weigh the pros and cons against other options like inkjets before deciding.
The original article contains 428 words, the summary contains 239 words. Saved 44%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
