Who the hell can figure out how to make a printer work
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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Brother laser gang here -- highly recommend. I print a handful of things every year and it hasn't let me down. Still rocking the original toner and I bought it in 2021.
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Xennial here, get a Brother laser printer if you can. The "starter toner" lasted me for like 4 years so far and is only now getting low. I can't imagine going back to an inkjet that would always dry up since I used infrequently, but I still needed it.
A second vote for brother lasers.
I upgraded my old printer about 6 months ago. Laser is far superior, and no longer particularly expensive. I also discovered they have solved the photo printing quality issue at some point (laser's only real weakness). I ran off a photo and it came out near/at inkjet quality.
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Bonus is you can buy third party refilled toner in bundles for like $15 for 3. I bought some a couple of years ago and I still haven't burned through the first replacement
There have been reports that Brother has finally started being evil about third-party toner with new firmwares.
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Yep, finally got rid of my Epson BJ with a Brother b/w laser and it’s fantastic. A little louder but it functions like it should instead of complaining about low Magenta.
Same, 3 years running, printing lots of shit for my own company and just now got a "low toner" warning which I'm ignoring for the last 2 or so months. Buying an inkjet is the biggest scam there is, you pay more in the ink and broken printers than you ever would for a laser.
This is me. Now that I work from home, if I need to print something (maybe 3 times per year), I use a mailing service that will print a pdf and send it to my place. It cost 2€ per document, takes 2-3 days to arrive, but it is still cheaper and less painful than buying a printer.
I have to use a printer for my work-from-home job. If you just buy a Brother laserjet printer and avoid other brands and inkjets, it's way more affordable. It costs more up front, but they're reliable and don't need to be replaced every year. My printer cost $250 and I've had it for at least five years at this point.
Xennial here. I bought a nice lightly used office printer/copier for cheap off ebay a few years back for my daughter’s Girl Scout troop. It saw a lot of use while I was an assistant leader, but nowadays I only use it to print Pathfinder character sheets and maps. I definitely don’t use it enough to justify it, but as long as I have it I may as well keep it.
I just go to a print/copy store. Pay up, be done with it.
I have a cheapass printer that is probably listening to me. It has little ink (i barely used it and the black ink is at 50%) i use the scanner feature more often.
I can't remember the last time I actually had to print something, it's either digital or you get sent whatever needs to be on paper.
I don't understand why laser printers aren't more affordable. way back in 2010 I bought a full colour Samsung laser printer for $200. Nowadays you can't find a full color printer for under $500.00
My Brother color printer was like $350 and they are probably the only OEM I'd even recommend.
My local library has been getting refurbished for a couple of months.
It's really thrown off my ability to do paperwork, as they were the only people around with a working printer.
I actually had to fix the printer at work. Horrible stuff.
Ditto on libraries. Mine does AWESOME large format printing for next to nothing. I got 5 different sewing patterns printed, which ended up being 20 or so pages of 48"x48" sheets in color and it cost about $30. Priced it at fedex and it was running well over $100 (I think closer to 200 or 300 but I didn't pay much attention after seeing how much it was at the libraries.
I have a small Canon b/w laserjet at home which has worked well for small projects but the libraries have been a huge help for anything outside standard letter size print jobs.
Hey! I use my local library too! 😂
Home printers suck, too much gadgetry and bs involved. Industrial printers are far better at being plug and play. I dont need apps or anything at all.
HP doesn't even sell the ink for my (relatively new) printer where I live.
Its on their U.S site, but I can't order from that since it asks for a ZIP code.
Most BS thing I had to deal with HP ink was region-locked ink. If you buy the European version of the US ink (it’s literally the exact same thing with a different label) it will refuse to work unless you change the region of your printer. Good luck going through HP support
What the actual fuck
Bought a Canon laser printer a decade ago. Only needed a new set of toner and a bunch of paper obviously. Standard power cord, standard USB 1.x cable. Still works in Windows 11. I think I got it working in Linux at some point, but I don't know if it does nowadays, because I probably don't have the mental fortitude to touch CUPS again in this lifetime. (People keep saying audio is a nightmare to set up in Linux. Ohh you clearly haven't tried to set up a printer or you would not be complaining)
Strangely, this has never been the case for me (printers, not audio which obviously has sucked in the past). Also if you get a printer that is networked, it generally just works these days, better than my Windows experience.
(People keep saying audio is a nightmare to set up in Linux. Ohh you clearly haven’t tried to set up a printer or you would not be complaining)
My single worst experience with Linux was getting audio to work with an ISA Plug 'n' Play Sound Blaster card back in the late 90s. Eventually I got it to work, but after installing the card I had to dig through documentation and forums to figure out that in addition to audio drivers I needed to install a package for ISA PnP cards, run a tool that came with that to generate a config file, realize that config file contained every hypothetical configuration my card could potentially have all commented out, find and uncomment the actual configuration I wanted the card to use and then restart the isapnp driver. All of that to get basic functionality. For Windows, I literally just installed the card and it worked with basic functionality out of the box, with an option to go to their website and download a driver for some extra functionality specific to that card.
That...soured me on the idea of desktop Linux for several years.
I've genuinely never had a better printing experience than on Linux. Across multiple distros. just press ctrl+p, printer is already detected, press ok, done. What am I doing wrong?
Linux is fine for printers. As long as you don't want to print more than one copy. But even then you just start multiple print jobs. Unless you need a lot of copies. Then Windows or Mac is probably easier.
I have a printer
The best investment of my life was buying an Epson LQ500 back in... I don't know... '95 perhaps? All this years, and even after months or even years without use it will happily awake from its slumber to once again scream and punch dots on to its never ending but ancient supply of fanfold paper
But where do you get new ribbons? Or can you re-ink them?
For one, they are still sold new for a surprising low amount of money (e.g.: https://www.bueromarkt-ag.de/farbband_kmp_0633_0501_fuer_epson,vt-farbbaender_und_-rollen,vh-epson,vg-lq_500,p-06330501.html) but re-inking them using just rubber stamp ink is also a possibility.
Who prints things? Don't think I have used a printer for personal or work purposes in years.
Sometimes it's nice to print out a drawing to scribble on.
I bought one to print anti-Trump propaganda to post by the mailboxes.
And because I'm a Millennial, I enjoy printing photos because I grew up having photo albums, and as such I'm used to making them. Plus if I don't print them I'll literally ever look at them.
I do, but it's also my favourite hi-tech success, having a functional reliable printer.
It is only black and white though.