Get a Brother color laser and live happily ever after.
That said, my experience with non-HP inkjets is they’re much less reliable (Brother) and more jam prone (Canon) than HP. I’ve yet to try an Epson though.
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.
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.
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’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 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 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 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.
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 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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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’s a built-in integration: 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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