I hate that everything now is a subscription service instead of buying it and do whatever you want.
Okay so I see all this talk about ducky printers but if I want one that’s not trying to guck me over which would that be?
Brother ist the way to go. Also OK for Linux in my experience
From my experience, printer support on Linux is often better than on Windows because all the drivers are included in the kernel and you don’t have to go driver hunting on obscure websites.
I just got around to setting up my Brother MFC-2750DW in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I was prepared for a long process, but Brother publish Linux drivers for it and the whole setup took about 5 minutes. Works perfectly over wifi. Easiest Linux printer setup I’ve ever done. And it’s happy with third-party cartridges too.
The new brothers also work fine with chrome os.
Second the recommendation for a Brother. I’ve rarely had problems with them. Above all do NOT buy an HP printer because they come with every form of nickel-and-dime known to mankind.
Alternatively, for the once in a blue moon that the average person needs to actually print things in the modern day, bring your local library a fiver and use their printer. This is the way I do things, because I rarely ever need to print a document. When I do, it’s a ten minute drive and a five dollar or less cost and then I don’t have to bother with owning a printer.
But in general, Brother is a good brand, and a laser printer will be less hassle and easier to manage than an inkjet, but will have a bit higher purchase cost.
A lot of my printing happens when parents visit. They love to print everything. I’m much more likely to use the scanner on my Brother printer than actually print.
Yes on the Libraries! Libraries are often incredibly cheap for printing, and most of them have an online uploading tool so you can print things from your home computer or phone without any hassle. Plus, at least at the library I work at, we have incredibly high quality printers and your docs / photos will come out a lot better than how they would if you were at home, as well as a scanner that can give you a 600dpi TIFF file
Just please try not to hand us a twenty for something that costs 1/100th of that - we often don’t have enough small bills to make change. (Or do and put it on your account for later, if that’s an offered option, or better yet donate the remainder 😉)
In Germany there are a lot of stores that let you use their printer for 10ct per page. Is this not the case in the US (or wherever you live)?
FedEx and Staples have document printers for less than 10 cents a page. This is what I’ve been doing for years now, when someone won’t just take a PDF straight up.
Go to the library next time and see if they’ll let you do it for free. They may very well.
Most businesses in the US have a hard rule against connecting any outside hardware to the network, for security purposes. If you bring them a USB drive you will be asked to leave. If you can get whatever you need printed into a company email, you might stand a chance, but it would frequently require you having a personal connection to someone in the company willing to print your document for you, and depending on the document it will often not be appropriate for business email. American businesses are not really set up to be print shops and most of them would likely not help you unless you go somewhere like a Fedex-Kinkos that IS explicitly a print shop.
Libraries, however, will always have a printer you can use. It just costs, usually a negligible amount per page (10-50 cents depending on the particular library), but they’ve got no issues with you showing up with a USB drive and printing off of it, or logging into your own document storage (email, onedrive, etc) to print from there, because the computers are intended for public use.
Brother printers are fantastic. They cost a but more upfront but actually work
They’re incredibly reliable. I’ve had the same Brother laser printer for a good 15 years now. Possibly longer. Old enough that there’s no wifi or bluetooth options, but it’s a network printer because it has ethernet.
I made my old brother a wifi printer with the help of a raspberry pi.
Needed something to print the occasional document for bureaucracy stuff, and I also got a Brother printer a while ago. Used, laser (very important for good value imo), 100 bucks. An older model, black-and-white but with wifi support. Didn’t need to register my license, create a cloud account or whatever other shit companies come up with these days, I could just turn it on and it worked.
Additional hot take: get a laser printer for your normal documents and just get photos printed somewhere else. The money you’d spend buying 4x6 photos on someone else’s ink and paper would probably be less than you’ll pay for color ink unless you’re an absolute photo printing maniac. And a laser printer toner cartridge will last you like 1,000+ pages.
Second this. Bought a Dell one 10 years ago and it’s still working like a charm! Got me through all of Uni Ani besides the finicky diva driver it’s just amazing!
Agreed, my wife and I got a Brother laser printer about 3 years ago and I still haven’t had to change the toner. It’s been telling me the toner is low for months but still keeps going strong. Granted we don’t print a TON, but we print enough that the initial cost of a laser printer made sense.
This is the way to do it. Getting your photos printed by somebody else will be tons cheaper AND give you better results.
Yep, I bought a Brother laser printer for $120 a few years ago. I don’t use it super often, but it’s been reliable and easy to use whenever I need it. I’ve never had to replace the toner. It just works.
Is it good for someone who constantly needs to print documents
As long as you don’t need color a laser printer is way better for printing documents.
I love my color laser. (Again, props to Brother). It takes off-brand toner with no fuss and hasn’t failed to print yet.
I don’t know that I would print photos with it, but it’s more than sufficient for everyday documents and even game manuals.
I printed a ton of documents in university with a black and white brother laser printer. All my notes were always printed, for example.
Still have it over a decade later.
The best. Color laser is pricey but not many people would need that.
A laser printer is best no matter if you print a lot or a little.
Brother will generally be an excellent choice. While HP will generally be probably the worst choice you can make.
Edit:
Just to be clear, laser is better if you print a little, because the laser cartridge doesn’t dry, and can last a decade. While even if you don’t print a lot, you will need to replace ink cartridges regularly, because they dry out.
If you print a lot, the laser printer is both more reliable, faster and cheaper to use.
This is just anecdotal, but I work in IT and I can’t recall a brother printer ever giving me a headache. HP is obviously the worst.
HP is obviously the worst.
HP is special kind of printers shitcompany. They probably spent years on doing market research to understand what people NOT want, so they can do exactly that. 😂
makes me wonder, how are they still in business doing that?
HP used to make rock solid laser printers back in the late 90s and 00s. Shame what they turned into.
I recently had an HP printer to set up for a client (IT as well), and it only had USB 2.0 and Ethernet interfaces. The printer needed an internet connection and activation online before it would even let you print over USB, and of course the Ethernet port was dead and wouldn’t connect, so now it’s just a shitty white brick with HP stamped on it. At least they were able to return but how does that make sense in practice?
Most hp models are fine, I have a laser jet I swear by.
Third voice for a Brother. I used to work an office supply store and they were by far the most reliable printers we sold.
That was because of a misunderstanding. Brother started a subscription service and people assumed that meant you had to pay a monthly fee to use the printers like with HP. Instead, it’s a toner subscription like Dollar Shave Club or Amazon’s Subscribe and Save where they auto-send a new toner at your requested interval.
I use cheap Chinese knockoff toner in my Brother laser
I heard they stopped allowing that recently.
Saw some people posting recently they sold out also
I also heard a rumor about something somewhere, that maybe something might have happened. But I’m not sure. /S
I just installed a Brother printer for my dad, absolutely zero bullshit.
Yes, some of their firmware updates started breaking aftermarket toner cartridges and support said “that sucks” like it was very intentional. It seems constrained to a few of the MFC color models more than anything tho I’ve never had any issues other than bad wifi modules in the b&w home office lasers. Which if you’re using wifi on a printer that’s your own damn fault lol
Yeah I’m not sure whether this is shenanigans or an actual problem Brother is managing here. The post does mention there are problems with incorrect response to temperature management with the unoriginal cartridge, which again could theoretically cause harm.
I honestly wasn’t aware unoriginal cartridges were a thing for Brother printers, since the originals tend to be quite reasonable.
But to continue using the unoriginal cartridges he can as the answer states, use BRAdmin to downgrade the firmware.
So it’s not like Brother is attempting to take control of your printer like HP likes to do.
I’m sure HP didn’t ramp up their bullshit from 0 to 11 overnight, the question now is how much we can trust Brother not to be walking the same path and mandating more and more restrictive firmwares in the future. I think them opensourcing drivers and firmwares would help mitigate that, and if their business model is really to be that sole good guy and antagonize the likes of HP/Epson/… they don’t have anything to lose and a lot to win (or as a minimum, myself as a customer).
HP has done the ink cartridge shenanigans for more than 30 years now. They just recently found a new trick. Apart from that nothing has really changed.
I am not aware Brother ever did similar things to basically trick or cheat their customers. Most other vendors are somewhere in between. AFAIK none are as bad as HP.
My dad is running his Brother HL-1212W printer on the open source Linux driver, works perfectly fine, and I was actually surprised about the high quality of his prints for such a cheap printer.
AFAIK Brother is among the best regarding opensource drivers too.
All this printer talk almost makes me want to buy a new printer. My current printer is a 14 year old Samsung color laser, and the print quality is not that stellar anymore. ;) The Samsung open source driver kind of suck for this printer. There isn’t even a driver for this specific model CLP-325W, so I have to choose another Samsung printer that is (mostly) compatible.
The Brother printer was completely plug and play. The system recognized the printer, and installed the correct open source driver, no hassle at all.
Eh, I am all about wired networking wherever I can, but my awesome old Brother laser printer gets used like once per month or two, and it lives off in a far corner of the house where it isn’t taking up valuable space. Plus it could work with a tiny fraction of the LAN bandwidth available to it.
On wi-fi it stays, lol. I think I may have had to reconnect it once in the decade+ we’ve had it. Otherwise, the printout is ready before I can even walk to the printer (unless it has a ton of pages, naturally).
I don’t even know how old it is at this point. I just know it’s over a decade because I didn’t buy a third party toner cartridge until 2014.
Can you avoid firmware updates? Are there domains that need to be blocked to prevent them?
Yes the firmware updates are only voluntary. The driver will sure nag you to do them but you can choose when and what version easily.
I’ve had my Brother printer for several years and never had an issue. I don’t have the color one, just black and white. Would buy again.
I treat my Brother laser like a rented uhaul truck and it just keeps going.
I have one of the complicated brother ones that scans and prints, including double sides, in colour, and it’s a tank. Works fine in Linux too. Connected or through the network.
It even does fax, which someone, somewhere probably finds useful.
Doctors offices and health insurance. It’s weird but technically fax machines are still considered “secure” communications for sending PHI. Sending it across the internet requires a lot of expensive hoops to jump through, or they could just buy a fax machine.
Send signed email. Done.
Bunch of weirdos, that’s what they are.
Funny thing is those faxes are going through internet anyway most of the time.
Where I live fax are considered a legal proof contrary to emails.
So for important contracts it is considered safer than mails.
And honestly it kinda is since an email can totally end up never being recieved without any kind of error or warning. A fax you should know immediately that it wasn’t received on the other end.
I still wish fax would disappear soon but an email is not a good replacement.
Emails are now considered the defacto standard for businesses but they suck and are absolutely not reliable.
I’ve had the same brother inkjet printer for 14 years now, and it still works great.
Even worse, if you subscribe to the ink service with an HP printer, it will update the firmware. But if you decide to cancel the service, they don’t change the firmware so you now own a brick.
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If you print regularly, HP’s 6 cent per page, 100 pages per month plan is about the same price as a small black and white laser’s drum and toner.
But you can plan full page photos on photo paper with it for that 6 cent too, not just BW documents. I like it, a full year costs about the same as 1 set of XL OfficeJet ink and you never have to try to save money by going BW / draft mode. Just print whatever. Clean the head whenever needed. It’s all included.
Yes it is a subscription, but this one is actually useful. And it gets cheaper the more you print, up to small office volumes. We have it at multiple offices on a 300/700 pages plan.
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Wait, 6 cents? That’s three times what I paid to print stuff at uni.
Okay that was a decade ago, but still, I don’t pay 3x for other office services.
Other than the recent nonsense, this is why I cancelled Netflix and went back to pirating. Content leaves unexpectedly? Not on my Nas.
Except when I accidentally rm -rf the media folder but shhhhhhhh
Backups are in a peer-to-peer cloud
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But then it’s in DVD quality. Why not just pirate a full quality version?
This. My only media expense monthly is my VPN at $10. Everything is pirated.
Even that though - I just download only my favorites for the collection. Everything else is available on stand alone websites these days (multiple) so if you’re paying for a streaming service or really even using bittorrent then you’re living in the past as far as movies go.
What should I be using instead of (q)bittorrent?
fmhy.net will tell you.
QBitTorrent is fine. BitTorrent and its children are not.
Blurays exist and they’re pretty cheap from thrift stores (often just $3)
Ya but Blu-ray is a PITA to rip sometimes.
Piracy is free though
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DVD isn’t very good quality. I don’t really care and I have a tiny TV, and DVDs still don’t look very good on it.
The video quality is shit and it’s extremely obvious in my opinion. Even the sound is inferior to a good torrent with Dolby TrueHD/DTS HD sound.
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I’ve been buying preowned DVDs off ebay every few weeks or so for the last year. I don’t even bother looking to see if they are available to stream anymore.
Probably cheaper too
What software would that happen to be, supposing it’s not MakeMKV?
I’m pretty sure handbrake can rip as well as re-encode.
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Old school pirating or new school? Last time I remember pirates was like… Napster, Limewire, Kazaa… Then went to TPB before it got raided like 8 times… What’s the current? Is it still torrenting with proxies?
Word on the street is that reddit’s arr slash piracy has a pretty good guide to it in their wiki, including lists of generally trustworthy torrent sources. I of course don’t torrent, because I’m terrified of legal consequences–I just browse shady but technically legal websites to stream my anime
I’ve been pirating since Napster and you’re right, it’s changed a lot. These days, I usually just stream from third party sites. Takes less room on your PC and is faster than downloading a torrent. Dopebox is where it’s at for most stuff. 9anime if you like anime, it’s better than the paid alternatives like Crunchy roll or Funamation.
If you want to stick to torrents I’ve found 1337x to be the best since TPB died.
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New skool is to use automation tools to grab and manage your media. You can still use torrenting but IMO using usenet is more reliable and doesn’t flag your ISP. I highly recommend anyone pirating to use 'arrs https://wiki.servarr.com/
I just got my automated pirating machine set up!
Here’s the wiki for the *arr apps!
- Radarr for movies
- Sonarr for TV shows
- Prowlarr for index management
- Optional Doplarr Discord Bot for requests
Set up your profiles for Radarr/Sonarr to pick the quality of release you want (1080p, min/max file size, etc)
Feed Radarr/Sonarr your qbittorrent info, nzbget & Usenet info
They will automatically search the indexes (I use 1337x for torrents & nzbgeek for Usenet) for the files that fit your parameters, download it, and organize it.
All you have to do is point Plex at the output folders and BAM, automated pirating.
I even took it a step further and set up Doplarr - a Discord bot that handles requests. Now friends/family can ping the bot with their movie/show requests and it’ll sync up to Radarr/Sonarr and add their requests!
Oh, the high seas are very, very busy these days. Still a bit difficult for the non technical user, but there is buried treasure out there.
Non technical users can just use Stremio and a debrid service. Couldn’t be simpler.
Torrents are still around, lots of sites out there for them.
Content leaving isn’t a problem. If they give up some things they have more money to get the rights to other content, and usually by the time it leaves I’ve either watched it or don’t want to. If it’s one of the rare things I want to watch several times, I can just buy it. But cracking down on password sharing is ridiculous. They’ve been functioning fine with people sharing passwords. I bet the current pricing accounts for password sharing. But now people in college can’t be on the family netflix? Pure greed.
Content leaving is totally a problem. I’ve lost track of the number of times my spouse and I say, “Oh hey, what about we finally watch xyz that’s been in our queue for ages? Yeah that seems like a good one for Friday pizza night! …oh, it’s vanished from our queue, hooray.”
It’s not my full time job to keep tabs on what’s coming and going from the damn entertainment service that I hope to use in my ever dwindling reserves of free time. Especially when there’s alternative means available that are not too difficult to use.
This is incredibly annoying for series. Crunchyroll dropped Bleach, a series with over 350 episodes, when I was at episode ~100. A few years ago I started to manually keep track of the episodes I watched, since you lose your progress when they drop it (true for crunchyroll, prime and netflix)
I’ve taken to de-DRMing any e-books I bought from Amazon for that reason.
Also, the “You can only view this book on 3 devices” – yeah … fuck off.
Calibre + DeDRM plugin + KFX plugin. Perfectly legal too, as long as you aren’t distributing them.
This is the way.
Btw, did you know of Weightless Books and Smashwords?
They may not have as many ebooks as Amazon, but they do offer DRM free ebooks, and may be worth keeping in mind to check before going straight to Amazon.
Thanks. I had a collection from several years ago of Amazon books, though these days it’s my absolute last choice for anything.
This is the reason I went with Epson for printing for many years, and had no issues! But I don’t print anymore.
To be fair, this person could be using a business printer. Large multifunction printers offices use can cost $10k+ and require A LOT of work so small companies and firms that can’t outright afford the upkeep usually lease the printer and that lease comes with warranties and maintenance covered by the company its leased from.
Wendigoon is a youtuber, i don’t think they need to print so much they’d requure an industrial sized printer
And here’s someone making excuses for a billion dollar company based on nothing but imagination. HP isn’t your friend, they’re only driven to seek profit.
What’s more likely, that there’s a legitimate reason the printer needs a subscription or that the printer company is just trying to nickle and dime the end user again to squeeze every penny out of them without providing additional value?
BTW when one of our offices large multifunction printer has issues we call the vendor that maintains it, NOT the company that manufactured it.
HP has something called an “instant ink” subscription plan
If you sign up for the plan, you cannot use ink official hp ink which is purchased in a store, you must use the ink hp ship’s you when you get low. If your payment is declined, the printer is disabled until you go through their hateful cancellation progress, or you fix your payment and let them ship you new cartridges.
This is 100% on a consumer printer.
I doubt that Wendigoon is using a $10k+ business printer.
There’s a recent post on HN talking about this similar behavior with content platforms.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36974358 https://old.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/15gechw/apple_just_stole_hundreds_of_dollars_from_me/
Basically users Apple account gets flagged for “fraudulent problems”. User loses access to all “bought”/rented content associated with Apple account. CS is useless. CS manager useless as well.
It’s a well documented story with any content platform. This is far from being an isolated issue.
Personally, piracy and ripping Blu-rays is back on the table for me and using a media server only accessible via VPN.
I was actually thinking of getting an Apple account and backing my files up to their cloud. Glad I read this before I made that mistake.
apple used to be my go to but decided to deplatform from them. All of the iTunes music, videos, and tv shows I bought over the years have been pirated or ripped to my media server.
All personal files and media is backed up on my personal cloud/server with redundant backups to another server that I own.
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I don’t get how this is legal, and my guess is that it isn’t in EU and many other countries that aren’t USA.
Anyone ever heard one of these stories from EU?
They offer it in the EU. They don’t force you to choose the subscription, you can also just choose to buy the cartridges at the store outright if you want to. I don’t really understand the big hoopla about being offered that choice.
If you sign up for the subscription, the printer is “adjusted” to disallow store bought cartridges while it is enrolled
The big hoopla is that in some cases they disable your printer so you can’t buy your ink independently. That’s the part I suspect is illegal in EU. Obviously subscriptions aren’t illegal.
My last ever hp printer went in the e waste skip last week for a similar reason.
Just freecycled an almost new HP printer/scanner because of their ridiculous software locked cartridges that print like 20 pages total. I specified in the listing that the ink was expensive and that it would be best for someone who printed almost never and just wanted a scanner.
The printer business is tantamount to the gangster era. Fucking thieves.
Incredibly annoying. Especially with all these apps that want to charge you monthly. Fucking nuts thinking I’m gonna pay 30 a year for the rest of my life to look at radar.
I just bought a Brother laser printer for my dad, because he needed help changing the ink cartridges, after having printed maybe 8 pages in ½ a year. It’s just too stupid to use ink printers today, no matter if you print a little or a lot.
I’m guessing the laser cartridge will last my dad a decade. lol
And it uses dry toner, so it’ll never clog because you didn’t use it!
Exactly. We’ve had our color laser for about 14 years, and it still runs on the original toner cartridges!
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Good points on the ink jet. I’m not sure laser printers are really toxic. Yes 30-40 years ago there were problems with ozone for heavy printing environments, or if you sat right next to the printer. But AFAIK the ozone levels have been reduced, and for small printers it’s not a problem. While ozone is toxic, it is also naturally occurring, and we can tolerate low levels of it.
Regarding chemicals in the toner, it was a problem way way back, because in high volume environments that shit sometimes would be all over the place. Because containers weren’t tight enough. I don’t recall seeing toner in or around laser printers for home office for the past 2 decades. I’m guessing production environments have improved similarly too, but I haven’t been much in contact with those lately.
There are clear work environment regulations in most (western) countries, that date back to the early 80’s and even earlier. As a minimum those regulations must be met. So yes there are actually health and safety laws around laser printers. And AFAIK they are completely safe unless you are doing something illegal or incredibly stupid.
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Heh. Another symptom of the second gilded age we now find ourselves experiencing.
What are good printer companies? Fuck HP and Epson
Buy a slightly older one. I have a cannon now, it’s works great. I don’t print all that much anyway, so I’m not too knowledgeable about printers tbh.
Brother used to be a holdout, but they probably aren’t anymore.
If you get a Brother, it’s best to go with laser, as the toner will last ages. If you’re on a budget, the Brother inkejet I have gives zero shits what cartridges I put in there, as long as they’re the right shape. I usually have to clean the contacts on top of the cartridges before inserting like it’s an NES, though.
I have an Epson ink tank one and it’s 100 times better than HP. Is Epson really that bad?
I had a terrible experience with epson
HP certainly needs fucked with a pineapple, Epson otoh, I’m not so sure, I have two eco-tank printers and have had no issues with them whatsoever.
Epson are ok as long as you remember they’re descended from Tamagochis. Leave them alone for a month and they’ll sometimes clog up for ever.
I have an ecotank too. No BS subscription shenanigans, painless to get it working. What impresses me is the lack of it breaking if it sits even months between uses, usually not even needing to be cleaned.
And since ink can be bought in bulk, it’s cheap to run too.
Canon laser printers
My Brother printer has been going for about 14 years, so I recommend them.
OK, but what printer does your brother use?
Also a Brother :P
Brother
Get a Brother laser. Don’t bother with color.
people always say this, but 95% of what i print is index and reference cards that need colour :( I would love to get a B&W printer, but i need the colours.
Well shit. I literally have never needed color for printing but I get it.
Color Laserjet is the way if you “need” colors. The only time inkjet is any better is if you’re printing actual photo quality stuff. But at that point it’s cheaper to just buy it through an online company like https://www.nationsphotolab.com/prints.aspx rather than maintaining the printer itself.
