Best printers / printer brands?

Brother lasers are pretty great.

60

Yep. We have a black and white Brother laser printer, and it's lasted* for at least five years now. Toner is so much cheaper than those stupid, tiny cartridges with not-enough-cyan.

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- I got mine as a display model when Office Depot/Max were killing off stores that were too close together and I had had no issues in the at least 7 years I’ve had it. Its a black and white printer and have used CVS or where for printing pictures the off chance I need to. I also have only bought toner a time or two over the years. Dual sided scanning and printing? For my occasional use its perfect.
  
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This is the way.

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I got a b/w Brother laser and have been using it with Windows, Linux and Android devices with no issues. It has lasted me through 6 years of university and I've only replaced the toner once. Probably the best technology investment I've ever made.

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- How many photos are you printing to not use a professional service?
  
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All Brother all the time.

34

For now at least yes. I would have said the same thing about HP 25years ago.

8

This thread is pretty much all brother 🤣

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It's the first printer I've owned that didn't make me want to throw it off my balcony

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Count me in as a happy Brother user. I used to think they were the knock off crappy printer but once I started to see more of them poo up and how much better they worked... I just bought myself an all in one laser one. Couldn't be happier. It works so well, and no bullshit in Linux either. Works there too. Hp used to be the easy way but they're not so great anymore.

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We're all brothers in Brother

8

Brother. Don’t ever look at anything else.

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as mentioned above, https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/brother_mfc_firmware_update_nongenuine_toner_now/

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- My previous Brother laser lasted me over 14 years using only the original toner provided inside the box. I merely had to shake it once a year to redistribute the toner inside it.
  
  Even if I had to buy another genuine cartridge during that 12 year run, it would have been worth it. I had to get another printer simply because that specific model had been discontinued for years, and I couldn’t find a replacement drum.
  
  Not bad for a $109 printer.
  
  HP cartridges barely last a month, costs $40 each, and if you don’t use it for a couple of weeks, they no longer work.
  
  Had to buy an HP inkjet to make custom printed shirts for an event; never again.
  
  That thing ended costing upwards of $200 for 2 months of use.
  
  I’ll buy Brother and their genuine laser toner cartridges anytime.
  
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I've been happy with my Brother printer. If you don't need an inkjet printer, I highly recommend just getting a toner printer. The toner is significantly cheaper, for a significantly greater volume (at least it was the last time I had to buy some, which was ages ago).

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Brother

21

Did well with Brother laser printer. Canon was okay.

I had setup a friend's HP printer and noticed he was constantly switching to WiFi Direct in order to print. I did him the favor of connecting it to the AP, so he wouldn't have to manually switch all the time.

The moment it got online, the printer locked itself down and refused to continue print until he paid for a subscription service on the ink.

18

My brother laser printer has been going for like 7 years. I bought a replacement drum head recently but that's the only thing other than toner that it has needed.

4

Brother. Strong, reliable, durable, in my own experience.

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Happy brother user here. We had a hp and the bastard had connection troubles then ended up only printing blank pages. Never again.

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I thought you meant happy brother as an euphemism for hp

6

Get a laser printer not an inkjet printer

Inkjet printers will crap out if not used constantly due to the ink lines getting blocked with dry ink

I've got a brother laser printer and it works great

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Joining the brother bandwagon here

13

In addition to the Brotherly love, we have multiple Samsung ML-1865W laser printers that have been consistently reliable for years with no janky printing software and I have even used the $6 or whatever bottle of loose powder to refill although the regular cartridges are more convenient.

Going laser and not HP is the most important parts.

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HP purchased Samsung's printer department about 5 years ago

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- Dammit!
  
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Samsung's printer division was acquired by HP. I had a computer drive failure and after reinstalling the Samsung (now HP) driver I had nothing but printer connection issues (printer doesn't wake up, driver says printer unavailable). Wish I had copied the original driver to a flash drive. Finally gave up and bought a Brother MFD laser. That's been working flawlessly.

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It's Brother: https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine

We went with their black and white MFC which also does double sided ADF scanning... and I recently had a bit of FOMO when a colour MFC went on sale (ofc, for like three-four times the price, and at that price I might as well just print colour at a local print shop).

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Another good thing about the Brother printers is they work on Linux without too much fiddling

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I've had a Brother MFC-9330CDW for a long time and it's been great. No driver updates in like 5 years but don't really need updates when everything works. I moved away from buying official Brother toner several years and buy a budget brand off Amazon. Basically 4 toner carts for less than the price of one official Brother cart.

11

Same model here. Love it!

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Also Fuck Epson Ecotank series.

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I've heard good things about it. What's your take?

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- The "catch pads" are where they screw you over. They have to be changed regularly. My wife has had to change the pads more than buy new ink. And then you need a $10 code to reset the counter ON TOP of the pad.
  
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- Lemmygizer's had a bad experience, but our's has been nothing but good. We've had an et-4550 for 6 years, and it's been great. It's done double duty since COVID WFH for 2 people.
  
  If I were to replace it, I'd get another.
  
  Our's doesn't have a rear load tray, which I miss. The auto-feed scanner works reasonably well. As it's aged, it's started to have feed problems with cheap, thin (18#) paper; this was solved by using 20# paper. Duplex printing is flawless.
  
  The only thing I've ever bought for it was ink.
  
  I had a color laser Brother once; that cost me more in toner and drums than refillables for this Ecotank. Speed and quality was better on the laser, but the thing also weighed a ton and was hard to move - you do not want to spill toner. I might try a modern laser again, but I've been pretty happy with our Ecotank.
  
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Brother. Mine, a laser monochrome, is 12 years old and works perfectly fine

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Brother monochrome laser

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Brother

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Brother laser , no WiFi , no color , prints perfect everytime. Cost like 200 euro. Edit checked model HL-L23100

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The ones that have a network jack, and WiFi that you can turn off are OK too!

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Also here to shill Brother laser printers

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Brother, my brother. My little HL1200 serves my needs nicely, is cheap to run with both genuine and third party toner, ~~and the company isn't run by a bunch of greedy pigs. Probably the only printer brand I'll ever buy again.~~ Fuck HP indeed.

Edit: discovered Brother plays that game too

8

I had a Brother black and white laser (I think a HL1240?) for almost 10 years and then we started having to print a ton of education related stuff for our kid and colour made sense, so I got the closest thing that I could to the colour one that I use at work which ended up being a DCPL3551CDW.

Printing a little in Windows and Linux, but more often from apps on my Android phone and my partners iPhone.

I absolutely hate printers, but they have been fine.

7

At work we sell our customers (small but high volume printing) regular brozher laser printers.
For s/w: HL-L5100DN or MFC-L5750D(W or N? Don't remember)

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20 year old HP LaserJet

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Honestly, i have 20 year old hp and epson printers and they don't have this proprietary problems modern ones have

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- I love HP! They prove that successive generations of technology are not necessarily improvements. I hate my parents HP printer. I thought I taught them better than that but apparently not.
  
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No printer. Unless you really print frequently, just use printing services from place like Staples, FedEx or UPS. Your local library probably even does printing. The drive is better than dealing with a printer.

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Brother had one for almost a decade now and not 1 issue

Ink jet printers are a cartel and a scam

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I have a Brother HL-L3230CDW. It has been a horse and has quickly become my most prized possession of all things that I own. It takes anyone's toner and produces quality without question. It works with my various Linux, Macs, Windows, and Android devices without hesitation and minimal fuss to get setup.

So that's what I would recommend. Is a good bit of coin up front but in my opinion, it has paid for itself in cheaper long run TCO and sanity in that it just fucking works.

6

Check the EFF's list of printers without tracking dots

They are probably all pretty old, but you should be able to make a good Ebay search

printer (model-a,b,c) -replacement -for

or similar

But, ::: spoiler Warning REMINDER: IT APPEARS LIKELY THAT ALL RECENT COMMERCIAL COLOR LASER PRINTERS PRINT SOME KIND OF FORENSIC TRACKING CODES, NOT NECESSARILY USING YELLOW DOTS. THIS IS TRUE WHETHER OR NOT THOSE CODES ARE VISIBLE TO THE EYE AND WHETHER OR NOT THE PRINTER MODELS ARE LISTED HERE. THIS ALSO INCLUDES THE PRINTERS THAT ARE LISTED HERE AS NOT PRODUCING YELLOW DOTS. :::

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OH, INTERESTING INFORMATION. THANKS! ;)

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Everyone talking about Brother but does the point still stands for the newer models?

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No, it doesn't. Not even the old ones, because Brother is rolling out malicious firmware updates even to older models:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

If you have one of the remaining good Brother printers, make sure firmware updates are disabled.

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- Upvote for.disabling firmware. It's a sad state when the average printer consumer needs to know how to disable firmware updates and even needs sysadmin skills to know how to block a host from the internet.
  
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- Then I'm lucky mine only been connected to Linux. Thanks for the headsup
  
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Another vote for Brother . I have a black & white laser printer (mfc-L2675). And I can get a 3-pack of toner off Amazon for around $20.

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Brother here too. I bought a used one to save some money. It did come with a small printing problem that wasn't stated in the refurb description, but it was a problem i could live with for the savings, and has worked perfectly except for that one problem ever since.

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I got myself a Xerox printer because I figured I'd be familiar with the interface since all the offices I worked in had Xerox printers, plus I figured getting a near-corporate printer might keep some of the bullshit away since Xerox would probably not want to motivate their corporate customers to switch brands. AFAICT they probably get most of their business through service, not so much product.

So far it has worked out well. I have yet to buy a Xerox brand toner cartridge, and I've had this printer for several years and I keep getting consistent high quality prints. Some of the features are not super intuitive, but I don't think it's terrible to have to read the manual once in awhile.

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I have a funny story about a Xerox printer!

I had a problem where there was ink left (this was a solid-ink printer, the ink came in blocks you could easily see), but the page count had run out and it wouldn't print. So we found the flash memory IC that held the info -- it used I2C to communicate. There's a similar IC on consumer RAM to store the manufacturer info. We swapped it in, hex-edited it so there were a huge number of pages left, and put it back in the printer.

It worked fine!

Then, days later, I noticed that the printer's web interface let you reset the page counter by just pressing a button in a web browser. So the whole hack had been completely unnecessary :D

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Actually, I work in it and had to install a xerox printer for someone's home office yesterday. Grab the driver's, go to install and it completely failed. I told the guy to restart and we'll try again tomorrow since it was the end of my shift. Guy messages me back, the printer and PC restarted and when he walked back to it, there was a page printed that said congrats on your new printer.

Fucking thing failed successfully.

3

If you want to print in oversized, I can readily recommend the Epson ET 8550.

It's a 6 tank A3+ photo/poster printer for under €800. If you got the use case for these (say as a photographer or an artist or you just want to print your own posters) then it's a really good model.
Unlike it's closest rival in the semi-professional market from Canon, the tanks make ink very cheap to operate, the vast vast vast majority of the printing cost is going to be the paper. It has a damn good printing quality even on mostly dark prints, it's quite fast for documents spitting them out in 3-5 seconds each so for personal use it's not meaningfully behind a laser. Quite variable, too, you can take the back off and feed whatever material you want in there with a huge clearance for thick plates to print on.

Sure, it's not something the average user ever needs but if you are looking for something like this, I can recommend it.

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Interesting. What's the total price per sheet on decent paper? I do a few hundred A3 prints a week.

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- It's difficult to say as a lot depends on your specific use case and what you print and on which paper.
  
  For my main use case, I bought a 100-pack of relatively inexpensive satin a3+ poster paper (so only 280g, but eh, they get put on the wall with something like poster strips or tack, I hardly need them to be thicker) which comes down to ~78cents per sheet. Ink usage is difficult to measure because my prints differ wildly in how much color is on them but my average so far seems to be ~50 cents per max quality a3+ print. So ~€1,30 per full size print if I want to be slightly pessimistic about it. But some of them were probably more like 85 cents total. 😅
  
  The ink bottles really last a long time. Check your local prices but over here they cost €22 a bottle to replace, the printer has two blacks (one is pigment based for documents and stationary and so on), CMY and a 60% Gray, they all cost the same here but might be different for you. And then of course depends on what you print.
  
  What I sadly cannot say is what A3 would cost, but scaling down you should be looking at roughly 20% less ink costs per print for full-size graphics prints, and then of course the paper you're printing on. But that's just mathing it down from my A3+ prints.
  
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Brother.

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I love my HP printer. Always prints when I ask it to every few months, uses third party toner, 0 issues whole time I've had it. Of course it's a laserjet from 2004 so it's built a bit different. I wouldn't recommend a new HP though lol.

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I have a brother laser at home and on the rare occasion I need color prints I send them to Office Depot.

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Sort of depends on what type of printer you're aiming towards. At work we've been mainly using HP Laserjet (the more expensive business class types with multiple trays) & those things are workhorses, they do last a good while. I also did work for a guy whose office still runs an ancient HP Laserejet from probably 20 years ago & somehow the thing still works (old enough to still have a parallel port on it haha).

On a related note more recently I've been testing a Canon MegaTank color inkjet to replace our dying Lexmark color laserjet, so far everyone in the office hates the Canon.

3

Same. We have dozens of M477s and M479s in production and few issues. Recently started deploying 4301s and so far so good. I bought an M479 on a good sale a few years ago for personal use and never had a problem. No mandatory subscription, hp account or any of that mess, and the toner lasts a long time. Not sure if it even will expire.

Many years ago we maintained a fleet of 4050s and 2200s (had to purchase parallel port add on cards to use those…) Those were rock solid for many years and very repairable, but at a certain point part availability and time lost doing repairs adds up and we had to move on.

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I love my cannon megatank

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Nope. They’re all shit.

Partially because ink/toner scam.

Partially because fuck you, I bought the damn thing. If I am ok with stripy printouts until I squeeze the last molecule of toner from your hellcartridge, imma do it and you can’t stop me.

Ex. I bought a $30 printer off eBay. Burned thru the toner quickly. Bought cartridge.

Turns out that this printer counts pages - and only pages - and hangs itself at an arbitrary number of the same.

Twenty pages of the cartridge were lettter sized.

Ten were A4.

The remaining pages? A fucking 5.

IOW, I printed thirty total pages of US letter. And the remainder were half-letter.

Printer doesn’t care, a page is a page.

Admittedly, printers have to sol e a fairly difficult MechEng problem - grab one and only one sheet, pull it just right, and don’t wrinkle it.

That doesn’t give the mfg the right to extort us. I literally should have 2x the A5 pages I’ve remaining bc by def each one is half of (roughly) a full page.

I’ve gone from printing general templates for my day to day, to developing things that feel native to me to draw - but I’m also a fountain pen hobbyist and truly care about paper quality, etc.

TL;dr - I just want some damn lines to color between, as I organize and journal my life. Printer manufacturers have abs ruined that. There are zero good ones.

Srsly I’d rather spend the time to carefully develop a template for day to day use and trace it (max 1 hr, tracing it then takes zero time to speak to) than deal with printers.

But that’s just me, an IT guy who values organizing in an analog world.

Oh, also, a 40ish IT guy who remembers LaserJets that were nearly bulletproof and still weren’t worth screwing with.

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Interestingly, here in Asia some inkjet printers are sold with huge (like 500ml per color) external ink tanks that take very cheap 3rd party ink. They're not terribly expensive. I see all the print shops and some businesses using them, they seem to work OK. I don't have one personally, but recently I've been tempted to get one.

If I do, I'll post about it somewhere. It sounds like it's nearly worth physically flying all the way over here, buying one, and carrying it back. If you're a small business owner and print a lot or something.

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- Looks like my next printer will be from alibaba
  
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I’m pretty happy with my Canon GX7021.

It’s pigment based inkjet, so no bleed, and it also prints thick card stock that lasers can’t. And way cheaper than lasers.

Otherwise ticks all the boxes, double side print and scan, Ethernet etc

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That's interesting & somewhat surprising, we are currently testing a Canon MAXIFY GX5020 and everyone in the office hates its color output. It's in the same MegaTank family that your Canon is in.

I'm trying to figure out if maybe Canon sent us a bad printer or if these Canons just don't do colors that well. If you have a chance can you do these two color test prints & let me know how yours does?

https://cmyktool.com/cmyk-test-print/ (download the PDF and print it)

https://printtester.com/#print-color-test-page (download the Color Test Page PDF and print it, the one with the color wheel)

What I've found is that our Canon does fine with the CMYK Test Print but doesn't do as well on the Color Test. For us in the color wheel when the colors blend from Blue into Red (e.g. the dark blue / purple / dark red) the mixed colors look sort of dull and generally off. So any images with purple or around that color come out sort of darker/dull compared to our old color laser printer. I can't really explain colors that well but you get the gist :D

When we first received the printer magenta was barely printing so all the colors were especially bad, after doing the printer maintenance functions that color at least started printing but I wonder if the printer heads are just screwed up on this one, hmm.

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- I don't have anything to directly compare against, but it seems fine to me! Then again, I bought this for productivity (not photos).
  
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Canon laser, no question.

I believe they manufacture for other brands including brother, but I just woke up and I'm too lazy to reference. You like doing online research like this anyway, so you're welcome.

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Have one of the last decent HP printers.

I've gone from being able to easily and happily recycling my laser printer cartridges to HP - print off the label and send free post - to going through some convoluted account sign-up bullshit pictures of my inside leg whilst upside down. Yeah not happening.

Eventually my toner is going to be too expensive to support and the printer scanner will break.

Thank-you for asking this question.

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92 comments huh? Well without even reading I'm sure about 90% of them say the same thing: Brother Laser Printer. This is the way. Join us Brother.

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I like my Xerox Phaser 3020. No complaints so far, doesn't even require installing drivers, and cheap non-OEM toners are widely available.

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Just got a Cannon laser with a scanner for less than $100 can't beat that.(d570 I think)

Had an old Samsung laser that was amazing.

But only get laser and only B/W. And F HP!

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I have a Cannon laserjet and it's amazing, cheap to operate, and has worked great for almost 10 years

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I had a really bad experience with a $30 hand scanner and Brother support (they included the wrong size calibration sheet in the packaging and refused to replace it, and were assholes/user blaming about it). I definitely did not want to deal with that for a $400 printer/scanner combo. I went with Xerox 6515 instead, which has been going solid for 4 years - black toner is at 25%, the rest are mostly full. I have never used it with USB, only Ethernet (plugged in network). Works great with Windows, Linux, and Mac. The scanner does great work.

Cheap printers are cheap because they make up the cost with ink. If you want something decent then bite the bullet and fork over more cash upfront. A printer designed for corporate/office work will typically be more durable - but buyer beware, may have "features" that only look good on a sales presentation. Do your research, avoid cloud storage/fax/etc.

I also got my godmother an Epson Ecotank, due to simplicity. It has been going swimmingly. Their "innovation" is (massive, mind you) refillable tanks in the printer, you must buy bottles of ink. That makes ink DRM impossible, but their ink is cheap enough that bootleg ink is unnecessary.

If you can't afford a more expensive printer right now then take trips to your local FedEx/whatever and put some money each time you do towards a decent printer. DO NOT get a temporary cheap printer, ink will easily cost you the same as a decent printer over a short period of time.

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