The Printer That Simply Worked

“Once upon a time, I bought a Brother color laser. It never failed to do its job. The End.”
- I just bought one last week and holy shit you aren't joking. Our Canon was malfunctioning for the last 2 years, so I finally bought a refurbed B&W Brother Laser. I've never had a printer just work like this. I didn't even have to connect to it. My browser just automatically detected it, even on Linux.
  
  Printer support on Linux is honestly better than Windows.
  
  My browser just automatically detected it
  Wait, what?
- My wife would always call it World War 3 whenever I would go to print something with my inkjet. Finally bought a Brother colour laser a couple years ago. While my distrust of printers is still deep seeded, this printer and I are approaching something of a friendship.
- I was just going to comment the same. My Brother laser printer has simply done its job for the last 13 years without issue.
- My HL2270DW has been working flawlessly for nearly 10 years now.
  Connects to any PC/mac on my home network. Always prints correctly. Toners are dirt cheap
  Is OP using a 1998 cannon printer or something?
- I just bought a new printer. After reading lots of reviews, it came down to Brother color laser and Canon color laser. Consensus seemed to be Canon was equally reliable with slightly better color quality.

In all fairness, my cheap Brother laser printer hasn’t let me down at all. Unlike the HP inkjets of the past.
- I bought mine (HL2270-DW) 12 years ago for college. Last week I plugged it in after it sat for several years and printed off some stuff for family with 0 problems. I think it's only on its second toner as well.
  
  They last much longer in storage /without printing because toner is a powder, so it can't dry out. The print head of an inkjet printer (part of the cartridge) will dry out if you don't use it for a few weeks.
  
  Still the exact same printer my family has been using for the past 10 years after our old Inkjet kicked the bucket a measly 3 months after it was born. And it has seen some stuff, including being dropped at least twice, plastic film in the paper compartment, coffee-stained (for aged effect) paper, and even a x-acto knife blade that somehow ended up in there.
- Big Brother loves you. Really, those are the best printers right now.
- my wife was having some problems finding the right W11 drivers for our Brother HL-2030 and dared to utter the thought of replacing it
  I shut that down right quick
  
  Windows Update should find the right driver. Failing that, a generic Postscript printer driver should work fine. Windows should have one.
- Conversely, I have a recent-ish (<5yrs old) Brother inkjet printer that's waiting to be dumped to recycling because it arbitrarily decided that it didn't ever need to be discoverable or respond to any print requests one day, and so even though there was nothing mechanically wrong with it, even hooking up a Raspberry Pi to run CUPS over USB didn't fix the issue -- because Brother explicitly refuses to publish drivers for the Raspberry Pi, and their inkjet drivers are proprietary.
  I've since replaced it with the best-reviewed Epson printer I could find that supports a generic PCL driver, so that if Epson ever loses their minds in the way Brother did, I can fall back on an open-source implementation of good ol' PCL.
  That thing's given us no issues so far.
- My experience has also been that laser printers work a lot more reliably.
  
  Heck, even my 7 year old HP laserprinter is doing just fine, still
  Granted, I print like 70 pages a year, but that's still better than the inktjet before!

Linux/Cups. Postscript. Laser. Have never had a problem. Printers not working is a "put the logic in the Windoze driver" problem vs telling a good printer "Print this".
- My Brother laser printer/fax that looks like it came from the 90s is amazing and works with everything on default drivers. Mac, PC, Linux, Android, all of these work fine for me. The brother driver gives you more options if you care to install it, but you don't have to.
  Inkjet is a different beast. Especially the ones that don't let you print B&W if you run out of colour ink, or that check for "legit" ink refills.
  
  Especially the ones that don't let you print B&W if you run out of colour ink,
  They need the colour ink to print the tracking dots :)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170607-why-printers-add-secret-tracking-dots

Oh, you mean laser printers?
- Sadly the consumer laser printer market is in decline and a couple of companies have already exited. I'm not sure how much longer they'll be available (new).
  Home printing is a declining market overall, SMB printing has plateaued, and a lot of the die-hard laser printer users are moving away; because bringing big canisters of microplastics into one's home is less appealing than it once was.
  
  True that...
  For now, we can hope the surplus from previous generation would last.

Gotta be a Brother
- I found a brother laser printer for 8 bucks at a thrift store and it printed with linux over USB as soon as I got it home without any tweaking.
  I then directly networked it to a raspberry pi, configured it with cups and shared the printer over my network. Every device was able to discover it instantly and I can print from anything, android phone, ipad, mac, linux laptop, etc.
  It's absolutely freeing. I found an OEM toner cartridge for like 30 bucks, so I have like 2000 bw prints ready to go for like 40 dollars all in.
- I will talk shit about a lot of printers, but I've had a Brother workhorse laser for years. It's black and white. You tell it to print and it spits out pages. I don't know if they still make them that way but they used to be amazing at the very least.
  
  They do, absolute workhorses with no bullshit. Only printer I will ever pay money for.

😆Can someone make a similar one for bluetooth devices too, pretty please?
- And in the shot should be a 3.5mm plug laughing while holding money
- i never had problem with bluetooth devices
  
  You must be amazingly lucky. Bluetooth has been nothing but issues for me for 15 years of use, across a plethora of host and client devices, OSes, mobile and desktop, all Bluetooth versions, proprietary implementations (game controllers), cheap devices, expensive devices, ranges, etc. Bluetooth has improved a lot in the past 5 years, but it's still not good enough imo. A PS5 controller can't stay reliably connected to my steam deck that is docked by my TV while I am sitting on my couch, yet an Xbox controller with a wifi-based USB dongle works fine.

This looks like an office jet pro 8720 which ironically is one of the printers I've had the least trouble with.
I'm running an Epson ecotank now though because the price per page is way better.

I can't even remember the last time I used a printer
- You must not work for a company that went paperless then

This hits hard :'(

Get a Brother. My simple black and white laser printer has very strong "ME PRINT FOR YOU. ME PRINT! ME PRINT ALL PAGE FOR YOU" energy. The only beef we have is when he is all "NO PRINT. FEED ME PAPER" and then when fed he goes back to printing no problem.
- Can you share the model of the Brother printer you use?

It'd be nice if there were open source printers. Somehow we have a few for 3D printers but not 2D printers, and it is annoying as hell.
- It's because the printer heads are really hard to make, since the individual nozzles are so tiny.
- An decent SLA 3d printer (which will be much more accurate than an FDM printer) can get down to feature sizes of 150 microns. A 300dpi paper printer is hitting about 85 microns, and that's not even a particularly high resolution printer.
  Source on SLA printer feature size: https://formlabs.com/blog/3d-printer-resolution-meaning/

PC load letter? What the fuck does that mean!?
- It's really disturbing just how relevant that movie still is today.
  
  The longer I work in the tech industry, the more I empathize with it. All the warning signs were there but I ignored them 😭

it took me an hour to scan and send 2 one page forms successfully. that's about the same speed i could write everything on the pages by hand and address an envelope, so i'd say they work okay.

Brother®, I know what you mean

In an omniverse of infinite dimensions and fundamental particles, there’d be no permutation of any that would permit whatever’s being represented in the comic to exist.

We could have Forerunner-level technology and the damn printers still wouldn't work

Where programming?
- Why do you think it doesn't work?
  (Besides the users)
  
  My perception was that this sublemmy was about humoristic takes on programmers' day to day, i.e. programming-related.
  This is more IT-related, and the horse is dead and rotting.
  
  Because boss put a windows xp netbook as a print server

HP LJ 1200
F in chat

I do stuff that involves quite a lot of printing, scanning, and copying.
My goofy lil Canon Pixma MG3620 printer has held strong throughout the years.
I will scream if it ever dies, as I have zero desire to peruse the hellscape of current-day printers.
- My Canon laser multi-function works fine. Connected with Ethernet it just does its thing.
  My wife has had issues printing some PDFs from OSX but she is always too busy for me to look at it.

The author of the book never had a Brother, it seems