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Switched to a Brothers printer well over a decade ago that uses toner instead of ink and couldn’t be happier.
by enonevets 5y ago
Switched to a Brothers printer well over a decade ago that uses toner instead of ink and couldn’t be happier.
- hughrr 5y agoI use HP toner and expense it :)
- egberts1 5y agoBrothers, and never looked back after 15 years.
- TacticalCoder 5y agoSame. B&W laser Brother MFC-7320 here since I don't know how many years. Once in a while a new toner and the thing keeps happily cranking.
- ekianjo 5y agoyeah and they have decent Linux support too.
- phoronixrly 5y agoI don't think shipping a binary CUPS filter you're just supposed to trust counts as good Linux support. Never buying a printer without a fully working PPD without blob dependencies.
- b112 5y agoThanks for mentioning this. Is there no OSS PPD?
- phoronixrly 5y agoMy experience with Brother printers has always included having to download a package containing a PPD + binary blob from their support site after someone blindly bought one because they are cheap/someone suggested them. Always check before buying if you stand by good OSS support.
- netizen-936824 5y agoWhich companies have good oss support in terms of printers?
- JoshTriplett 5y agoHP ships Open Source support for just about every printer they provide. (You have to bypass the pile of steps in the on-printer portion of setup that desperately want to push you into an ink subscription, though.)
- b112 5y agoAlways check before buying if you stand by good OSS support. I typically always do. I have a 20 year old HP colour laser, but it is showing its age. All the praise for Brother printers on HN, somehow short circuited, bypassed my check-it filter. Thanks for kicking it back in gear.
- xioxox 5y agoI would check the model. An MFC-L2750DW printed for me from Ubuntu without installing anything.
- kalleboo 5y agoTo get a Brother laser working on FreeBSD CUPS I used a community PPD from openprinting.org. Black and white only though (which is fine for our needs)
- mshook 5y agoSo what kind of printer do you buy then?
- syshum 5y agoI have been printer free / paperless for over a decade now. I am not sure why printers are even needed anymore
- wyclif 5y agoWhat if you need to print pamphlets, booklets, or place cards? What about your academic thesis?
- throwaway2331 5y agoGo to a print shop/Staples. Whatever you're printing will look 100% better/more professional if you get someone else to print it using commercial tools. Printers are cool if you need to quickly print some black-and-white papers in a jiffy. But anything more than that (and even that) is never going to compare to getting it properly printed. It's like filming video with your phone: it will always pale in comparison to an actual, video-oriented camera.
- wyclif 5y agoWhat if I don't want to go out, or what if I don't care about quality and what I need isn't about quality anyway...just wanting to print an essay on paper that I can use for pen edits?
- throwaway2331 5y agoThen buy a printer, man. I said it right there: > Printers are cool if you need to quickly print some black-and-white papers in a jiffy.
- syshum 5y agoI do not have a need for any of those things....
- calcifer 5y agoYou seem to be conflating Linux support with FOSS support. They have nothing to do with each other.
- phoronixrly 5y agoEven if I was, don't you think that good Linux support would require the drivers running on architectures different from x86? For example you can't use this printer on a Raspberry Pi: https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadtop.aspx?c=us_ot&lang=en&prod=dcp395cn_all https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadtop.aspx?c=us_ot&lan... You get a choice of a deb or an rpm packaging the following blob: > brcupsconfpt1: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.2.5, stripped
- ekianjo 5y ago> For example you can't use this printer on a Raspberry Pi very uncommon use case...
- joepie91_ 5y agoNot really. RPi printing server setups are somewhat common.
- gunapologist99 5y agoYou can normally use a generic PCL or PS driver (or another brother cups driver), if it's a Brother laser printer. If it's an inkjet, YMMV.
- tadfisher 5y agoBrother MFCs support IPP Everywhere (aka AirPrint), so you shouldn't need drivers in the first place. If the UI doesn't let you use the IPP Everywhere driver, you can add it with lpadmin -p myprinter -E -v "ipp://<address>/ipp/port1" -m everywhere The printer's web interface should give you the exact IPP/AirPrint URL to use.
- Ansil849 5y agoI switched to a Brother printer not only because of the toner/ink issue, but because it was the only model which afforded a straightforward USB printer. No useless bells and whistles, not even WiFi, which I neither need/nor want in a printer. It has been the best printer I ever bought.
- Siira 5y agoMy Brother printer's Bonjour server is wonky, and sometimes the only way it works is if I myself start advertising its IP on Bonjour. Even that doesn't work perfectly, e.g., double-sided printing does not work.
- csdreamer7 5y agoHow good are the drivers with Linux? A family member bought both an Epson and a large flatbed HP printer in the past few years. Neither of them work (recognized, but do not print) while my much older (over a decade and a half) HP printer does work including scanning.
- maratc 5y agoWith Brother printer here, WiFi works to print straight from iPhones and Androids. This works excellent for apps that otherwise make you mail a pdf to yourself. The initial WiFi setup was done straight from the printer using buttons. Never asked to install any driver. Hands down the best one I've ever had.
- rmbyrro 5y agoI have an EPSON MFP, had the exact same experience. Their mobile app integrates with everything I need and the amount of control I have over printing settings is great. They introduced recharging cartridges, dropping ink prices by an order of magnitude, while still keeping ink quality very high. Third party ink quality was always hard to predict, I prefer relying on the manufacturer's. I'm happy with their approach.
- maratc 5y ago
- quijoteuniv 5y agoSame… but i still get low level ink warnings when using non brother cartridges which is slightly annoying
- praptak 5y agoSadly, not my experience. I bought a Brother HL-L3210CW an my advice is to avoid it. Cartridges have chips and the printer randomly stops recognizing the third party ones. The official service provider told me it's the cartridges and the solution is to buy original ones at over 3x the price. I am not a happy customer.
- jessriedel 5y agoHmm, I have been using generic toner in Brother DCPL2540DW and HL-L2370DWXL laser printers for years without issue. My vague impression is that Brother printers try to detect whether a cartridge is for the correct printer model, but not whether the cartridge is Brother brand. So long as the generic cartridge has a chip that says "I am designed for this printer", it should work. (The worst they do is advise you on the website to buy "genuine Brother ink" because of the increased risk of jams, cloggings, etc with generics. Im sure this is overplayed, but its not an altogether imaginary risk.) Is it possible that your generic cartridge is just crummy? There really are a ton of Chinese generic cartridge brands, and it would not be surprising if some are crap. Maybe try a different brand of generic?
- praptak 5y agoI cannot rule this out. This happened twice so far, with a different cartridge brand each time. Also, the last time two slots failed at once, or in a very short timespan (black and yellow). Unfortunately I don't remember which slot failed when it happened for the first time. So, the data suggests it's the printer but as always, more data is needed.
- alanfranz 5y agoPlease, try being a bit more accurate when answering on HN. Your Brother printer just happens to be a laser printer, most manufacturers offer them, you can buy Canon laser printers as well. They’re usually placed in an higher price bracket, though, so the economics are different (printer price is likely not subsidized). The brand has nothing to do with the tech, though. And AFAIK it’s possible to add chips to toners, just the same way as you can have chipless inkjets.
- credittw2021 5y agoHistorically, Brother has done a better job of getting affordable lasers or laser like printers out to consumers. Canon rested on their laurels and played catch up afterwards (much like they did in the mirrorless camera space)
- alanfranz 5y agoThat's totally possible, but laser tech exists beyond Brother nevertheless. And Brother does sell inkjets as well; so there's no 1:1 match between "Brother" and "toner".
- enonevets 5y agoI was sharing what printer I got and that I was happy with it. Nothing more. Yes, it’s a laser printer. No, it wasn’t meant to be a comparison to Canon, ink printers, or any other printers. I’m not sure why you felt like I was trying to compare them.
- alanfranz 5y agoSo, what was your contribution to the discussion? The article is about Canon inkjets, mostly consumer ones. You said: "Switched to a Brothers printer well over a decade ago that uses toner instead of ink and couldn’t be happier." So, you seemed (I may have been mistaken, but your statement was far from being clear and explicit) to make quite an apple-to-oranges comparison. First, you were likely comparing products from different price brackets, then, you were comparing products with different technologies. How does the brand matter? But the first thing you said was "Brothers", as if it was the most important and relevant info. You really seemed to imply that "Brothers" is what matters here. If you said "I switched from low-end inkjets a decade ago, now I use SOHO laser printers - mine happens to be a Brother one which I find great", that would have been perfectly fine to me. Or even if you said "Canon low-end inkjets are crap - buy low-end Brother inkjets and they're far better!" - all of those are great contributions. Yours wasn't.
- franga2000 5y agoEvery time there's talk of printers on HN someone inevitably praises Brother, so there must be something to it. I'm getting really sick of HP's unnecessary and horrible software so once my MFP inevitably dies due to some minor but entirely unfixable issue, I'll definitely be looking into Brother's stuff.
- jessriedel 5y agoI bought two HP printers, hated them for the standard reasons, then read HN comments praising Brother printers, bought two of those, and have since been very happy. This experience led me to permanently distrust Wirecutter recommendations, as they (currently and for many years) have listed HP as their #1 recommendation for both lasers and inkjets.
- ThenAsNow 5y agoHere's a contrary voice for an underappreciated option, despite the villain in this story. I wanted a networked color laser MFP that could be used from within Linux without proprietary binary drivers, i.e., needed to natively support PostScript and have PPDs available. I did not want to give HP any business given what it has turned into. Canon has color "imageClass" devices that fit this bill. I wasn't able to find a Brother unit where the PPD was self-contained, but maybe I missed something. The Brother PPDs I was able to get from their site had additional filter scripts or binaries to which they called out. The scanning function works great on the Canon via the "AirScan" SANE backend (I use it in WSD mode). Third-party toner cartridges are available. I needed support on an occasion and found competent, pleasant, non-outsourced Canon staff via their phone support line. Pretty happy with mine. Now that WSD and AirScan are popularly supported on business-class MFPs and don't require manufacturer-specific SANE backends, there are probably other choices worth looking at as well. Kyocera is another brand that seems to support first-class PostScript printing.
- katbyte 5y agoGot a small b+w brother printer for a couple 100 last year and it’s been great. Wired in with lan, everything can print to it. Solid “just works” experience.
- 5y ago