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I bought a Brother monochrome laser printer (with built in scanner) for £250 and it was bundled with 6 spare toner cartridges. That was two years ago, we’re sti

I bought a Brother monochrome laser printer (with built in scanner) for £250 and it was bundled with 6 spare toner cartridges. That was two years ago, we’re still on the first cartridge. The printer before that was also a monochrome laser printer and that lasted nearly a decade (only got rid of it because it didn’t support wireless and I couldn’t be bothered running cables anymore). Basically, I think monochrome lasers can last forever, they always work (even if I haven’t printed for 6 months). Most people seem to buy printers with way too many features and they need 7 ink cartridges etc. I rarely print anything, but when I do I want it to just work.

stormdennis 3y ago
Mine's a B&W samsung laser. I print a decent amount but sporadically, No issues, fast and reliable and generic replacement toner cartridges are cheap on Amazon (which was where I bought the printer for about 50 quid).
kfarr 3y ago
We've had our Brother monochrome laser nearly 10 years. Still works perfectly, only used a handful of cartridges in the past decade
elorant 3y ago
I have a Lexmark E232 that bought back in 2006. I’ve printed like 90k pages and still works like a charm.
chordalkeyboard 3y ago
I was issued a Brother by the US Department of Veterans Affairs and it burned through ink cartridges, I took a semester off and the ones in the printer went bad without me printing anything; when the yellow ink ran out it refused to print in black and white even though I had plenty of black ink. Eventually it stopped working because of something to do with the drivers even though I never changed anything. I'm glad your experience, and the experiences of others here, seem to be better but I can't help but reflect on the variance every time I read an HN poster relating about their positive Brother experience since my own experience was so different.
- faster 3y ago
  If your print dialog was set for color then it requires working color cartridges. Even if the document is only black and white. I've been buying Brother printers for over 20 years and I've run into that a few times.
- ta988 3y ago
  I think OP is talking about laser printers. Aren't you talking about inkjet?
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
A friend of mine also bought a monochrome laser Brother. It was about half of what you paid; but it came with one toner, and it was only half-capacity. Already a bad start. The stock toner only lasted for a year or about 200 pages. A replacement toner costs 50€, more than a single black ink cartridge would cost, and the toner is rated for 1k pages only while the 44€ ink cartridge is rated for 2.2k. (!) In fact, for even one of the most expensive inkjet printers I can find, replacing all _4_ color cartridges costs in the vicinity of 100€. There are single color toners that are more expensive than that. It is true that for an inkjet cartridge you will never be able to print the rated 2.2k pages, specially if you don't print frequently or in long-spaced batches. A single nozzle cleanup probably wastes around 200 pages equivalent of ink, and you definitely need one after about one week of not using the printer. The math in these cases favors the lasers, albeit not by several orders of magnitude as is often claimed. Also, the same amount of ink is wasted if you don't use the printer for a week than whenever you don't use it for half a year.
- somehnguy 3y ago
  Page count ratings aside, the issue I've always had with Inkjet printers is that I print rarely - so nearly every time I go to print, I need to buy new cartridges! It isn't very fun to spend $60 on ink so I can print 3 pages because my last cartridges dried/clogged up in the last 3 months. My laser printer will sit there quietly out of the way indefinitely. Then I surprise it with a print job and it just does what I asked before getting out of the way again. Repeat in 3 months, same story.
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    > so nearly every time I go to print, I need to buy new cartridges! It isn't very fun to spend $60 on ink so I can print 3 pages because my last cartridges dried/clogged up in the last 3 months. Wait, do you know that most printers have the ability to clean these clogs (by wasting a large chunk of the ink)? You don't really need to throw the cartridge away. This is why I say that printing the rated amount of pages is difficult, since these cleanup operations waste a large chunk of the ink. In my experience, an installed cartridge does not become unusably dry even after 1 year of total lack of use. That's because I've had all 4 colors installed for almost a year and they're still printing, and they were open & already close to the expiration date by the time I bought them (amazon warehouse stuff)...
regularfry 3y ago
Depends. I had an 8-year-old Samsung fail because a foam pad on a solenoid in the paper feed mechanism degraded past the point where the mechanism could work. I got a good life out of it, but to have it fail for such a stupid reason really annoyed me.
shanebellone 3y ago
I bought the monochrome HP Neverstop (tank rather than cartridge). I totally agree... minimal features solve 99% of the problem.
madeofpalk 3y ago
See linked, also from The Verge > Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine > The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model. https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...
- MisterSandman 3y ago
  The Verge is honestly pretty great. Usually. It's the only mainstream tech news publication that feels like it's not bought out by every company (re: CNET)
  - skunkworker 3y ago
    Even though Arstechnica is owned by Conde Nast, it's still my go-to for most tech news, albeit normally more specialized in certain fields. But at least once per week they have a really excellent and in-depth article about a variety of topics.
    - mardifoufs 3y ago
      Agreed but the comments on ars articles are now sadly a cesspool.
      - imchillyb 3y ago
        The endless-summer of the net dilutes the relevancy of information exponentially every year, while also exponentially increasing the amount of non-trivially discovered good information every year. The good becomes burried by the bad, in ever increasing volume. The tasty nuggets of information being eaten by ever-larger sewer-slimes.
    - Andrex 3y ago
      Ars has always been consistently in-depth and technically insightful, somewhere in-between TechCrunch/The Verge and Phoronix/XDA Devs. My only minor complaint is that Ron Amadeo is so transparently bitter about every little bit of Google news, to the point these days he only reports the bad and very rarely the good. Like, the last news article on RCS was about 3 years ago... Right before all four US carriers standardized on Google Messages + Universal Profile (and three of them on Jibe). There's been a mountain of RCS developments happening lately but it doesn't fit the narrative of "Google is bad at messaging" so no articles are written. You can bet if RCS has even a minor gaffe, it'll get an article. (See this play out with Ars' reporting on Google's payments efforts.) Other than that, Ars is my go-to as well. I just have to mentally apply the Amadeo Bias Filter before I read any article about Google. For the record, I am also incredibly bitter about Google[1]. But I'm not a reporter. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29566313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29566313
tim333 3y ago
Similar with my Samsung M2026 laser with WiFi which still works well and cost £60. I would recommend it but HPs CEO of Hostage Situations Incorporated and Monopoly Maintenance bought Samsung printers and got rid of it.
hedora 3y ago
We have an old samsung, from before that division was acquired by HP. Instead of supporting HP’s printer business, I buy third party toner cartridges on Amazon for 25% the price. The official supplies are generally inferior. I’m not sure how much this applies to brother, but it means I pay $5-10 per year for toner. We use multiple reams of paper a year.
- zrobotics 3y ago
  Our shipping department runs on brother machines, the 6200 something. I don't recall the model number offhand, but these printers are intended for a office, they really aren't true commercial spec machines. That being said, the oldest one has a page count of 1.5m last I had looked and the only real maintenance they have needed is occasional disassembly to dust them from paper fibers. The off brand toner cartridges work OK, but they have much lower than advertised capacity. I had run the numbers 6 months ago, and the most economical option is the high capacity OEM brother units. However, my one real annoyance is the printer reports low toner well before it is actually low, we get ~500-1k pages after the low toner warning before the prints start getting faint.
robotnikman 3y ago
Thats what I got for my parents since they like to print a lot of things. It has worked great so far.
myself248 3y ago
> (only got rid of it because it didn’t support wireless and I couldn’t be bothered running cables anymore) I picked such a machine (a DCP-7065dn) out of the hackerspace's scrap pile. It's complaining that the drum is at the end of its service life, but still makes great prints. It supports wired but not wireless Ethernet. So I got a $20 gl.inet router, glued it to the side of the printer, and tapped the internal 5v power point (the schematics are easy to find) to power the router. It comes on when I turn on the printer, and their bootup times seem agreeable enough; the router is configured with WDS so the printer gets DHCP off my main WLAN and Just Works™. It took a few hours to find the power trace and perform the surgery, but I love not having an extra power brick.
nashashmi 3y ago
I know somebody who works at Brother and they were upset at how little innovation happens at Brother. So they asked the CEO about working on some of them or newer items, like 3-D printers, and the CEO said we work on products after everybody stops working on them. Their entire business model is to make great basic products.
bityard 3y ago
I have a Brother monochrome printer too and it's been a great machine. I just want to caution people that while they are much more reliable than an inkjet, they still require _some_ maintenance every so often. In my case, I had to buy a new (aftermarket) drum unit, and have to go in and clean the rollers, and dust it out every one in a while. I suspect most owners don't do these things and decide to just buy a new one every 5 years or so.

stormdennis 3y ago

Mine's a B&W samsung laser. I print a decent amount but sporadically, No issues, fast and reliable and generic replacement toner cartridges are cheap on Amazon (which was where I bought the printer for about 50 quid).

kfarr 3y ago

We've had our Brother monochrome laser nearly 10 years. Still works perfectly, only used a handful of cartridges in the past decade

elorant 3y ago

I have a Lexmark E232 that bought back in 2006. I’ve printed like 90k pages and still works like a charm.

chordalkeyboard 3y ago

I was issued a Brother by the US Department of Veterans Affairs and it burned through ink cartridges, I took a semester off and the ones in the printer went bad without me printing anything; when the yellow ink ran out it refused to print in black and white even though I had plenty of black ink. Eventually it stopped working because of something to do with the drivers even though I never changed anything. I'm glad your experience, and the experiences of others here, seem to be better but I can't help but reflect on the variance every time I read an HN poster relating about their positive Brother experience since my own experience was so different.

faster 3y ago
If your print dialog was set for color then it requires working color cartridges. Even if the document is only black and white. I've been buying Brother printers for over 20 years and I've run into that a few times.
ta988 3y ago
I think OP is talking about laser printers. Aren't you talking about inkjet?

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

A friend of mine also bought a monochrome laser Brother. It was about half of what you paid; but it came with one toner, and it was only half-capacity. Already a bad start. The stock toner only lasted for a year or about 200 pages. A replacement toner costs 50€, more than a single black ink cartridge would cost, and the toner is rated for 1k pages only while the 44€ ink cartridge is rated for 2.2k. (!) In fact, for even one of the most expensive inkjet printers I can find, replacing all _4_ color cartridges costs in the vicinity of 100€. There are single color toners that are more expensive than that. It is true that for an inkjet cartridge you will never be able to print the rated 2.2k pages, specially if you don't print frequently or in long-spaced batches. A single nozzle cleanup probably wastes around 200 pages equivalent of ink, and you definitely need one after about one week of not using the printer. The math in these cases favors the lasers, albeit not by several orders of magnitude as is often claimed. Also, the same amount of ink is wasted if you don't use the printer for a week than whenever you don't use it for half a year.

somehnguy 3y ago
Page count ratings aside, the issue I've always had with Inkjet printers is that I print rarely - so nearly every time I go to print, I need to buy new cartridges! It isn't very fun to spend $60 on ink so I can print 3 pages because my last cartridges dried/clogged up in the last 3 months. My laser printer will sit there quietly out of the way indefinitely. Then I surprise it with a print job and it just does what I asked before getting out of the way again. Repeat in 3 months, same story.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  > so nearly every time I go to print, I need to buy new cartridges! It isn't very fun to spend $60 on ink so I can print 3 pages because my last cartridges dried/clogged up in the last 3 months. Wait, do you know that most printers have the ability to clean these clogs (by wasting a large chunk of the ink)? You don't really need to throw the cartridge away. This is why I say that printing the rated amount of pages is difficult, since these cleanup operations waste a large chunk of the ink. In my experience, an installed cartridge does not become unusably dry even after 1 year of total lack of use. That's because I've had all 4 colors installed for almost a year and they're still printing, and they were open & already close to the expiration date by the time I bought them (amazon warehouse stuff)...

regularfry 3y ago

Depends. I had an 8-year-old Samsung fail because a foam pad on a solenoid in the paper feed mechanism degraded past the point where the mechanism could work. I got a good life out of it, but to have it fail for such a stupid reason really annoyed me.

shanebellone 3y ago

I bought the monochrome HP Neverstop (tank rather than cartridge). I totally agree... minimal features solve 99% of the problem.

madeofpalk 3y ago

See linked, also from The Verge > Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine > The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model. https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...

MisterSandman 3y ago
The Verge is honestly pretty great. Usually. It's the only mainstream tech news publication that feels like it's not bought out by every company (re: CNET)
- skunkworker 3y ago
  Even though Arstechnica is owned by Conde Nast, it's still my go-to for most tech news, albeit normally more specialized in certain fields. But at least once per week they have a really excellent and in-depth article about a variety of topics.
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Agreed but the comments on ars articles are now sadly a cesspool.
    - imchillyb 3y ago
      The endless-summer of the net dilutes the relevancy of information exponentially every year, while also exponentially increasing the amount of non-trivially discovered good information every year. The good becomes burried by the bad, in ever increasing volume. The tasty nuggets of information being eaten by ever-larger sewer-slimes.
  - Andrex 3y ago
    Ars has always been consistently in-depth and technically insightful, somewhere in-between TechCrunch/The Verge and Phoronix/XDA Devs. My only minor complaint is that Ron Amadeo is so transparently bitter about every little bit of Google news, to the point these days he only reports the bad and very rarely the good. Like, the last news article on RCS was about 3 years ago... Right before all four US carriers standardized on Google Messages + Universal Profile (and three of them on Jibe). There's been a mountain of RCS developments happening lately but it doesn't fit the narrative of "Google is bad at messaging" so no articles are written. You can bet if RCS has even a minor gaffe, it'll get an article. (See this play out with Ars' reporting on Google's payments efforts.) Other than that, Ars is my go-to as well. I just have to mentally apply the Amadeo Bias Filter before I read any article about Google. For the record, I am also incredibly bitter about Google[1]. But I'm not a reporter. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29566313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29566313

tim333 3y ago

Similar with my Samsung M2026 laser with WiFi which still works well and cost £60. I would recommend it but HPs CEO of Hostage Situations Incorporated and Monopoly Maintenance bought Samsung printers and got rid of it.

hedora 3y ago

We have an old samsung, from before that division was acquired by HP. Instead of supporting HP’s printer business, I buy third party toner cartridges on Amazon for 25% the price. The official supplies are generally inferior. I’m not sure how much this applies to brother, but it means I pay $5-10 per year for toner. We use multiple reams of paper a year.

zrobotics 3y ago
Our shipping department runs on brother machines, the 6200 something. I don't recall the model number offhand, but these printers are intended for a office, they really aren't true commercial spec machines. That being said, the oldest one has a page count of 1.5m last I had looked and the only real maintenance they have needed is occasional disassembly to dust them from paper fibers. The off brand toner cartridges work OK, but they have much lower than advertised capacity. I had run the numbers 6 months ago, and the most economical option is the high capacity OEM brother units. However, my one real annoyance is the printer reports low toner well before it is actually low, we get ~500-1k pages after the low toner warning before the prints start getting faint.

robotnikman 3y ago

Thats what I got for my parents since they like to print a lot of things. It has worked great so far.

myself248 3y ago

> (only got rid of it because it didn’t support wireless and I couldn’t be bothered running cables anymore) I picked such a machine (a DCP-7065dn) out of the hackerspace's scrap pile. It's complaining that the drum is at the end of its service life, but still makes great prints. It supports wired but not wireless Ethernet. So I got a $20 gl.inet router, glued it to the side of the printer, and tapped the internal 5v power point (the schematics are easy to find) to power the router. It comes on when I turn on the printer, and their bootup times seem agreeable enough; the router is configured with WDS so the printer gets DHCP off my main WLAN and Just Works™. It took a few hours to find the power trace and perform the surgery, but I love not having an extra power brick.

nashashmi 3y ago

I know somebody who works at Brother and they were upset at how little innovation happens at Brother. So they asked the CEO about working on some of them or newer items, like 3-D printers, and the CEO said we work on products after everybody stops working on them. Their entire business model is to make great basic products.

bityard 3y ago

I have a Brother monochrome printer too and it's been a great machine. I just want to caution people that while they are much more reliable than an inkjet, they still require _some_ maintenance every so often. In my case, I had to buy a new (aftermarket) drum unit, and have to go in and clean the rollers, and dust it out every one in a while. I suspect most owners don't do these things and decide to just buy a new one every 5 years or so.