Brother printer is probably the best brand if you want it to “just work” but still have support.
I paid the premium price for a color laser printer scanner combo - about $450 I think - seven years ago and I haven’t paid a cent since. It’s done everything just fine.
Adding to this. Consider what your printing habits are. For me 99% of what I print are documents, and even those are rare. A $110 black & white Brother laser printer was enough to meet my demands. Been running on the original toner for a good 5 years.
I have heard so many different people praising Brother printers and coincidentally my dad got one from his work that they were just getting rid of because they were upgrading. Cannot say how good it is yet since we’ve only printed a couple of pages, but I’m excited because of all the praise I have heard.
When I was still doing IT support as a job, I hated every single printer I ever had to deal with. This was until I dealt with my first Brother. I ended up buying one for myself eventually and it’s the only brand I’ll ever recommend.
I have one, and they are great. But wasn’t there just a scandal about a recent firmware update that applied DRM to ink?
Looking into the ecotank printers
I’ve had one for a year. I print a lot, in color, and I’m impressed.
It’s good cause you can’t drm ink. And the bottles can be refilled my biggest concern right now is. Can it be used without Wi-Fi and just via usb cable and I’m looking into the linux support for it
ET-2800 does have a USB connection and linux drivers
I have the ET-2720 which I like but appears to have been discontinued.
Visited my parents a while ago who got a new Brother ethernet printer. It was available immediately from the printers menu on my Linux laptop, no installation needed or anything
My next personal printer will probably be a Brother too
Voron 2.4R2 is a great printer. All open source and fully programmable.
Looking for printing on paper but thanks for the 3d recommendation
Omg! I didn’t even think of that! Lmao. Anyways. boron are great for 3D.
A little off topic from your DRM/open source query, but since so many people are praising brother, in my opinion they are ruining their printers due to the jacked up toner cost. It’s not even just brother. Basically all the greedy printer manufacturers have all but ruined affordable laser printing. Years ago you could buy a brother printer for a reasonable cost that used toner that cost about a penny per page to print. They shrank the toner cartridges but didn’t reduce the cost so it’s not uncommon to speed a few cents a page on toner these days. Compare that with the current ink tank options and you’ll find the cost is way lower at around $.002 per page. The biggest trade off in my opinion is that you have to print to them regularly or they clog up and they are slower, but they are definitely a better value.
TL DR: greedy printer manufacturers ruined laser printers. Buy an ink tank printer instead until they ruin inkjets again.
You can buy third party toners for brother (if it comes without a chip, you just need to move it from the original toner.
Good question.
last time I saw a thread about good printers on Riddit someone said basically any 90s model resell, or LaserJets if it should be modern.
In terms of open source / no DRM tho, no clue. Maybe they just don’t exist or you almost have to build them from scratch?
Pretty much anything by Brother. They encourage self-service, have super cheap consumables, are very efficient, and have some of the best plug and play experience around.
Was talking with my coworker about this the other day and we have both been very impressed with the Kyocera ECOSYS printers one of our customers has been buying.
Brother MFC-J4440DW Colour Laser, scanner (and fax lol!) $299AUD and the toner cartridges are $39 each (x4) so ~$160 for enough toner for approximately 3000 pages. The printer already comes with toner.
If you don’t need more that 20 pages a minute, or higher than 1200x4800 dpi prints, then its hard to beat this!
