Every home printer I’ve owned, regardless of the brand, has been difficult to set up in the first place and then will stop working from time to time without an obvious reason until it eventually craps out. Even when consistently using the maintenance functions.
In: Technology
You’re buying cheap printers. Spend some coin and you can get a great printer, yes even inkjet, that works flawlessly and requires little maintenance. Brother monochrome lasers are great, but if you want to print photos inkjet is still the way to go. A decent midrange Epson photo printer requires nearly no maintenance and will self-clean the print head, keep the lines from drying up.
Colour laser printers are pretty sweet too, but expensive and have a lot of consumable parts.
Because they are robots. Name another robot that is commonly found in homes. Roomba? Also doesn’t have the best rep. Robots just aren’t that good yet. Soon though
I have a brother and it’s the first printer that has been flawless. It doesn’t turn off though and after a a couple days it goes to sleep which is annoying. So I plugged it into a smart plug that reboots it at 7am everyday. Flawless for years now
I have a black and white laser printer/scanner from Brother. Had it for years.
The thing just works. The only setup was to pair it to the wifi network. Now any device that is also on the same wifi can see and print no problem.
Here is the model: DCP-L25400W
Because the profit incentives aren’t there to make it better, most of the margin is made on the ink, which, the crappier your printer is the more likely you are to let dry out.
personally i’ve found that….just use the library is my preferred method of printing. society puts too much emphasis on “this is yours (it might suck)” and not enough on “this is ours (and it works)”
Maybe I print way less than the average person but I just dont see the value in owning a thing that, by all accounts, seem to be more of a nuisance
because they cost nothing, the sophistication from 2024 is left out of the picture when you buy stuff that costs so little
My brother printer is 6 years old, haven’t updated it. got some bootleg printer color tones from chay naw. prints black and white, maybe color. haven’t needed color in years.
I have had a sub-$100 black and white laser for 15 years. On its 3rd toner cartridge. Sometimes, it goes months without use. And then it just works when I need it to.
I have 2 hp printers one in my office at work and one at home and they are both amazing. The brother printer I also have at home works great but the colors print like crap. The hp for color printing is amazing.
One of the challenges that home printers may face is the network environment where they are set up. When setting up a printer on a home network, to make it easy on consumers, the instructions are to just connect it to the network, whether wireless or wired. One of the issues that I used to have (think mid-2000s) is that the computers would “lose” the printer and have a hard time connecting. I found that the issue was resolved by setting the printer to a static IP address inside my home network. That meant that the computers always knew “where” on the network the printer was even if the network was restarted. This does require a bit of network management, so I understand why the instructions don’t recommend it.
I honestly don’t know if this is still a problem. I have been setting static addresses for my printers for close to 20 years now.
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