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
Like everyone else has said – Brother brand laser printer. I bought one 5 years ago and have never had to mess with it. You can buy off-brand toner cartridges on Amazon for cheap also. I’m on my second cartridge.
I’ve had the same Brother laser I bought on Amazon in 2013 and the thing still works flawlessly every single time.
Minimum viable product. You are not buying a printer, you are buying ink and garbage hardware for used for ink drainage.
Do not buy an HP. It stands for Horrible Printer.
The products are cheap and don’t work for long and never stay paired. The customer service is the work I’ve ever experienced; worse than Comcast!
Lots of comments about brother… I have an epson eco tank printer and I love it. It uses liquid ink and it lasts FOREVER. It was around $400 when I bought it, but worth the investment. The ink isn’t really expensive to replace. It works great for my needs as a special education teacher. You have to invest in something that works well. I bought my printer after two shitty hp printers.
I want to only comment the part you say “stops working from time to time”.
Windows computers use a background service called “Printer Spooler” which often fails with no apparent reason and you have to restart this service manually or just “reboot” your computer and afterward all is fine.
Even now , 2024, the above is the 99% reason of printers unable to print.
HP printers are the worst. I’ve had a few. All with bluetooth (supposedly) and none of them have ever been able to connect with anything with said bluetooth, as hard as I’ve tried to make that happen. May be me. Three printers with crappy bluetooth seems to be a pattern though.
Tl;dr – the money is made on the ink, printer prices are a race to the bottom to get you to buy their brand so they can overcharge you for ink forever. Low prices means absolutely bare minimum quality components and cheap tricks to get you to buy more ink (like if yellow is empty you can’t print black)
Because nobody besides offices wants to pay for the quality of a machine that last. Take the original HP DeskJet as an example… it was an indestructible printer of primo quality. And it would cost about $2,700 if bought today. Even if it was only half that much due to reductions in the cost of the electronics, it’s still well beyond what anyone would pay.
There’s only so much printer it’s possible to manufacture for the piddly amount they can charge for ’em. The printer itself is already sold at a steep discount in order to sell you ink. (It might not be sold at a loss, but they ain’t rolling in the margin either.)
I’m afraid your card on file has expired, so we have disabled your printer. Also your cyan is low.
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