I'm glad there's a printer service close to where I live, I can go there and print every page for cents. There's also one on my faculty, more expensive, but still affordable. I only use my HP printer/scanner to scan documents, ink is expensive as hell.
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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I have a Brother MFC-9340CDW that I salvaged from work last year; we replaced it because it kept getting a ghost "paper jam" every time you tried to print something. Turns out the cause is an $18 board that's known to fail. Scanner still works fine though, strangely.
I also have a Kyocera FS-3900DN b&w laser printer from 2006...or somewhere around there. It does the thing, and can even be managed with a CUPS server since it has 10/100 networking.
Now to figure out how to disable automatic firmware updates on the Brother 🤔
I've always promoted commercial inktank printers for people who do a lot of printing, and people always mentioned Brother as a response, but tbh I've never really hopped on the bandwagon to shill for any particular company.
Just a good commercial inktank printer. A regular printer with all the bells and whistles is going to cost you like $100 and $45 for each ink pack you buy, you might as well just spend $450 on a printer, write it off as home office expense, and call it good.
Can't watch right now, but is there a list of affected devices?
Are there actually any good printers? I would pay more for the printer itself if you just don't try and scam me afterwards. It feels like a hopeless space.
You might have to consider buying used.
Even older HP printers are fine (and I know people love to shit on them, but they too used to be perfectly safe and reasonable choices). More or less the safe/unsafe divide coincides with the switch from printers with 2x16 character displays to ones with full colour screens.
I've got a 2012-designed (but mine is 2017-built) HP Colour Laserjet CP5225dn, it has none of the modern lock-in shenanigans.
Just gotta find one that's new enough that consumables are still readily available (fortunately this usually isn't too difficult), and in good physical condition.
I didn't even know he had a brother.
I have a Canon color laser printer which works pretty well and doesn’t pull any of this shit. They’re probably the last one standing now.
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I heard Brother was good, then I spent way too long formatting different USB sticks in different cluster sizes and formats, and never got ours to work with any of them. Don't buy Brother if you want that feature, either.
FYI an MBR table with a fat32 partition is probably what it was looking for. If that doesn't work odds are the port is broken
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Go with a bottle printer, or at least a laser and get a standalone scanner for USB. Cartridges suck, literally, all-in-ones even moreso.
Great, brother are the only ones I'll still buy.