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Comment by mrec | Hacker News Reader

I've been hearing good things about Brother, but all their (and AFAIK everyone else's) laser printers are still pretty hefty compared to inkjets, aren't they?

Being very space-constrained (London) and looking at very occasional use (I've managed without owning a printer at all so far) that's a bit offputting.

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Yes, they are hefty. I don't know if you can find one that's only a printer. We have a printer/fax/scanner model that's now around 10-15 years old. I can tell it's getting ready to give up the ghost soon. We have actually had to use the fax part of it recently, too. The scanner in it is terrible for anything other than scanning documents to PDF. Completely unusable for photos. (Taking a few photos of a photo with my DSLR and doing an HDR merge produces great results, whereas using the scanner produces crushed blacks and blown-out whites with no way to fix them.)

Yes, you can buy just a printer. I'm not really fond of the all-in-one devices because they tend to be a mediocre everything and not a really good anything.

I will say this about my Brother all in one black and white laser- it does everything I need it to do well enough and I don't have to fiddle around with it to get it to work. Multi-page scan direct to PDF, fax, printing over WiFi (thanks to my router for that and Brother with some decent Linux drivers)- it does everything I want it to do and pretty good.

Can say good things about brother inkjet too. Was using J5?20 (don't remember exactly):

It auto cleans head while plugged in, can take a3 paper, in emergency can print decent photo in slow(best) mode, has huge black tank, and the size is not much different from other brands a4 inkjets. It weights a ton, though

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