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Comment by HeavenFox | Hacker News Reader

My family printer was bought in 2008. I parted with it when I left for college. After getting by with school printer, office printer and public printer in my apartment building, I finally bought my own after the pandemic. Oh boy are modern printer marvelous. Compared to my old one, the Brother laser printer I bought

- Is super compact and can be left anywhere

- Connects to home network by WiFi and supports AirPrint etc

- Supports automatic duplex printing

- Has an automatic document feeder that supports automatic duplex scanning

- Has a large touchscreen so I don't have to navigate four levels of menu just to copy something

- Can print from and scan to my Dropbox

- Has never jammed

All for just $160 refurbished.

While I am a big fan of reducing e-waste, if I had an old printer and use it with some frequency, I would seriously consider upgrading, now that I know what I am missing out :)

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My experience with printers was always that Brother ones were a bit of a standout in the consumer space, so your experience might not be representative of the whole consumer market! I haven't bought any printers in years though so maybe things in general have got better.

Just to piggyback on this comment: whatever you do, don't get a Samsung. I have a Samsung printer, and the Wifi just stopped working. As in, it would lose its settings for no reason. Currently I've given up on trying to fix it, and put the PDFs on a thumb drive and walk over to the printer to print. It is painfully slow. I hate this printer. If I hadn't bought new toner cartridges for it last year, I would have gotten rid of it, the PoS.

It's a Samsung C460W, BTW.

I was super tempted by a Brother printer but ultimately went for a more expensive hp one.

The thing is, hp driver support in linux is just the best, hands down.

People should also be aware that having an old printer running 24/7 can waste a pretty significant amount of electricity.

I got a Canon image class laser printer a few weeks ago. So far, so good. I intend to keep it for years and am looking forward to not having to deal with faded and smeary prints like with inkjets.

Which model is this? My Brother doesn’t have scanning and I wouldn’t even call that compact.

Probably their basic black & white laser printer. The exact model number changes over time whenever they introduce the next generation. I'm sure if you need color printing they have an option for that too for a bit more money.

If you go to the Brother website and view all laser printers, sort by cheapest, select the filter for print/scan/copy. There are two options with different model numbers and a small price difference, one has a basic multi-character LCD display and one has a touchscreen (apparently with a faster processor, since the touchscreen one is rated for a few more pages per minute).

I purchased the LCD display one around 2 years ago, can't remember the model number of that one, and then gave that to someone else and got the HL-L2395DW a few months ago. Both were around $160-170 new. It seems the touchscreen has gone up in price recently to $200; the HL-L2390DW alternative is still $170.

Linux support is pretty good. Both printed out of the box (use ipp / AirPlay when adding to CUPS instead of going through the drivers); for the new one I had to manually install the drivers to get scanning to work. Was pretty easy.

Make sure the model has generic drum (which also has the waste toner container built in) and toner cartridges.

Offhand TN-450 and DR-420 were the generic Brother toner and drum parts that everyone has a generic version of for cheap.

I got the L2740DW. Granted it's by no means small, compared to the old HP monstrosity I'm used to it feels tiny

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