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Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean 'a thing'? They're hugely popular in offices and increasingly in residential environments as people (very) slowly pick up on the offensive economics of feeding a bubblejet.

I picked up a Brother (L3510CDW) colour laser + scanner a few years ago. It was slightly more expensive than a bubblejet, but consumables and maintenance will mean TCO is way lower. Brother seem to have some of the better support for GNU/Linux & CUPS these days - this thing Just Worked (over the network, too) on Debian with I think one package from the standard repos.

Also, the printer from your childhood was limited to black and whatever colour paper you fed into it, not black and white.

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>> What do you mean 'a thing'?

I meant ‘are they being produced anymore’, ‘would you still recommend them’, etc.

>> Also, the printer from your childhood was limited to black and whatever colour paper you fed into it, not black and white.

I wouldn’t have known - it’s not exactly like I was the person purchasing the toner, and I was simply told by my Dad that it printed in black and white only.

At that age, I was just grateful to be able to print my Winnie-the-Pooh fan fiction. :P

Fair enough. I'd looked at your profile and assumed you'd have come across plenty of laser printers at large orgs like LEGO & Universal Music. I guess the swathe of energetic replies to your first question have now convinced you, in any case.

It's a bit of a trope, people calling monochrome printers black & white -- they don't print the white areas, of course. Some light-yellow paper would have been appropriate for the fanfic. : )

Laser printers have been the most versatile B&W printing tech more or less since they were invented, and the best-looking for most of their existence.

For photo prints, you are far better off just paying per page for commercial products, though color lasers are pretty good for simple things like colored charts. A really good color printer costs a lot; it's far cheaper to rent the use of one when you need it.

I used an HP LaserJet 4+, upgraded to 4M+ by adding a PostScript board, and adding memory to get it into the 30-something MB range. That was 12 ppm printing speed. I replaced it with a much-lighter Brother HL-2140 (22 ppm) when I had owned it for about 10 years, during which I replaced the toner once. The Brother is now almost 10 years old, still working just fine, though I have replaced the toner twice.

I could replace it, but why? It still does what I bought it to do.

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