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Comment by Androider | Hacker News Reader

Buy the Brother whatever-it-is [0]. You'll have no more printing or scanning problems and can carry on with other things.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...

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They've apparently switched to the "run our good name into the ground for $$$$ phase".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

That's terrible. I've had my Brother laser printer for 14 years now, and it keeps on trucking. I have only replaced the toner twice and do use 3rd party toner. However, I do note that it says that the toner is empty well before it is actually empty (like months or even years if you don't print often).

I have an old brother laser printer/ scanner. Unfortunately the driver doesn't work since Windows 10. It doesn't recognize either scanner or printer. Windows 8 was still fine...

Depending on how interested you are in getting it up and going again, Brother in the past has been good at providing Linux drivers. I use a small single-purpose lightweight linux PC as a print server and let it deal with the driver- and then just serve the printer to all computers on my network as a network printer.

If a driver like that is available for your model it could be a way to revive it.

I wonder if that's the old "take the toner cartridge out and tilt it back in forth a few times" issue of toner getting unevenly distributed in the cartridge?

It was certainly something I tried often. Haha.

Not everything is designed to run all the way empty.

Running your car at a very low fuel level is hard on the fuel pump - it has to work hard to slurp up what few drops are left - and on many newer models if you actually run it dry the consequences can range from having to re-prime the pump to the pump grenading and sending shrapnel into the injectors, ruining them TOO.

Yeah but the pump equivalent here is on the toner cartridge IIRC

Isn't the interaction between the laser toner cartridge and drum completely electrostatic? I thought the toner just gets pulled out of the cartridge via static electricity?

When these recommendations come up on HN, It's always people who have had their printer for 10+ years. I always wonder if Brother is still the same way.

I bought a recent Brother and have been pleased with it, though I haven't yet tried to replace toner. I'm a bit worried because I've heard they do some firmware tricks with non-standard toner. I sure hope that's not true.

As long as it’s laser and doesn’t have obnoxious features it should be good. Mine is 4 years old and doesn’t have a scanner - I gotta say with mobile phone cameras and post processing I haven’t actually needed a scanner

I have a new brother printer (<2 years old). It works just fine. The quality of the printer, as a device itself, I have no complaints about. It's the DRM Toner bullshit that is the problem. Unfortunately, in the past, that kind of behavior has often presaged other things like degrading hardware quality in the future. Will Brother do the same? I have no idea. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a different company that both supplies a quality product and also doesn't do the DRM bullshit. So, in my opinion, Brother is not longer better than other companies, but it doesn't appear to be worse either. Which is more an indictment of the printer industry than anything good about Brother.

-edit- You can still (for now) get around the Toner DRM. The drm chip is pretty easy to remove and it just slots into a little spot on the toner. It's about a ~5 minute operation. So make sure to keep your OEM cartridge for now:

https://youtu.be/NzaRVEzYuz8

Even if it’s true, Brother toner is cheaper than HP :)

My 7-year-old Brother printer works well with third-party toner, I paid $29 for two refills and each lasts for 3 years or so. The printer itself was like $50 back then :) I bought it because it was cheaper than buying ink for my previous HP inkjet.

Nah, Brother is the same now.

A more useful recommendation is: buy when they are making their money from the razor, not the blades.

Most (all?) printer companies now have a range printers models where that's true. HP calls theirs a "Smart Tank" printer, Brother names them INKvestment printers. Epson was first with their EcoTank printers. I have one of them, but I know other people with other brands, and we all swear by them.

That's possibly because they aren't cheap upfront, so they tend to load them with features so you feel like you are getting something for all that money aside from the privilege of getting ripped off on ink. For example they often come with 10's of thousands of pages of ink in the box and are typically warrantied for years and have a build quality to match.

In principle, I'm fine with them offering the razor model - even "you can't scan if you haven't paid the ink tax". In practice, they never spell out on the box the Faustian bargain you are signing entering into. So once again we have big corp exploiting the "oh you didn't read the fine print" power imbalance between them and the consumer.

My recommendation: Buy a Brother Laser Printer and get a scanning app (e.g., ScannerPro or similiar) and forget about all your problems.

Second that. I have an absolutely antique Brother MFC. It prints, scans, photocopies, and it has a $20 generic toner cartridge in it that gives perfectly good print quality. The only downside is having install a 32-bit binary driver to make it work in Linux, with an extra hoop to jump through - scanning won't work until you manually install another missing 32-bit dependency. But once that's done it works. For years. It's enough to make one not hate printing at home.

And with gscan2pdf - not hate scanning too!

Little known fact, but you can scan using macOS's Preview. Just do File->Import from Scanner.

Scans from my Brother something-or-other with no apps or drivers whatsoever directly to PDF, over Wi-Fi. Perfect.

TIL. I’ve always used the included Image Capture app for all my scans.

MacOS also has an Image Capture app that's explicitly made for scanning.

The only real problem I have with it is that it wants to do a preview scan first if you used the scanner bed last (as opposed to the document feeder) and it freezes it's interface while that's happening.

I honestly hate dealing with the scanning apps. They're ok, but they're not cheap and require a subscription. I've been looking to replace them with an actual scanner.

Scope out Microsoft Lens (app)

Genius Scan Enterprise is a non-subscription "pay-up-front" scanning app that I've used (on Android) for at least 3 years with complete satisfaction. Current price 25USD but I recall paying noticeably less (I share the app with other users in my family to defray the cost). I previously owned a Fujitsu fi-5110EOX sheet-feed scanner that I thought was the pinnacle of scanning goodness, but when it died after 15 years, Genius Scan proved a more than sufficient replacement for me[1], such that I returned the new Fujitsu sheet-feed scanner I'd bought to replace it for a refund.

I have no affiliation with any of the products I've mentioned above, just a user.

[0] https://thegrizzlylabs.com/enterprise/

[1] NB: my use case does not involve a significant amount of scanning high page count documents.

Why not just use the OneDrive app? I just scan directly in that app.

Yup. I’ve had the HL-2240 printer for at least a decade. I’ve changed the toner once during that time, and that was pretty recent. It’s boring and reliable.

I bought a stand-alone Brother feed scanner that I’m also happy with, but for occasional scanning, phone apps do quite well these days.

If I want to print something in color, I’ll go to a print shop.

Brother laserprinters only here: two at my wife's SME, one here at our home here, one at our vacation place but... As someone already commented they've also started playing nasty.

It's still probably going to take a few years before they reach HP level of suckage but apparently it's coming.

I used to have a Brother laser but now have a Kyocera color laser MFP, it works beautifully so that’s another good option.

Also a networked printer is a lot less faff if you have a lot of Linux machines at home, from a drivers perspective.

Huh, thats the one I ended up grabbing on a whim for my parents from officemax when their old one kept giving them problems. They have not complained to me about it since, in comparison to the previous 3 printers we tried.

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