Any time a relative asks me which printer they should buy, I tell them to get the cheapest Brother laser printer they can find without wifi. I mostly do this to save myself support calls, but it's also the printer I use in my own house.
I bought the cheapest Brother laser printer in the early 2010s because someone on a forum gave me this same advice. It has worked without issue ever since.
A few years ago I plugged it into a Raspberry Pi so that I could share it via CUPS to all the family's PCs. This has also worked almost without problems (the exception being it had to be reconfigured a few times on my wife's Apple laptop). A year or so later I realised that while connected to wifi I can print from my Android phone. The phone found the CUPS server and the printer without me doing anything at all and it has never gone wrong.
A (very) recent HP inkjet firmware update just broke all inkjet cartridges older than about 18 months. Including cartridges from HP.
Neither the on-device or OS mediated error messages explained this. I only figured it out from other angry users on reddit.
How was my mom supposed to have figured this out? She didn't know that her printer had updated itself a few days earlier. She doesn't even know what a firmware update is.
In a world of class action suites over batteries, chargers, keyboards, etc., why isn't HP being sued?
I kinda did this. Cheapest Brother printer, but with WiFi. Which is exclusively how we use it. Been flawless, printing from windows laptops, macbooks, iphones...
A few years ago this is what I did. Got the cheapest Brother laser printer. Happened to have wifi, but managed to disable it. It's been working solid via cables for years.
wikfwikf|3 years ago
A few years ago I plugged it into a Raspberry Pi so that I could share it via CUPS to all the family's PCs. This has also worked almost without problems (the exception being it had to be reconfigured a few times on my wife's Apple laptop). A year or so later I realised that while connected to wifi I can print from my Android phone. The phone found the CUPS server and the printer without me doing anything at all and it has never gone wrong.
oblio|3 years ago
Besides the fact that I never printed anything from my phone.
It literally required reinstallation (not restart!) to print again, every time, on Windows.
It needed an HP account to be able to scan. Locally.
I just chucked it out and got a USB Brother.
Koshkin|3 years ago
You can use Windows apps to do the scanning without creating an HP account.
specialist|3 years ago
Neither the on-device or OS mediated error messages explained this. I only figured it out from other angry users on reddit.
How was my mom supposed to have figured this out? She didn't know that her printer had updated itself a few days earlier. She doesn't even know what a firmware update is.
In a world of class action suites over batteries, chargers, keyboards, etc., why isn't HP being sued?
infinityplus1|3 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
rootusrootus|3 years ago
wingworks|3 years ago
noisy_boy|3 years ago
bergenty|3 years ago
m463|3 years ago