My resin printer was powered off with resin in the vat for about 7 months. Last night I turned it on, gave it a job, and I woke up to a successful print.
My inkjet printer was powered off for 2 weeks. Last night I turned it on, gave it a job, and was instantly disappointed with a streaky, blotchy output. Running a clean cycle just made the output worse.
Why are 2D printers so terrible despite decades of development? What are some 2D printers this community has had good interactions with/would recommend?
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Brother laser printers are great.
I’ve heard the lady who fucked up HP has been hired to the board of Brother, though. So who knows how long this sort of thing will last.
Thank you, brother. Which brand do you recommend?
I got mine almost a decade ago and I’ve replaced the toner once, never had issues with it.
It just works
Yup.
A few years ago I needed to print something for a job I was applying for and I had three inkjets, none of which worked. Replacement ink wasn’t even a guaranteed solution and was going to cost three figures anyway…so I started looking into whether there was a better option.
Ended up buying a Brother color laser printer. A bit spendy, but now when I need to print something after not printing for months, I just literally tell it to print and it gets it exactly right, first try, every time.
Zero regrets.
Second! I love my brother
First, avoid inkjets. They need to be used regularly to work reliably. If you don’t print, they will periodically blast ink through, till they run out. If you leave them turned off, the ink dries, and they clog up.
For day to day. A colour laser is the best bet. More expensive, and they struggle with photos, but they just keep on going. 1 refill costs 5x the cost of an inkjet, but will do 50x the prints.
If you need photos, a dye sublimation printer is the way forward. They are expensive to run, but create professional grade photos. The consumables also keep indefinitely.
As for brands. Brother is the best bet. They quietly produce the battle tanks of printers. They do 1 job very well, no faffing, no unnecessary bells and whistles.
In short, a brother colour laser printer is exactly what you are asking for.
At this point it might just be more reliable to print a 1 layer thick text document on my 3D printer.
I suggested that to my kid the other day. Print a few layers of white, then swap to black filament. As it was an assignment for school my spouse vetoed it :(
I just strap a marker to the head of my 3D printer and then program it to write on some paper.
Truly the best solution!
Brother laser printer ftw. I think I spent $40 on it years ago, it’s never failed after hundreds of pages, and is still on the original toner. There’s a good chance it will be the last paper printer I ever buy.
Brother laser printers are like the Soviet era Lada of printers. They are small, affordable, and you cannot kill them. No weird features that sounded great when buying, no stupid “pc load letter”, just pure core function. Keep it fed and it’ll print for 20 years.
We had an hl2030 for 15 years, and all it took to keep it running that time, was some fresh toner (which was surprisingly cheap) and a new fuser (once!). 15 years of 1500-2000 pages a year at its peak. I’ve been on dates that were more expensive than that printer’s TCO.
Same, shit just works. I don’t even want anything I print to be color, by design, because it always is terrible anyway.
Get a Brother HL-L Series monochrome laser printer. You’ll have the same experience as with your 3D printer.
Inkjet printers are only an option if you need to print in (brilliant) color regularly, and then you’re probably running a photo print shop.
Cheap inkjet printers are literally useless trash.I got a Duplex Brother SW Laser with Copy and Scan function via Ethernet… Scans to a thumbdrive connected to my router via ftp.
Yup, Brother laser printers are the way to go. Inkjets became popular with the invention of digital cameras. But unless you’re regularly printing photos, you don’t need an inkjet printer. Except for photo quality prints, inkjets are inferior to lasers in virtually every way.
A laser toner cartridge will last for ~1000 pages, and modern laser printers build the LEDs (they’re commonly still called laser printers even though they’ve used LEDs for the past decade) directly into the toner cartridges. So you replace the LEDs at the same time you replace the toner, and never need to worry about them dying or going bad over time. Even full color prints look decent, as long as you don’t need photo quality. And if you do need photo quality, just fucking use Google Photos and get print shop quality photos delivered to you in two days. You literally never need an inkjet in this day and age, because the only reason you’d need one (photos) is obsolete.
I switched to Brother after my HP updated itself when I forgot why I had a particular firewall rule, deleted it and let the printer onto the internet to roam. It pulled down a patch which added an amazing security feature to block the use of the toner that I bought. I bricked it while trying to downgrade the firmware (after placing an order for their “certified” toner). I tried returning the toner, but couldn’t and eventually took it tongue recycling center, swearing to never buy HP again.
Get a brother brand, it is the open source of printers, haven’t had a single problem with mine, ever
I currently have a Brother 3-in-1 that I’ve had for 5 years and it’s great. Sometimes the print head needs a deep clean but generally it prints and has survived some paper jams. Before that I had an Epson which was DRM’d and I despised it. It used to reject cartridges, even Epson cartridges for no reason until I got sick of the money I was wasting and dumped it. Had a Canon before that which was not DRM’d and worked fine but it just got old and started misbehaving.
Moral of the story. Do not buy any brand or model which uses DRM cartridges.
The best inkjet printer I ever owned, possibly the best printer I ever owned period, was an old Canon Pixma iP5000. It had no screen, no wifi, no networking at all, no DRM, and took ink cartridges that were literally just clear boxes of ink. I never bought a single cartridge for that thing; I just drilled and refilled the ones it came with for years. The print head itself was removable – without tools – for cleaning or replacement. You just flipped a little lever on the side and it popped out. Got a clog? Just toss that bad boy in your ultrasonic cleaner full of isopropyl alcohol and you are good to go.
I wore that thing out. I printed absolutely anything and everything with it. Flyers, handbills, advertisements, stuff for work. I used it so much I literally abraded the face of the print head off, so I bought another print head and used it until I wore out that one too. By then parts weren’t available anymore and I had to junk it.
Every inkjet I ever touched since then was bullshit. Cartridge or not. You can read my other comments in this thread about my experience with the fucking thrice-damned Epson EcoTank. I have a laser printer now.
I have a Espon ET-5150. Its worked fine so far but I wish my wife would’ve let me spring for a laser printer.
My wife specifically ordered me to spring for a color laser printer.
We decided to DIY a lot of our wedding stationery after seeing the outrageous prices dickheads try to scam newlyweds-to-be for this sort of thing. We easily could have bought a very nice printer and all the fancy paper and so forth we’d need just for the price of the invitations, envelopes, table cards, etc. (And, part time graphic designer over here. No sweat designing and cranking out some cards and table standies and stuff.)
So I bought an Epson EcoTank ET-16500. I had three of them consecutively shit the bed for one reason or another while simultaneously failing to actually complete our stationery project. Weeks wasted waiting for warranty replacements, arguing with the manufacturer, and fiddling around siphoning the ink out of the fucking things to ship them back and forth. I still have like 12 unopened bottles of ink because every new one they sent me came with more.
Fuck inkjet printers with a rusty pitchfork. All of them. I bought a Canon color laser printer while waiting for warranty replacement #3 as a stopgap. Because I didn’t have time for that shit. That was six years ago and it’s still trucking just fine. And now I use it to print all of our handbills, signage, and color literature for work also. That’s thousands of pages at a time sometimes – No problem.
I had a Samsung SL-C430W (a laser color printer) and it still work really well after 7 years, but admitedly I don’t print that much and only a really few time a photos. On the other hand I printed on a variety of types of paper, from the standard one to the decals paper to paper to print shirts and lastly to paper to print on wood and it never disappointed.
Cheap toners (from Amazon) and really robust. But I think it is no sold.
Go buy a brother laser printer. I’ve personally never had any issues with them
I have an HP inkjet printer that qualifies for their Instant Ink program. I am currently on the free plan that allows printing up to 15 pages a month for free. When the ink runs low they send me more ink (for free). If I happen to go over 15 pages/month, its only like $1 for another 10 pages, so not a big penalty.
They’re not great.
My dad signed up somehow years ago. He doesn’t even have a printer anymore. He swears he’s canceled, but I keep seeing a monthly bill. They aren’t even sending him ink. Thanks for reminding me that I need to get the bank to stop charges.
That sucks to hear. In my case I am not paying them a dime and still getting free prints out of it.
