Looking for a decent home printer

[Skelder]

Hello, I am currently in need of a home printer. We had one(EPSON L363) but it decided it hit it's arbitrary printing limit and won't print anymore unless we payup to have it's limits reset.

 

We do not print that much, only occasionally also the quality of print does not really matter.

 

Are there any printer or printer brand that does not impose some wierd arbitrary restrictions? like requiring specific ink, or blocking you from doing a maintenance yourself and charging you everytime some limit is reached.

 

I won't mind having to pay a little bit more to have no non-sense one time purchase machine with only ink/catridge cost.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

1 hour ago, Skelder said:

Are there any printer or printer brand that does not impose some wierd arbitrary restrictions? like requiring specific ink, or blocking you from doing a maintenance yourself and charging you everytime some limit is reached.

I think Brother is the only manufacturer I haven't heard of being linked to such tactics. Mine happily uses third-party toner cartridges granted mine is like 15 years old so probably no longer representative. So far HP (which also owns Samsung's printer business), Canon, Epson, and Lexmark, all do some DRM shennanigans.  

 

Ricoh, Konica Minolta, and Xerox are more enterprise-focused which their customers typically purchase supply contracts with those printers anyways so you don't hear much about them with regards to toner/ink DRM shenanigans. 

[Daphoid]

While not perfect - in my experience you can't go wrong with Brother. Get a laser printer, only get color if you actually need it, ensure it has duplex (2 sided) printing, airprint, networking, and whatever else is important to you, and away you go.

My brother printer even has an option in it's admin UI to print past the low toner warning at the loss of quality (it's a checkbox and a printer reboot) - nice.

 

- D

[Skelder]

Thanks for suggestions. I guess I will give Brother a try

[mariushm]

10 minutes ago, Skelder said:

Thanks for suggestions. I guess I will give Brother a try

Don't get the cheapest Brother printers, get something in the mid-range or a bit above the cheapest.

Look on the brother website at the  consumables for various models , and see the rating for the drum and for the toner.

The cheapest Brother printers may have a drum that's rated for only 5000 pages and toner that's good for maybe 800-1000 pages, the mid range ones may have a toner rated for 10-20k pages and options for toner up to 4-5k pages.

 

Drum is that roller over which paper moves and picks up the black powder. Once you go over that number of pages you may start to get missing pixels, white thin vertical lines on the paper or a bit of toner leaking on the edges of the paper .. a drum usually costs around $100 to be replaced.

 

Cheapest Brother toners may have chips that count the pages and won't let you refill the toner (you can get a retail toner once and then buy reset chips from eBay but it's a hassle), on the mid-range and higher end there are toners which have no protections or which use plastic gears to count the pages  - the starter toner may have those plastic gears missing so you can't refill it but you can buy the plastic gears from eBay, or you could get a retail toner once which includes the plastic gear and then you can refill that toner and open up a panel on the side to rewind the plastic gears in the "new toner" position

 

You can figure these out by searching google  for "brother PRINTER MODEL refill procedure / instructions / tutorial " or "brother PRINTER MODEL reset chip" to see if it needs page reset chips to refill  or "brother PRINTER MODEL toner gears" to see if you can add missing plastic gears to the starter toner and refill it.

 

 

 

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, Skelder said:

Are there any printer or printer brand that does not impose some wierd arbitrary restrictions? like requiring specific ink, or blocking you from doing a maintenance yourself and charging you everytime some limit is reached.

 

I won't mind having to pay a little bit more to have no non-sense one time purchase machine with only ink/catridge cost.

The problem is hardly anyone buys printers any more so the manufacturers do this to keep the printer price low, then make their profit on the ink/toner.

 

I've always gone HP and while they do require buying their own ink/toner, I've never hit any arbitrary limits, every model I had let you choose to continue printing after hitting the "quality may degrade" limit.

With toner I just don't think its worth buying inferior products anyway given toner if spilt is carcinogenic and a lot of unofficial inks and toners produce bad prints in comparison.  I do like to print the odd photo on glossy paper so quality does matter to me.

 

As a low usage printer myself, I didn't need to change the black toner on my last printer for 5 years and by the time the colour needed changing it made sense to upgrade to a newer model with more features (as its a multi-function, it was faster to print from minutes to seconds and the scanner quality was night/day better).

Ink based printers I found are useless for low usage as the ink dries up.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

If you’re concerned about the cost of the ink, I’d look into a laser printer.