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HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

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Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#82

I've had great luck with both Xerox and Brother printers. Both laser and inkjet. No vendor lock in, no funny business.

FWIW, Xerox inkjets were what drove me to Oki's color lasers. They erfectly good printer that they stopped selling ink for after only about a year. Knockoff ink cartridges are just money flushed away. I'm done with Xerox.

Brother's printers are reliable, but have some of the worst setup and UIs in the industry. "Actively User-Hostile" is not going too far...

Canon and OKI for me, please. They just work.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#83
post #60
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the best Linux support has been from brother. Also, their printers seem more light weight (in a good way), and their compatible ink is cheaper. Good for basic documents etc, but probably not for printing photos.

OKI has absolutely the best color laser (really micro LED strip) printers, and they work flawlessly with PCs, Macs, or Linux, PCL, PS, or native, and wired or wireless (depending on model). I swore off all inkjet printing after buying my first color OKI over 20 years ago, and that decision has saved me thousands in ink and uncounted hours of frustration as I watched that ink being spewed out to clean clogged printhea…

Looks like OKI has pulled out of the America's market as of 2021.

https://www.oki.com/us/printing/

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#84

Avoid HP at all cost and stick to Brother, Cannon and Epson. HP is a company that had the privilege of having their logo on a iPod but is a complete turd at the end of the day.

Canon's Linux support is very poor. It has a proprietary printing language which needs a closed source daemon/filter to work, and it's finicky.

How finicky? If it doesn't like the version of something it forks itself until it borks your computer.

Used HP, Lexmark, Xerox, Samsung & Kyocera. All worked with Linux. Also, none of the HP printers I used created any problems during their lifetimes with me. One of them was very light duty, and I worn it down in 7-8 years, that's all.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#85
The printer space ripe for distruption. I have had really bad experiences with HP Printers, specifically related to force installing software / drivers on PCs. I consider the HP SmartPrint app to be malware as it completely locks down the printer if it detects a non-HP cartridge. Or at least it used to, before they were sued. Now it ensures you are constantly harrassed about buying genuine ink, gives false low toner messages, and flashes various warnings designed to scare consumers into overpaying for toner. I assume the same is true for all brands. I'd like to see a printer that isn't agressively marketing toner to me or at least offers it at a fair price.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#86
post #8

> Requires the HP Smart app download. > Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries > HP account required for full functionality > Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner The disclaimers, or more succinctly, the anti-feature section.

Honestly, seing printers like this over the years and everything getting worse and worse makes me feel good about having an old Brother laser printer.

It's monochrome, it's now 20 years old, but it's good enough for me.

It keeps running and running, and the toner is dirt-cheap on the market. No internet, no spyware and no IoT-secured (tm) app required.

Manufacturers like Epson and HP kind of force me into keeping this old thing alive when it eventually breaks down.

I'm so glad we got CUPS and SANE as libraries. Without them, I would have to buy a newer model with current Windows support.

The only thing that was missing in daily use is smartphone support, but an mDNS-SD service running on a little raspberry pi that shares the printer can fix that.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#87

> 250-sheet paper input tray nothing more annoying than having a half-empty ream of paper sitting on a shelf.

Unless I want to make emergency office supply trips (in fact, I don't), I have to have something on the shelf. How is a half-ream worse than a ream?

I order by the case and re-order when I've loaded the last ream.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#88
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a cheap, domestic HP1020. Absolutely fantastic piece of kit for printing text. It is from the before times, apparently it was so good it started eating into their low end commercial unit sales so they discontinued it.

How does it handle curling of paper? I had this model but it would start to curl paper if you printed more than a few sheets at a time.

Seems to do fine. I printed out a manual for a thing recently and the pages came out flat I think.

It _is_ weirdly muddy with images though bit noone is buying a monochrome printer for images.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#89

Avoid HP at all cost and stick to Brother, Cannon and Epson. HP is a company that had the privilege of having their logo on a iPod but is a complete turd at the end of the day.

Linux support for Brother printers is variable. brlaser kind of works for mine, but only with a patch, and some documents still end up producing a white page...

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#90
post #8

> Requires the HP Smart app download. > Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries > HP account required for full functionality > Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner The disclaimers, or more succinctly, the anti-feature section.

> Requires the HP Smart app download. To be able to scan your documents to your phone directly. > Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries For some advanced, Prizmo-like scan features and OCR which are probably cloud based. > Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner Considering printers at same size provides ~3000 pages, that's good. 2 years is probably printi…

I have an HP deskjet f4210 and it doesn't work with windows 11 at all. Gave my wife a new laptop with windows 11 and there are exactly 0 drives anywhere to be found for it. Can't even re-use windows 10 drivers. However, they will run you through about 5 different tools and HP accounts and personal information gathering while trying to "find" drivers for it. Sure, I get it, super old printer, but it works just fine for what we need it for, why upgrade just cause we are using a new OS?
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