[ale] B&W printer recommendations

[Bruno Bronosky]

I took the advice here and picked up a Brother HL-L2395DW from Microcenter
yesterday. It's great so far. I use it on WiFi. I added their .deb driver
to Ubuntu and extracted the PPD for from the package to use on Arch. It has
a flatbed scanner on top. It can scan to a SAMBA share, or Google Drive,
Evernote, Dropbox, and a few other services. It can also download and print
from all the same services. At $200 for a Black-only laser printer with
$42/$72 Reg/High capacity OEM toner... I'm probably good for a decade or so.

Thanks ALE! I was getting tired of having to syringe/pump cleaning fluid
through my Brother MFC-J835DW inkjet ~quarterly which is all I print. Time
to extract some l steppers and optical encoders! ☮️❤️🌈🧘🏽

On Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 11:35 AM DJPfulio--- via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> I've been happy with my 2008 Brother MFC-240C ... since I refused to buy
> any ink.  It is a great page scanner with auto-feeding and fax.  I use fax
> over a VoIP connection to request absentee ballots every election. It
> hasn't printed in about 13 yrs, but I didn't buy it for that purpose. I was
> tired of the ink drying out without any substantial use.  Replacement ink
> was $35, so effectively, filing taxes always cost me at least $35 for
> "supplies", even when I just filled in the forms and used a spreadsheet to
> do the calculations.
>
> An $80 Samsung ML-1740 laser printer does my normal printing. Laser toner
> lasts years - -lots of years. I'm on my first 10K pg toner still and have
> to shake it about once a year to get the toner spread everywhere.  I bought
> 2 cartridges a few months after buying the printer in 2007-ish. Cartridges
> are cheap and don't have any DRM.
>
> Many of the new printers have DRM built-in, which is a non-starter for
> me.  Canon actually told people how to break their ink DRM due to COVID
> shortages.
> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/chip-shortage-has-canon-telling-customers-how-to-skirt-its-printer-toner-drm/
>
> Any printer that needs to phone-home to be used is also a non-starter for
> me.
>
>
> On 1/27/22 02:29, Steve Litt via Ale wrote:
> > Leam Hall via Ale said on Wed, 26 Jan 2022 13:55:06 -0600
> >
> >> I used to love Brother, but now mine decided powering on isn't it's
> >> thing.
> >>
> >> Leam
> >
> > Brother's great if you use Redhat or Debian or *buntu. But try using an
> > alternative distro with a different package manager, and Brother
> > doesn't help you at all. I've used a Brother all in one for five or six
> > years now, and for scanning I still need to sneakernet to and from my
> > Brother constantly. So because I use Void Linux, I am my Brother's
> > keeper.
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