A little off topic from your DRM/open source query, but since so many people are praising brother, in my opinion they are ruining their printers due to the jacked up toner cost. It’s not even just brother. Basically all the greedy printer manufacturers have all but ruined affordable laser printing. Years ago you could buy a brother printer for a reasonable cost that used toner that cost about a penny per page to print. They shrank the toner cartridges but didn’t reduce the cost so it’s not uncommon to speed a few cents a page on toner these days. Compare that with the current ink tank options and you’ll find the cost is way lower at around $.002 per page. The biggest trade off in my opinion is that you have to print to them regularly or they clog up and they are slower, but they are definitely a better value.
TL DR: greedy printer manufacturers ruined laser printers. Buy an ink tank printer instead until they ruin inkjets again.
Was talking with my coworker about this the other day and we have both been very impressed with the Kyocera ECOSYS printers one of our customers has been buying.
Brother MFC-J4440DW Colour Laser, scanner (and fax lol!) $299AUD and the toner cartridges are $39 each (x4) so ~$160 for enough toner for approximately 3000 pages. The printer already comes with toner.
If you don’t need more that 20 pages a minute, or higher than 1200x4800 dpi prints, then its hard to beat this!
Visited my parents a while ago who got a new Brother ethernet printer. It was available immediately from the printers menu on my Linux laptop, no installation needed or anything
My next personal printer will probably be a Brother too
Brother printer is probably the best brand if you want it to “just work” but still have support.
I paid the premium price for a color laser printer scanner combo - about $450 I think - seven years ago and I haven’t paid a cent since. It’s done everything just fine.
Adding to this. Consider what your printing habits are. For me 99% of what I print are documents, and even those are rare. A $110 black & white Brother laser printer was enough to meet my demands. Been running on the original toner for a good 5 years.
I have heard so many different people praising Brother printers and coincidentally my dad got one from his work that they were just getting rid of because they were upgrading. Cannot say how good it is yet since we’ve only printed a couple of pages, but I’m excited because of all the praise I have heard.
When I was still doing IT support as a job, I hated every single printer I ever had to deal with. This was until I dealt with my first Brother. I ended up buying one for myself eventually and it’s the only brand I’ll ever recommend.
It’s good cause you can’t drm ink. And the bottles can be refilled my biggest concern right now is. Can it be used without Wi-Fi and just via usb cable and I’m looking into the linux support for it
Pretty much anything by Brother. They encourage self-service, have super cheap consumables, are very efficient, and have some of the best plug and play experience around.
Oh yeah, my mom has been running a fax/inkjet printer from Brother for a good part of a decade. Ink is super cheap, and it works really well. Only downside is that printer isn’t networked.
I ended up getting her a used network printer before those dongles existed. She’s just stubborn with what she will use. Honestly, I might just buy her a replacement laser printer and toss out all the old ones at some point. She finally admitted not needing a fax anymore a couple years back.