I heard Brother was good, then I spent way too long formatting different USB sticks in different cluster sizes and formats, and never got ours to work with any of them. Don't buy Brother if you want that feature, either.
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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I have a Brother printer at work that's old enough that I don't have a single thumb drive small enough to work with it. Haven't tried in a while, but iirc it tops out at 8gb and the smallest I have is 32gb.
But it works fine over the network, so I'll just carry on ignoring the firmware update it's been begging me to install for two years.
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I didn't even know he had a brother.
When I saw this title. I thought another YouTube hardware advocate turned their back on Louis and started an anti-consumer group to fight off policy debate that Louis does. My brain is wild.
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I have a Canon color laser printer which works pretty well and doesn’t pull any of this shit. They’re probably the last one standing now.
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Go with a bottle printer, or at least a laser and get a standalone scanner for USB. Cartridges suck, literally, all-in-ones even moreso.
I'm glad there's a printer service close to where I live, I can go there and print every page for cents. There's also one on my faculty, more expensive, but still affordable. I only use my HP printer/scanner to scan documents, ink is expensive as hell.
I haven’t printed anything in years, but damn, this sucks.
Ugh.
$100 mono laser printer
Well, you probably aren't getting a $100 laser printer unless they've got a razor-and-blades model. I definitely paid more than $100 for the mono laser I have. I don't know what printers out there are gonna be fine with third-party ink (or toner), but any that do are going to cost more, because they aren't relying on ink sales to make the printer business viable.
He says that he doesn't know what to recommend any more, now that Brother has started doing this too.
I understand that Epson has some inkjet printers that don't use ink cartridges. You just pour more from a (cheap) bottle into the tank. Like, they can't implement a lockout, and there are other manufacturers that sell ink for them.
kagis
"Ecotank".
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ecotank
But if you want those, they're gonna cost more than printers that are using the razor-and-blades model and expecting to make their money on the ink.
https://epson.com/For-Home/Printers/Inkjet/c/h110
There's a list of their home inkjet printers. Notice how the "EcoTank" ones cost more than the non-EcoTank ones.
Like, one way or another, the printer manufacturer is gonna make their money. Either it's not razor-and-blades model, in which case the printer is gonna cost more but the ink is cheaper, or it's razor-and-blades and you get a cheap printer but pay more in ink and the printer manufacturer will do everything they can to lock out anyone else from selling ink for the thing.
EDIT: I'd add that I am not personally a huge fan of inkjet printers unless one really needs what they can do, like printing photo-quality images, because they have so many more issues with ink handling than do lasers. I can have laser printer sit without powering on for five years, then turn it on, and it'll come right up and work fine. Inkjet printers are prone to clogging problems.