this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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Thinking about my most recent desire to have a printer, which I haven't had in many years, I was building a bed, and it would have been nice to have a cut sheet printout to take to the garage. Instead, I used my tablet, which worked well enough.
It's so rare that I use paper for taking notes, I have to track down something to write on, often it's an envelope.
It'd be nice to have a printer around for occasional use, but I'm afraid the ink would dry up between uses.
Get a cheap laser printer. The toner won't dry out, and you can get a very reliable printer for cheap. The Xpress series from Samsung was cheap and very reliable. Unfortunately, Samsung does not manufacture printers any more and their printer business was bought by HP. I have no idea how new HP models compare to the old ones.
I'd probably look at Brother, a monochrome laser printer can be had for $120, and Brother generally has a good reputation. If you want to print in color, that'll be more expensive of course. Honestly, I haven't had a color printer in 11 years and I don't miss it, but YMMV.
I don’t know about brother anymore. I have one I bought because it would work with 3rd party ink. I updated the firmware and am now locked out from using anything but brother. I would up finding a hack to get it to stop checking the ink level, so I can at least print, but it’s a temporary fix (have had to do it a few times), and it makes it unable to tell me how much ink is left. No big deal, I just run the cartridges dry, but it’s less functional than when I bought it..
Nutshell, I used to trust bother, not anymore so an open option is a big desire of mine. If this is halfway decent, I’ll pick one up.
Will a factory reset get rid of the firmware update(s) on your model? It's not guaranteed but sometimes that will get you back to where you started.
If it does, all that's left to do is to completely close down any automatic update path (network access to internet, cable access to internet-connected PC, whatever applies to your situation). Yes, you can turn off automatic updates in settings, but on newer models especially that's not the guarantee it once was, esp on Windows machines with bidirectional printing features enabled: Windows will force update the printer itself. Anymore I set all my printers to wireless and then block them by MAC address at the firewall.
No, I think I can downgrade it, I need to find an older version of the firmware as they don’t have it available anymore. I think I need a 2024 version.
I do have auto updates turned off, I should just block it at the router.
That should do the trick. Good luck.
I've had a monochrome Brother laser printer for about 14 years now. Still using the original toner that came with it, though it's down to about 20% or so. Prints every time I need it which isn't very often, but when I need to print something, I actually need to print it.
Having been an IT guy for a very long time this is my recommendation to everyone. Buy a cheap laser printer for your home. Ink jet is garbage it will piss you off every time you want to print something, it's a trap. Go with whatever brand you want, but brother is the one I'd recommend most
In my home I have a brother color laser printer, it may have run over $300, I don't recall. But I don't recall because I think I bought it 15 years ago and it still works just fine every time I need to print. No regrets.
If you're just printing documents and stuff, laser is fine, but they do look quite bad for art prints, which is the main use case these days for inkjet.
Remember to include the price of a new toner cartridge when looking for a cheap laser printer. Some become quite expensive when you include it.
When I bought a small office laser printer for making stickers it took me four years before I needed to change the cartridges. It only came with those partially full ones too. Unless you're printing dozens of full color sheets a day the cost of cartridges is likely a minimal consoderation
I once bought a Xerox for very cheap for office work. Buying a brand new Brother was cheaper than buying toner for it.
You could if you want. But then again, remember that most people will be replacing that toner cartridge only once every 2-5 years. So it's not like a major expense.
It depends on how much you print of course, like if you're a teacher or something, you might print a lot.
I wonder how much of the ink drying up thing is designed in to modern printers to waste ink in head cleaning? I suspect that someone with the consumers' best interest at heart may be able to find a solution to that problem.
Worse than that, the printer I have, a Brother MFC-J895DW, actively eats its own ink on purpose (in the name of keeping it from drying out). Like most people, we print infrequently and I noticed that like every other time we would go to print we would be out of ink. After a bit of searching I found out this was a known thing and it was done on purpose.
I now turn the printer on to print and off when not printing. I haven't bought ink in over a year. Yeah the print heads need to be conditioned if you go to long between prints, but so what.
That's just what happens when you have stuff dissolved in solvents.
But couldn't you just cap it off and flush the line after each use?
Maybe? Sounds like a tricky thing to automate and then you also have solvent as an additional consumable. This is a problem even with huge industrial inkjets.