I think, for me, owning a printer is like owning a van. You're the only person your friends know who has one, so every time someone needs it you're the one they ask.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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Joke's on you; I have no friends.
Except for my wife and kids almost nobody knows I have one. But yes I have gotten pdfs from my mother in law to print.
I can't remember the last time I actually had to print something, it's either digital or you get sent whatever needs to be on paper.
I don't understand why laser printers aren't more affordable. way back in 2010 I bought a full colour Samsung laser printer for $200. Nowadays you can't find a full color printer for under $500.00
My Brother color printer was like $350 and they are probably the only OEM I'd even recommend.
Who the hell can afford a printer
Anyone can afford the printer, it's the ink that's the problem
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Home printers suck, too much gadgetry and bs involved. Industrial printers are far better at being plug and play. I dont need apps or anything at all.
I bought a Brother printer and an extra large toner cartridge a dozen years ago and it just sits there and prints things without any problems from any device on my WiFi.
So invent a time machine and get a Brother from ten years ago is my advice.
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Just get a Brother laser printer. It uses a normal power chord same exact as any desktop PC, and uses toner, same exact as any real printer that's not a money farming piece of shit ink jet.
DISCLAIMER: I have not investigated Brother or other brands for enshittification in recent years, so YMMV.
My Brother lazer color printer has just been sitting here, pooping out pages and pages of what ever I want, sometimes sitting there off for months, year after year. Still haven't changed the toner.
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I've had an operational printer in the household since around the year 2000, and I cannot fathom not having access to one. I would be a virtual headless chicken running around wailing about gutenburg or something.
Switching from Ink to Laser printers was a game changer as far as maintenance and costs (you can pick up a reconditioned laser printer from the early 2000's from a company that specializes in refurbing them and rock it for decades).
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I just print at a local library
HP doesn't even sell the ink for my (relatively new) printer where I live.
Its on their U.S site, but I can't order from that since it asks for a ZIP code.
Most BS thing I had to deal with HP ink was region-locked ink. If you buy the European version of the US ink (it’s literally the exact same thing with a different label) it will refuse to work unless you change the region of your printer. Good luck going through HP support
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"Xennials are the micro-generation of people on the cusp of the Generation X and Millennial demographic cohorts.
Many researchers and popular media use birth years from 1977 to 1983,[1] though some extend this further in either direction"
never heard of these.
We are the elder millenials, who know how to defragment a hard drive.
I'm a bit older than the minimum age to be a millenial and have defragmented many drives. when I was like 6 but I still remember watching that stupid coloured blocks diagram for hours for some 20mb or something
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We who have set dip switches or jumpers for an irq address on a sound blaster.
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There are a bunch of us who had a more GenX life than our birth year would suggest. The internet wasn't a source of study and paper writing until college. We were allowed to stay home alone after school far younger than is legal today. In the summer we were kicked out of the house and roamind the town on your bike with no method of contact was normal.
If you saw kids in an 80s movie our lives matched that more than a 90s movie.
I'm in there, I feel closer to Millenial than Gen X but not quite full Millenial. Think it's also referred to as the Oregon Trail generation, due to it being a common early PC game to play in class when they taught us computers. I still remember first seeing the trash bin on a Macintosh grow fat when it had items in it, I thought it was awesome, years before Windows.
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We’re sometimes referred to as “The Oregon Trail Generation.” We rode our bikes and ran around in the woods until it got dark, then went inside to play Nintendo.
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TIL I'm a "Xelennial"
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Who prints things? Don't think I have used a printer for personal or work purposes in years.
I bought one to print anti-Trump propaganda to post by the mailboxes.
And because I'm a Millennial, I enjoy printing photos because I grew up having photo albums, and as such I'm used to making them. Plus if I don't print them I'll literally ever look at them.
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I just go to a print/copy store. Pay up, be done with it.
Sometimes, staples or FedEx just to print the lease, sign the lease, and scan the lease.
10 cents a page black and white at my town's library
Plus I can rent a DVD and chat with a cool librarian
Bought a Canon laser printer a decade ago. Only needed a new set of toner and a bunch of paper obviously. Standard power cord, standard USB 1.x cable. Still works in Windows 11. I think I got it working in Linux at some point, but I don't know if it does nowadays, because I probably don't have the mental fortitude to touch CUPS again in this lifetime. (People keep saying audio is a nightmare to set up in Linux. Ohh you clearly haven't tried to set up a printer or you would not be complaining)
(People keep saying audio is a nightmare to set up in Linux. Ohh you clearly haven’t tried to set up a printer or you would not be complaining)
My single worst experience with Linux was getting audio to work with an ISA Plug 'n' Play Sound Blaster card back in the late 90s. Eventually I got it to work, but after installing the card I had to dig through documentation and forums to figure out that in addition to audio drivers I needed to install a package for ISA PnP cards, run a tool that came with that to generate a config file, realize that config file contained every hypothetical configuration my card could potentially have all commented out, find and uncomment the actual configuration I wanted the card to use and then restart the isapnp driver. All of that to get basic functionality. For Windows, I literally just installed the card and it worked with basic functionality out of the box, with an option to go to their website and download a driver for some extra functionality specific to that card.
That...soured me on the idea of desktop Linux for several years.
Linux is fine for printers. As long as you don't want to print more than one copy. But even then you just start multiple print jobs. Unless you need a lot of copies. Then Windows or Mac is probably easier.
Strangely, this has never been the case for me (printers, not audio which obviously has sucked in the past). Also if you get a printer that is networked, it generally just works these days, better than my Windows experience.
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I have to use a printer for my work-from-home job. If you just buy a Brother laserjet printer and avoid other brands and inkjets, it's way more affordable. It costs more up front, but they're reliable and don't need to be replaced every year. My printer cost $250 and I've had it for at least five years at this point.
You guys have work printers?
Just playing, I have a Brother color laser printer. Had it for about 7 years, replaced the toner only once, prints fantastically. I mostly use it as a scanner and printing coloring pages for the kid.
I bought a Brother about a year ago. I hadn't owned a printer in about 12-15 years. In Japan, one can generally just print things at the convenience store (after uploading (app, browser, etc.) or via USB stick), but I moved to the middle of nowhere and got tired of going back and forth. I also needed to print things like business cards which the cobini printers won't do.
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I have a cheapass printer that is probably listening to me. It has little ink (i barely used it and the black ink is at 50%) i use the scanner feature more often.