Hey lemmy. I’ve been paying out of pocket to get stickers printed from online printing companies. But its getting expensive and I think I’d like to get a printer to do the job.
HOWEVER, I’ve been avoided getting a printer, because, well, the whole thing is just a shit show. Our household went through like a printer a year for almost four years. Between ink prices, and the printers just failing, we threw our hands up and said fuck it. Not playing this game, so we shifted to printing services or the local library.
So I’m looking for a very basic (I think?) printer. Honestly, a black only printer might even be fine. I’ve heard I think that maybe Canons or Brothers are the ones you want and HP’s are to be avoided. The purpose of the printer will be to print stickers on sticker paper. What printer should I buy?
Old Brother laser printers are great. They’re easy to find used, but it’s unclear if they’re still being made. For stickers there are thermal printers for just that purpose if you want to go that route.
Brother is the only real choice. Their MFC are very versatile and handy and quite reasonable.
What’s your budget, here’s 2 options.
Brother HL2405 $139: https://a.co/d/0bHDQ885
Brother HL2460DW $179: https://a.co/d/0ccXVUgP
Color Ink: Epson Ecotank (no cartridge bullshit)
B/W: Brother HL-L Series Laser (bulletproof, long-lasting, cheap)We recently retired our color laser printer of ten years for an epson ecotank. I’m happy with it two months in, and only the black has depleted some 10% with the Mrs doing a couple of color copies daily.
Eco tank uses ink that fades and is sub par. Laser toner printers are crisper and last longer.
EcoTanks are so cool, you can buy their colors for cheap, you can get all colors refills for 15-20€ but they will last forever, bought last year, used them a lot for documents a few photos and a DnD sheet (with image included) and the tank is still full
I found my Brother HL out on the curb on a lightly rainy day. I had passed by it on my walk thinking it was an Epson inkjet, but on my way back I saw it was one of those Brother BW lasers the Internet nerds always go on about so I brought it inside and dried it off.
Fired right up and has been handling my once a month or so printing duties ever since, still on the same toner that I found it with. Best non-commercial printer I’ve ever used.
Would there be any advantage to going just black and white?
Black and white is more common in laser printers, less complex, cheaper and it takes up less room.
Laser printers don’t just shoot color particles on the paper like ink jet / piezo printers.
They “magnetize” a photo conductor so the toner particles stick to it and then usually transfer it to the paper using pressure and then fix it using heat. You can’t really do the first part for multiple colors at the same time so color lasers can get pretty complex to repeat this process for each color (CMKY, sometimes more).
So why not an ink printer instead?
- If you use them often they will cost you a lot. Printer manufacturers love ink printers because they can basically sell water (with a tiny bit of color) for the price of gold. That’s also the reason why they put you much effort into detection of original ink cartridges.
- If you don’t use them often, the print heads tend to clog and guess what the printers use to flush them? Copious amounts of liquid gold (ink).
My brother color laser is decent, but the toner is expensive. So expensive that i buy knockoff toner. Which 95% of the time is solid. Until every once in a while a kid needs something printed that’s a photo. Not sure why, but it is absolute garbage at photos. Like not even close. Streaks and bands of color everywhere. I’m not even trying fancy photo paper, just trying to get details. A caffeinated adhd toddler with fistful of crayons could do better.
But if you want to print a worksheet in color? Does fantastic.
Advantage being you only have to buy one toner cartridge and drum.
Depending on the age, you may need a new drum unit, but I think that may also just be a deficit of laser.
Could be this.
Laser printers are usually lower resolution than ink printers and half toning is usually more difficult for laser printers. However, the results shouldn’t be THAT bad.
Agreed, i’m not expecting good. But I’ve had pictures come out that look like an inkjet with the worst case of dirty print head you’ve ever seen.
I’m not sure which technology Brother uses but it kind of sounds like a damaged OPC to me. The printer might have multiple of them for the different colors. I think in consumer printers the OPC is often replaced together with the toner as a single unit but again, I’m not sure what brother uses.
Yea, someone else mentioned my drum might be dying, which could explain it.
It’s not inkjet but you can get passible color on laser. You need to go into settings and tell it it’s a photo and you want max quality. I have a Brother color laser.
Yep, tried that. Made no difference. Tried linux and windows in case it was a drivers thing. No difference. Though on linux if I use a generic driver instead of the model specific one it’s marginally better and will win against the aforementioned toddler. If it took another similar jump in quality it would be in the realm of what I’d expect to come out of a laser printer for a photo. My google results only showed people complaining on brother’s forum and they responded with “use genuine brother toner”. And someone replied saying that fixed it for them.
Knock off toner can be hit or miss. Even if it sticks to the paper it might not be the best quality.
You could also try adjusting the paper weight settings. The weight settings control fuser heat levels by adjusting the print speed. That can sometimes have an impact on color quality.
I use fake toner in my brother.
Toner is cheaper if you have a laser black only, lots of pages per refill.
At work I’ve installed 10 color inkjet epson L6460 printers 2-3 years ago and most of them I still haven’t refilled.
They come with 2 bottles of black ink and one of everything else, last forever, will print after 4 months unused if you do a print head cleaning (a few times in a row) and the Epson brand bottles are 8 - 12 bucks each.
For home use a cheaper Ecotank would probably serve you just as well.
The advantage is that you can get a cheap laser printer.
They’ll happily print every day for years and cost next to nothing to run.
They’ll also happily print after you didn’t use them for a long time.
Ink printers are generally less durable, cost much more to run and their heads dry out if you don’t use them regularly.
Color laser printers are expensive, big, and the color isn’t good enough for photos, only colored documents.Color laser printers are expensive, big, and the color isn’t good enough for photos, only colored documents.
I own two (identical) color laser printers, can confirm two out of three. They’re gigantic and the color isn’t very vibrant.
However, they weren’t all that expensive because I got them used. Still not quite dirt-cheap like a black & white laser is, but affordable.
Cost is like 100 times less per page.
Don’t even think about getting an inkjet printer unless you really, really need color, and need it often. Even if you aren’t dealing with DRM and price-gouging BS, the ink dries and gums up the print heads unless you’re using them regularly.
For me, color is a want, not a need (meaning I’m not relying on the quality of the output or making money from it), and only an occasional one. But I did want it, along with other bells and whistles like automatic duplex printing, for my “buy it for life” printer. So I decided to go with a Brother color laser.
I ended up buying two used ones from some office getting rid of them on Craigslist for maybe $50? each. The one I actually print with – the other is basically for spare parts – has almost 60K pages on it and is complaining that it’s due for some expensive “fuser” and “PF Kit” replacements, but it keeps working, so I haven’t actually bothered yet.
If your use case is very much about stickers on sticker paper, and you’re doing it regularly and often (not necessarily tons of pages at a time, but not going weeks at a time without printing anything), you may actually want an inkjet rather than a laser. Aside from the images not being as pretty as with an inkjet, the other disadvantage of a laser for you is that because it heats the paper, you might have to worry about paper compatibility to avoid gumming up the machine with melted adhesive.
Only advice I can give is if you are just printing on paper, pay the extra $ and get a laser printer. Avoid inkjets - they are a complete scam and a waste of money. The toner will last 10x longer, never goes bad or clogs up the print heads, and the quality is better.
I don’t know how laser printers handle sticker sheets, but for all practical printing purposes I wholeheartedly recommend a laser printer.
Brother is also a solid brand. I have had mine for almost 10 years now and it’s still running like the day I got it.
For sticker sheets you want a straight through paper path - this often means feed sheets one at a time, and catch them out the back instead of letting them to to the paper tray.
Stickers meant for printing in printers generally will work with a normal feed though, so if you don’t mind opening your printer you can take a chance and normally be okay.
You are correct that Canon and Brother tend to be the best straight forward printers. Brother is better for laser printing and Canon is better for ink jet printing. If you go ink jet go with individual cartridges instead of the combined cartridges it’s way less fuss.
If you can do laser the basic Brothers just work. We had one in our woodshop for almost a decade. Sawdust spray paint etc. and it just did not care. It didn’t end up dying even, we just swapped it for a color version, and we’re on year 4 with that one.
I’ve got a small Canon MFC laser printer/copier. No complaints at all. It only prints black and white but I tend to scan more than print so that was a big focus for me when I bought it.
Now THIS is a recommendation! My next printer (fuck HP) will be a Brother laser printer!
I have been thinking about replacing my brother laser with a color laser. Not sure how much I would use it outside of printing commie things for Pathfinder games though.
Maybe just go with a B&W printer and go to the local copy shop or library for the occasional color print? That’s what I do.
I went Canon for color laser, no complaints so far.
See if you can find a used Brother laser printer. The older Brother printers are fantastic. I thought I heard somewhere Brother had started to enshitify their newer products (last coulple of years). But I might be wrong there.
It was a mountain out of a molehill situation. Basically, brother toner cartridges can do an internal calibration to fix minor alignment issues. For off brand toner, it needs to be done manually. It had been that way for a while. The original author just got some particularly misaligned cartridges and “discovered” this.
Other than that, I’ve seen no signs of enshitifcation from Brother. I ended up buying a brother colour laser not long afterwards, and have been quite happy so far.
I just got a new brother laser DCP-L6600DW after my old brother laser started malfunctioning after nearly 15 years of duty. They both work fine, even with 3rd party toners. I’m using Debian BTW, but my phone also worjs fine with it. I did have to install the brother driver package, as the Debian included one didn’t work quite right.
I hear that once in a while, but so far it seems to be mostly haters have to take everything to the extreme vs a real problem. Still things could change.
Echoing others, Brother laser printers. Cheap, reliable, and toner lasts forever. Initial one with purchase is like…40% of standard, and will still get you a few hundred pages. The regular ones are like 1200+, and the large ones are I think pushing 2k for like $70.
You can do stickers on sticker paper with lasers, but idk the quality. Is it like…address labels? If so, lasers are perfect tly fine for that. Fine details? Idk.
I have a brother laser printer. It is very basic, but it can print stickers with the right paper.
And the finished product won’t run, because it is laser vs ink.
I just put the third toner in, and works fine.
The only thing if you get a basic one, make sure it can use the right wifi network in your home.Simple brother laser. While useful, the mfc range has more to break on it.
Brother laser or bust. I use mine once a month Max and it’s been years since I even serviced it, they simply last forever with no maintenance. Color laser is significantly more expensive for the initial buy than inkjet but supplies are infinitely cheaper per-page. Problem being I don’t know how laser behaves with most sticker package paper, so you’ll need to research your preferred stickers to make sure they are compatible.
Instead of buying a new printer, can you print at a local print shop/library/university? That might end up being the cheapest option
I have been for a few years. ITs time to buy my own. Also, some of the contents of the stickers are… well… sensitive to say the least.
Brother laser printer. Mine’s going on 9 years now, a cartridge lasts so long I have to look up how to change it when it finally needs it.
I can’t say much about brands, I bought a Samsung color laser years ago and still use it.
What I will say is being able to network print is amazing and well worth having. I can print from my tablet, phone, or desktop.
i think samsung doesn’t manufacturer printers anymore since a very long time ago. iirc it’s a rebranded hp printer (at least in samsung’s homeland korea) and quite notorious for breaking often
My samsung printer had terribly unreliable network access. I could never figure out what its problem was.
In the end I connected a raspberry pi zero with a cups server to the usb port and let that one handle all the printer requests. It works so much better now.
