I want to upgrade to a color laser, best would be a color laser all-in-one but I don’t think I have the ducats for that. I have been very disappointed with HP for a while. Windows doesn’t communicate with an HP printer half the time. Now they are forcing you to get an HP account and have your printer be in constant communication with them. And other companies do it to, but you cannot use third party ink/toner with their new printers and they limit how many pages you can get out of a cartridge. For all of those cons, HP printers are just not so much better than anyone else that it is worth it. Looking at reviews, it seems Canon and Brother are the two go-to companies now for a home/small office printer.
Does that pretty much sum it up? Is there anyone that would prefer a 2024 HP printer over a similar Canon or Brother? And where is Epson in all of this?
I have a 15(ish) year-old Epson laser printer that still works great. It seems a little chintzy in its build but that thing has just worked all this time with no fuss.
I do not know if HP is a distant third. I can say I will never (probably never) buy an HP printer again ever. Barring some major turn-around in the company, which is super unlikely, I won’t purchase any of their products.
I’ve had several HP printers and concluded that many of the more recent ones were duds.
My son sold printers for a while at a former employer and thought the Epson Ecotank printers were very good inkjet printers, particularly if you are printing images/photos. They also avoid the ridiculous prices for ink cartridges.
My current printer is a Canon laser printer. I am very happy with it. It’s a network printer, so any computer, tablet, or cell phone in my house can print to it via ethernet or WiFi, and the networking was very easy to set up. It prints in color and can duplex. I did not go with an all-in-one because I have almost no need to fax or copy documents. If I really need a quick copy of something, I just take a good photo of the document with my phone and send the image to the printer.
This might not be accurate, so someone more knowledgeable than me might chime in with a correction, but I think many of the laser printers from Canon’s competitors are made under Canon’s patents, meaning they effectively have a lot of Canon guts inside them. So, I figured why not get a Canon in the first place.
Very efficient on energy saving and toner consumption.
I would probably never buy an HP printer again in my life. Back in the days of the LaserJet II to the LaserJet 5, they were pretty much the best, but that was decades ago now.
I just verified, my current Xerox Color has been trouble free since January 2018 when I set it up. It survived a pair of moves also. Xerox Phaser 6510/DN Color Laser Printer
I’ve been using Brother B&W laser printers for decades, and provided them for my father as well. Very few complaints, the only significant one being finding non-OEM toner carts that perform well.
If you’re willing to shell out the bucks for Brother consumables (2-4x more than aftermarket carts), you’ll have no problems.
I have no experience with color lasers, and little experience decades ago with color ink jets.
If black and white is all you need you can just buy an old HP Laser Jet office printer. They don’t take over your computer and since they were built for moderately heavy usage, your light usage will work fine. Generic toner cartridges are available cheaply on eBay. I have an HP Laser Jet 1320 and it works fine.
Wow, those were the days!
The LJ II’s were built like a tank (and weighed similar). They just worked. And worked all the time. Few paper jams, and easy to open up and clear them. Toner price was reasonable, even from HP, and there were lots of good, cheap toner from other makers. (Internally, they used Canon parts, just like the Apple Laserwriter.)
I used mine for years, than gave it to my nephew. He moved it halfway across the country and used it for most of college; it was still working fine when it was stolen. What reliable machines HP built back then.
Now their printers seem to be somewhere between mediocre and average, but their software is dangerously rude & aggressive.
I’ve bought mostly HP printers for over a third of a century now, but when it comes time for a new one, I’ll likely look elsewhere. Pity.
Re commasense’s experience with Brother B&W laser printers:
My experience has been the opposite. I’ve owned several Brother B&W and color laser printers over the last 15 years and I find that they are (by far) the EASIEST to find good third-party toner cartridges for. Finding good consumables for my (older) Canon and HP printers was always a problem.
I regularly order replacement toner cartridges and drums from Amazon and have never had an issue. The toner and print quality are good. Plus, unlike Canon and HP, the printer doesn’t complain about the type of cartridge or drum that I install.
I should clarify that I didn’t mean to say that I couldn’t find non-OEM carts, only that some I had bought didn’t produce good prints, including ones I had previously bought from the same supplier that worked fine.
So my conundrum became whether to chance more cheap ones or pay full price for OEM. But in general, it has not been a major problem, and it’s not a problem with the printer.
Understood. I was just sharing my experience that Brother was usually a better bet if you want to be able to find good, reliable third-party consumables (especially when compared to Canon and HP).
My Canon is a LBP622Cdw. It doesn’t seem to care what brand the toner cartridges are. I bought a set of all four CMYK cartridges from Toner Kingdom in 2022, and a K (black) cartridge from Teino a few months ago. They work fine. Easily available from Amazon or elsewhere.
Due to concerns above that Canon printers won’t use generic cartridges, I wondered if this only appled to some Canon models. Only inkjet printers? Only printers made during a certain period of time? I Googled for more info on this, although not exhaustively. I can’t find anything listing which Canon printers require OEM cartridges, or confirming that any do it at all.
Way, way back HP made a good small inkjet all-in-one that produced pdf files of fine quality and small size – think 30 pages of 24-line B&W print for reasonably under a meg. Then I bought a new one and discovered the printer was prone to jamming and the pdf files were HUGE, even at the most degraded quality setting. Chucked it and never looked back.
I’m currently using Brother laser B&W all-in-ones, the MFC 2700 and the DCP 2550, for printing drafts and pdf scanning, and they work fine, plus I can get non-OEM replacement drum units and toner cartridges on Amazon that work fine.
I’ve also had quite a few Epson inkjets over the years. Their scanners produce excellent quality pdf files of modest size, but tend to be prone to developing problems and eventually not working. Still print fine, both the old cartridge machines I still have and the newer Ecotank models (I have two). The Ecotanks are also all-in-ones, and when the scanners worked they were great – superb pdfs at remarkably small file size. Alas, the ADF in both had one tiny part that was easily dislodged, couldn’t be put back in place, and made the ADF stop functioning. Pity, that, but they’re still good printers.
ETA: Yup, I have backups for backups, since I work from home and need printers and scanners always working. Plus if I have several drafts to print out I can send them to four or five different printers and get them all going at the same time, and can send the work from either of my two laptops or two desktops.
Quite a few years ago I tried to use generic ink cartidges in an inkjet printer – can’t remember now what brand name – and they totally wrecked the printer, essentially bricked it. Since then I buy only Epson cartridges or now ink bottles for that brand. But non-OEM toner cartridges and drum kits for my Brothers have almost always been no problem, except for one time when the cartridges I received were mislabeled and didn’t work in their intended laser printer.
Huh - I was wondering how old that printer was. I took it from my dad’s home office after he passed away two years ago, so I really don’t know anything about it. Still works fine.