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?
Color Ink: Epson Ecotank (no cartridge bullshit)
B/W: Brother HL-L Series Laser (bulletproof, long-lasting, cheap)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Could be this.
Depending on the age, you may need a new drum unit, but I think that may also just be a deficit of laser.
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.
Cost is like 100 times less per page.
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?
Some laser printers can do color (the Brother HL-L series can’t), they’re just not great at hi-res color images.
Laser printers are faster, more reliable, and are generally cheaper to operate in the long run, espesially if you are only printing once in a blue moon. Inkjet printers like the Epson Pommes_fur_dein_Balg recommended are better at hi-res images and are often cheaper up front, but are more expensive in the long run.
Eco tank uses ink that fades and is sub par. Laser toner printers are crisper and last longer.
They are not sub par, they are dye based, which fade when continuously exposed to UV. Pigment inks are used in photo oriented printers, like prosumer and pro photo printers. Dye tends to clog less, pigment need more constant use.
Laser color printers are better in every respect except for photos. Laser color printers usually have a 300-600 DPI native resolution, while 1440 is common in inkjet printers. Also, inkjet puts liquid on the page, which means that a good driver can actually blend inks to achieve a much greater color gamut, while lasers can only put one of the 4 basic CMYK colors in a point.
Different use cases.
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.
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