I've got three of 'em. Bog standard brother laser printers with duplex.
You can get a special USB cable on Amazon with that ridiculous printer cube on one end and a combination of whatever USB connectors you need for your phone/tablet/laptop.
I grab one whenever they're on sale for $70.

We will be printing this way until some Gen alpha genius reinvents the printer and the revolution will press forward.
I give it twenty years.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 11:58 AM on May 5

Still the best but not immune from enshittification; Brother pushed out a firmware update sometime in the last couple years to disable the secret printer menu to override the page count that controls the "toner low" and "toner empty" errors. Fortunately most of their toners rely on a physical page count wheel that can be trivially reset by anyone with a screwdriver and five minutes of free time, but still... jerk move, Brother, jerk move.
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 11:59 AM on May 5 [2 favorites]

Hmmm, points for being straightforward - a laser printer is the way to go - but is the second half of this article just regurgitating what googles AI has to say about a particular brand of printers?

The problem of AI spam is a big difficultly for me when doing some maintenance on my house plants. Every article wants to give me a history lesson and brief overview of… whatever. It’s made the internet useless for plant related searches so I’m sure it’s even worse for this stuff.
posted by The River Ivel at 12:00 PM on May 5

I always get asked by coworkers what brand of laptop to get and I hem and haw about most consumer brand laptops being interchangeable junk and throw out a few names of companies that suck a little less.

I get asked which printer to get and I point to the Brother printers around the office. It isn't even a question. That HP can even still sell printers while Brother exists is a crime.
posted by charred husk at 12:01 PM on May 5 [4 favorites]

Unless you can get an HP LaserJet 4+. I killed a man by throwing one out a seventh story window and then used it to print out his death certificate.
posted by charred husk at 12:03 PM on May 5 [34 favorites]

And what's sad is I just went along with the Brother thing before realizing this post was actually about AI and the unhealthy feedback loops it creates on the modern internet. I do think Brothers are the best, though.

Whenever I try to explain the dangers of AI and feedback loops I like to use the website edhrec.com as an example, even if it isn't actually AI. EDHrec scrapes online Magic: The Gathering commander decks on various deckbuilding sites like Moxfield and Archideckt. It then lists all the most commonly used cards for each commander.

Now if you really know how to use the advanced sorting functions this can be useful. However there has been the effect where people go the EDHrec, choose a commander, build a deck using the cards listed there which then reinforces the cards that are already being recommended.
posted by charred husk at 12:13 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]

is the second half of this article just regurgitating what googles AI has to say about a particular brand of printers?

Yes but Nilay (who runs The Verge) says he is about to do this immediately beforehand:

I am including a box with buttons to buy a Brother laser printer; the buttons kick us back small affiliate fees if you press them and buy a printer. Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out. [emphasis added]
posted by good in a vacuum at 12:15 PM on May 5 [10 favorites]

The only reason I don't have that Brother printer is that I have two of those Samsung printers, one twenty years old and one fourteen years old. The twenty-year-old one had a heavy Victorian ceiling collapse on it and barely noticed. They take the same toner cartridge and continue to just work.
posted by Hogshead at 12:39 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]

Best printer is whatever printer the local library lets me print on for $0.10/page, which given my printing needs costs me $1/year.
posted by joeyh at 12:41 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]

I always liked the IBM 3800 best. 216 pages per minute, but a little beyond my budget.

Does anyone know if Brother makes their own print engines?
posted by MtDewd at 1:01 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]

This is sad.
posted by betweenthebars at 1:19 PM on May 5

The only reason I don't have that Brother printer is that I have two of those Samsung printers, one twenty years old and one fourteen years old..

Yep, I have one that’s old enough to drink. I replaced a roller, and I think it’s on its fourth toner cartridge.
posted by dirigibleman at 1:28 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]

Laser printers can last for decades. We're still using one that someone gave us when their startup shut down fifteen years ago. The major driver for new laser printer sales is "forgetting" to update the drivers for the latest version of windows/MacOS.
posted by phooky at 1:30 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]

The amazing thing about this advice is that it hasn’t changed in the 15 years since a colleague told me emphatically that a Brother laser printer was the only valid option for home printing. The idea that HP and Epson are still able to sell ink jet options that print 80 pages and then demand refill ransoms is crazy.
posted by rh at 1:34 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]

I just take a USB key to FedEx Office fdba Kinko’s . . . 10c/page too
posted by torokunai at 1:38 PM on May 5

Always impressed by Brother's down-to-earthness, but I think Dell was once expriencing some brief Brother-like madness let the 3100CN escape into the wild by accident. Because if you bought one, then you basically never needed to buy a laser printer again. I've been running mine for 20 years. People like to use the word "tank" to describe robust printers, but after multiple coast-to-coast moves (it weighs around 32 Kg/70lb), I am particularly sensitive to its tank-like bulk, have dropped it a few times, yet it still runs. No fancy web server interface -- just simply accepts PCL or postscript sent down the wire to a raw TCP/IP address (9100) and then renders it to a page. Arrived with an unpopulated, simple PC133 SODIMM slot to expand the memory (ludicrously expensive at the time, then later ridiculously cheap). Has four individual CMYK toner cartridges, no sensor chips to complain if you just refill them. Linux is fine with CUPS, of course, and even though Dell claims the printer is incompatible with windows after 7, some other guerilla faction within Dell also released the "Open Printer" driver that, I'm reliably informed, lets the 3100CN work with whatever is the latest windows version.
posted by meehawl at 1:49 PM on May 5

Brother did recently make a slight update to the styling of the classic black cube, which threw me off for a good 20 seconds helping an artist friend install one (turn in on;-)

But omg we really need to transition back to gopher or something to fake out the AI entrepreneurs.
posted by sammyo at 1:51 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]

I just take a USB key to FedEx Office fdba Kinko’s . . . 10c/page too

I don't currently print often enough to need a printer in my house, so this is also my solution. Even my little town of 10K people has a copy shop that is also where you drop off packages for UPS or whatever, just a mom-and-pop place, but they can do all kinds of fancy stuff with their big fancy machines.

Fedex Office also has the advantage of being able to print on all kinds of things. I keep meaning to order some yard signs with messages on them like "Vote For People Who Want To Live In A Democracy" or whatever on them.

Anyway I have lived parts of my life when owning a printer was paramount. Right now, for me personally, it is not.
posted by hippybear at 1:51 PM on May 5

We got our current Brother off the curb in front of my doctor's office, under the rain. I had to clean the fuser with alcohol because the printer had worked a long life, and replace the drum because it's a consumable. It had lived a long working life. Fortunately, the clinic was also throwing away an assortment of replacement drums and toner cartridges.

My Brother printer is one of three that were on the curb that day. My wife was very kind and patient at being asked to get in the car and drive to me because I needed to collect "trash from the street", and loves that we got to replace our 10+ year old HL-L2305W for a faster, more capacious ex-office pro-level Brother.

The other two curb printers also got cleaned up and loaded up with the curb consumables. They now live very productive lives at a friend's house (the find was before COVID, and the lockdowns gave them an urgent incentive to let a stray printer into the house) and at the Sticky Institute, a Melbourne beacon of joy who received 80.000+ prints to teach kids how to produce fanzines with.

We gave our HL-L2305W to our neighbours, together with the spare 3rd party toner we had bought too much of. Unless the Earth swallows our neighbourhood, their descendants will be able to keep printing on that thing.
posted by kandinski at 2:08 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]

This reminded me of how I used to work for a startup that, thanks to being cheap and acquiring the debris of other failed enterprises, ended up with three laser printers, all which used Postscript(TM) clones, and all of which were slightly buggy. The end result was that most documents would print on any printer, but some documents would trigger a bug in one of the postscript clones and couldn't be printed on that printer. A few documents could only be printed on one printer. One of these beasts was a Sun SPARCprinter, which ran a postscript clone called NeWSprint, but I can't remember the others.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 2:33 PM on May 5

Nb check the Brother site for refurbs. There are often deals on lightly used printers that come with a spare high capacity toner for good price. I got one that I plugged in and told it the wifi password and everything prints to it perfectly, even the phones.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:36 PM on May 5

This reminds me of the story of the long-ago tire company whose tires were too good; people just bought one set for life. And so they went out of business.
posted by gottabefunky at 2:46 PM on May 5

Well, I mean, that's basically what's happened with Instant Pot. Their product was designed well, everyone who wanted one bought one, and they have no market left. They're trying other things to survive as a company, but if you build a solid product that can last a lifetime, it becomes difficult in the marketplace.
posted by hippybear at 2:52 PM on May 5

Well, I mean, that's basically what's happened with Instant Pot.

Bullshit. It was private equity.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 3:07 PM on May 5 [4 favorites]

And what's sad is I just went along with the Brother thing before realizing this post was actually about AI and the unhealthy feedback loops it creates on the modern internet.

No biggie. It appears nearly everyone here is going down the same path.

Thanks Rhaomi for the post, and the previously.
posted by intermod at 3:07 PM on May 5

Their product was designed well, everyone who wanted one bought one, and they have no market left.

You're missing a private equity step in there...
posted by advil at 3:08 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]

The last time we did this I just happened to be in the market for a printer. So I bought a Brother laser printer. It's ... fine.
posted by chavenet at 3:24 PM on May 5

So I bought a Brother laser printer. It's ... fine.

That means it's perfect. It's exactly what you want. Other printers are horror shows in so many ways, so having printer that you don't really consider its existence and it's fine... that's perfect.
posted by hippybear at 3:27 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]

Not to be That Guy but, well... I bought an HP Laserjet Pro 200 color printer 10 years ago, and while I'm not an absolute printin' maniac, it continues to serve me perfectly well. Zero problems with print quality, jams, or WiFi connection. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:35 PM on May 5

Hey, if your HP Printer was made before the days when they were scanning cartridges and phoning in to the mothership and preventing you from printing unless you bought a subscription... then you're golden. I had HP inkjet printers 20 years ago that were complete workhorses up until they stopped making ink carts for them and they were non-fillable otherwise.
posted by hippybear at 3:40 PM on May 5

Actually, not to abuse the edit window, but there was a problem with those old HPs in that the yellow ink would somehow either dry up or run out before all the others,, and the carts were bought in packs not individually. So I'd end up buying packs of carts just for the yellow, and had a surplus of the other colors. Of course, it won't run without the yellow so...

This was probably an early version of the enshittification of HP. I think they were using yellow ink to print watermarks on pages that weren't visible unless you knew to look for them, and so that's why the yellow would be used up more quickly.
posted by hippybear at 3:43 PM on May 5

Do we even need search engines anymore? Seems all the search providers want to synthesize information with an AI to keep eyes on their own AI-generated content, rather than sending eyeballs to some third-party AI-generated content that they can't monetize as efficiently.

Given the power of modern PC's, I could achieve the same thing by just running my own AI and having It make shit up, just like they do, and I would only be slightly less accurate and twice as amused

Also, considerably less like to lead to a Skynet.

Oh, and Brother all the way. I have a Brother inket that's about 5 or 6 years old and it just needs some ink and it will be just about as good as the day I bought it.

Almost any printer brand is better than HP.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 4:54 PM on May 5

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