Modern Printer Options

[Defenestrar]

So, it's about time to buy my third toner refill in a couple of decades and I'm wondering if it would just be better to think about a new printer these days. Surely the tech must be leaps and bounds ahead of the cheap 1200 dpi B&W laser I've been using for the last quarter century (802.11 G was the hot new tech on this thing).

What do I need to know? Did dye-sub finally take over the world, or is solid wax better for minimal printing? Or are laser and ink jets still the way to go at home? I don't need color, but it could be a nice feature. Whatever is on the page should not smear with water. Obviously I don't want cartridges to dry out with the tiny print load our family has - so I'm guessing liquid systems are out.

What are typical resolutions these days? (I know that's a little misleading for auto-mixing systems like dye and wax since there's a physical anti-aliasing that happens).

 

[Paladin]

For home I use a basic Brother B+W laser multifunction since I scan almost as much as print. Works great.

Your primary motive for updating might be simply getting off of that ancient wifi version to help your entire network go faster. (Old wifi devices can slow down the whole network to a degree.)

If your use really is that infrequent, maybe you could just print stuff at a UPS/Fedex store or something and not worry about it at all. But it is entirely valid to keep your current one, get a cheap toner ($20 or so) and go on with life.

 

[continuum]

Surely the tech must be leaps and bounds ahead of the cheap 1200 dpi B&W laser I

Nope, keep the B&W laser. 1200 x 1200dpi is as high as things go.

However depending on your needs, in particularly if you have more scanning needs, I would definitely consider replacing with a black and white laser MFP that does both automatic duplex scanning and automatic duplex printing. And yeah, you can get support for more modern standards of wifi.

I think Wirecutter still likes the Brother MFC-L2750dw but i think there's quite a few very similar mothers from Brother, and HP and stuff have some solid competitors.

 

[phlaym]

I'd keep your current one. I'm pretty happy with my color laser, but if you don't need color, keep your current one

 

[von Chaps]

Keep the current one. Or, if it's really broke...

Brother B&W laser. Full duplex, networked. Mines the HL-2250DN. Get whatever the newer model of that is.

Others have said include scanning. I don't use it, but I can see that option might be useful. Not sure how that plays with having it sit on the network, not connected to any particular machine.

 

[Lord Evermore]

People still use HP LaserJet 4/5 printers built in the mid-90s (if they can find parts) because they're workhorses and produce the same quality output as modern printers. Laser print quality hasn't changed much in a very long time, so if it works, there's no reason to replace it until you simply can't use it anymore or really need functions yours doesn't have. No other printer tech produces anything that is going to be amazingly different for a home user. If you're looking to actually change what kind of things you print, like producing hard photos, then you'd be better off with a dedicated device for that type of thing and continue using this printer for your everyday purposes, because that new printer is going to cost more to use for everyday purposes.

 

[Defenestrar]

No photos. There's no point when you can get Walmart or Costco stuff so cheap and fast. Or Mpix reasonably cheap and high quality (I had them do my print of Pluto on Aluminum).

I confess that I'm disappointed to learn that nothing has changed in so long.

 

[Ardax]

Not sure how that plays with having it sit on the network, not connected to any particular machine.

Lots of options on that front. The TIFF/JPG/PDF can be emailed, dumped to a file share. I'd expect a locally installed app to be able to control the device over the network for the OS.

Did dye-sub finally take over the world, or is solid wax better for minimal printing?

Nope and nope. Dye sub is still around and some inkjet printers can run dye sub inks I think. Solid ink died -- Xerox was the only major player in that game and quit.

I'd also vote to just get another toner cartridge and keep your current printer unless you really want color. In which case, get a color laser or MFP if you want scanning.

I kind of want to replace my color laser and scanner with a single MFP with a document feeder for the rare occasions I want to scan with good quality (as opposed to just using my phone and software to rotate/straighten/deskew), but the damn thing just won't die.

 

[cogwheel]

Others have said include scanning. I don't use it, but I can see that option might be useful. Not sure how that plays with having it sit on the network, not connected to any particular machine.

You just use network-aware scan software, like whatever the scanner comes with or the built-in Windows Scan app.

As far as scan and copy, the equivalent multifunction doesn't cost much more than the equivalent print only machine, and the few times you use it, it saves a lot of time versus having to go somewhere to scan or copy.

I confess that I'm disappointed to learn that nothing has changed in so long.

What would change? Paper isn't advancing, and printers are complicated mechanical devices so advances in semiconductors don't help much.

 

[Defenestrar]

What would change? Paper isn't advancing, and printers are complicated mechanical devices so advances in semiconductors don't help much.

Material science has evolved considerably as has cheap optics. Look at the resolution increase in projectors - why wouldn't any of that translate to at least laser based printing? Likewise 3D printing has gotten to the point where it can do cell scaffolds and other extremely high-resolution printing via liquid spray systems - often starting with inkjet technology. Semiconductors have resulted in better and cheaper electromechanical controllers - not Moore's law improvements, but significant. And that's just with the same tech we've used for a very long time.

Back when I get this printer they were talking about how dye-sub (not just for transfers) and thermal wax would soon overtake inkjet and probably laser as well due to the self-blending nature of the pigments. UV printing could have gone mainstream and completely replaced inkjet (obviously it hasn't). I guess there's no market forces to do what my imagination was hoping for (sufficient resolution to do holograms - or at least fun light-interference patterns).

Looks like I'll be trying to find a cartridge.

Thanks all, I appreciate the advice!

 

[Andrewcw]

The only thing that's gone up by leaps and bounds is Cartridge DRM'ed chip technology. And cloud printing has been really really iffy in terms of does the service still work.

B&W DPI hasn't gone up because there is no visual difference that makes that advancement worth it.

Color is the only advancement in the last decade. But you're not looking for color and this is where i'd say go buy an Inkjet. Consumer Color Laser printers are a longterm disappointment greater then Inkjet because they all mechanically break.

What would change? Paper isn't advancing, and printers are complicated mechanical devices so advances in semiconductors don't help much.

Paper advanced. It's just way way slower The last big advancement was the 2010 era? When they shifted from 87 to 92 brightness from a process change to balance out Inkjet/Laser performance in one product at a happy medium. I'm pretty sure they're still trying to get that Bamboo paper sorted out but it probably would be cheaper just to design a Asia/Pacific specific printer that handles that kind of paper.

Back when I get this printer they were talking about how dye-sub (not just for transfers) and thermal wax would soon overtake inkjet and probably laser as well due to the self-blending nature of the pigments. UV printing could have gone mainstream and completely replaced inkjet (obviously it hasn't). I guess there's no market forces to do what my imagination was hoping for (sufficient resolution to do holograms - or at least fun light-interference patterns).

UV On the consumer level. Nope. Commercial level sure.
Dye-Sub got killed because Color Laser tech got way cheaper. And a lot of printers considered Laser are really LED. The color mix however still isn't as good. But then Inkjet also got down to consumer level tank systems and those came in after dye-sub consumer got kicked to the curb.

 

[von Chaps]

Interesting to think how depositing words on dead trees even could advance. It's a solution for when you absolutely want a basic, lowest common denominator format that everyone (who's not blind) can handle. Any advance [that I can think of] would marginalize that.

 

[cogwheel]

Material science has evolved considerably as has cheap optics.

Most of what a printer does doesn't rely on materials science advances, since plain old steel, brass, and plastic are good enough. We aren't talking gas turbines, where advances in nickel superalloys have made a difference. Printers don't run hot, fast, or create corrosive gasses to launch themselves off your desk.

As far as cheap optics, you know what's even cheaper? No optics. Cheap lasers don't even use optics any more for imaging, just a strip of LEDs. For non-imaging, optical detecting and positioning sensors have been cheap for quite a while.

Look at the resolution increase in projectors - why wouldn't any of that translate to at least laser based printing?

Because it isn't applicable to printing. Laser printers either use a linear LED array, or a single laser and a spinning mirror, not a 2D array. 1200dpi is more than you need for human vision, so there isn't reason to go higher, and the projector advances are actually barely higher, if at all.

Likewise 3D printing has gotten to the point where it can do cell scaffolds and other extremely high-resolution printing via liquid spray systems - often starting with inkjet technology.

And those are expensive to extremely expensive, and require even more complicated machinery due to the 3D nature, and are explicitly for creating non-flat things, unlike words, illustrations, and pictures on paper.

Semiconductors have resulted in better and cheaper electromechanical controllers - not Moore's law improvements, but significant.

And those advancements were available twenty years ago. They've gotten cheaper, but not enormously so compared to the cost of a printer. Most of the cost of a printer isn't in the semiconductors, it's in things like motors, rollers, steel frames, and the like. In other words, printing isn't the limiting factor for home printers, it's paper handling.

And that's just with the same tech we've used for a very long time.

Basically. We don't have anything new for mechanical stuff. There's no alternative to DC motors and rubber-coated rollers set in a steel and plastic frame for moving paper around.

Back when I get this printer they were talking about how dye-sub (not just for transfers) and thermal wax would soon overtake inkjet and probably laser as well due to the self-blending nature of the pigments.

You were reading bad predictions.

Dye sub is a slow, energy-intensive, lower resolution process that is only worth it when dealing with continuous-tone images. Its drawbacks vastly outweigh its benefits for things like text. Further, inkjet continued to advance, so we now have higher resolution inkjets that use 8 or more inks (instead of just 4), which ate up most of the benefits of dye sub.

Thermal wax was never a contender, unless you were drinking the Tektronix/Xerox kool-aid. Startup time is worse than lasers due to having to melt the ink, handling that multi-phase ink is harder than handling liquid ink, the print output has a raised crayon-like feel and can be damaged easily, and the only benefit is the lack of disposable cartridges.

Basically, laser got cheap enough that it pushed inkjet out of the low end market and inkjet got good enough that it made dye sub nearly pointless.

Dye sub still has its place, but it isn't on paper. Dye sub is used today for durability when printing directly on (non-paper) objects, since the ink partially diffuses into the substrate.

UV printing could have gone mainstream and completely replaced inkjet (obviously it hasn't).

UV printing is inkjet printing, just with an ink formulation that is UV cured to increase durability. It adds nothing when you're printing on paper.

I guess there's no market forces to do what my imagination was hoping for (sufficient resolution to do holograms - or at least fun light-interference patterns).

At that point we aren't talking about inexpensive printing on a cheap flexible flat substrate, so it's an answer to an entirely different question than "what should I replace my laser printer with?"

 

[Lord Evermore]

I confess that I'm disappointed to learn that nothing has changed in so long.

There's no money to be made in making the quality/resolution better now. Most people don't print anything anymore at home, and businesses just don't need higher quality than 600x600 for their documents in most cases. Print quality is good enough, and all the focus is on speed and handling features. Anything that goes beyond what a home or business user has can be handled in one-off print jobs at Kinkos or Office Depot or whatever, or as you said, printing photos at Walmart. The human eye also simply has limits in regards to how much detail they can see and as someone else mentioned, paper hasn't changed much to where the ink can make a difference.

 

[iljitsch]

Interesting thread!

I got a new printer nearly a decade ago because my then a decade old inkjet printer that still worked fine was no longer supported by MacOS. The replacement is a Canon tank injet printer/scanner that uses AirPrint.

On the one hand, I still like this printer. It prints great photos. The ink tanks are not exactly cheap, but you can definitely do worse.

On the other hand, normal / draft printing of color leaves thin white lines over colored areas as apparently the nozzle is clogged somewhere. But: fix that with printing in "best" mode. Another problem is that black text varies in heaviness across the page. And when printing infrequently, apparently a good amount of ink is used up to clean the nozzles pretty much each time I print.

I'm thinking replacing this printer with a new inkjet will address the first two problems, but with a high risk of new ink DRM issues, the same ink waste when infrequent printing and potentially new nozzle issues in the future.

So what I'm thinking is getting an affordable B&W laser for text and keep my existing printer for color stuff. Am I correct in thinking that unlike with inkjet printers, infrequent printing with a laser printer doesn't use any extra toner over printing the same amount in a shorter amount of time?

To those who suggest we don't need printers anymore: hogwash. Just the other day I needed to send a book somewhere. Buying a shipping label online was the cheapest option, and printing it myself and dropping the thing in a mailbox was much faster than going to a post office and have them print and attach the label (although I gather that doesn't cost any extra).

 

[phlaym]

Am I correct in thinking that unlike with inkjet printers, infrequent printing with a laser printer doesn't use any extra toner over printing the same amount in a shorter amount of time?

Correct

 

[iljitsch]

Ok, I ordered myself a Brother laser (well, probably LED) printer/scanner for 150 euros! I’ll post some observations on cheap inkjet vs cheap laser later.

 

[iljitsch]

Others have said include scanning. I don't use it, but I can see that option might be useful.

I decided to go with a printer/scanner model rather than just a printer because this makes making copies really easy. That’s something that I need about a dozen times per year. The extra cost was only 45 euros so the time I save just pushing one button to make a copy rather than manually scanning on one device and printing on another will be well worth the extra cost over the prospective lifetime of the device.

Also, for unknown reasons my Mac Mini doesn’t see the scanner part of my Canon, hopefully that will be better for the Brother.

More generally I saw the light on scanners while I was living in country B while having a small business registered in country A around 2010 so having all my paper work digitally made a huge difference. Of course these days 98% of everything is digital/online in the first place, but there’s still sometimes something coming in on paper that I want to keep and thus needs to be digitized. Of course in a pinch a phone camera as a scanner will do.

 

[iljitsch]

1200dpi is more than you need for human vision, so there isn't reason to go higher, and the projector advances are actually barely higher, if at all.

It’s a bit more subtle than that. I remember that when I saw the output of a 300 DPI laser printer when that was still something new (to me), the letters looked very good but not 100% perfect: there was still a little bit of stairstepping.

Now of course laser printers do either 100% white or 100% black. If you can have intermediate brightnesses you can make this go away. Or increase the resolution. And I’m pretty sure that’s where you’re right, with a binary display, 1200 DPI = ~50 dots per mm = two or three dots across the width of a hair, anything better than that won’t be visible to almost any human.

But... around the same time (1990s), I encountered the output of a Linotronic imagesetter, which I remember as 2400 DPI but Wikipedia says 2540 === 100 dots/mm. That was insane. Why? Because the grayscales were perfect. If you want to have smooth grayscales on a device that only has black or white dots/pixels, you need to do half-toning and there 1200 DPI is still a limitation. Although the bigger issue is probably that the laser/LED printer dots aren’t perfect but the toner bleeds a good amount. And of course a printer prints on relatively coarse paper, while an imagesetter outputs to film.

(These imagesetters were (are?) used to create an intermediate step to get to the plates used for offset printing.)

Looking forward to experiment with all of this over the weekend.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Am I correct in thinking that unlike with inkjet printers, infrequent printing with a laser printer doesn't use any extra toner over printing the same amount in a shorter amount of time?

To those who suggest we don't need printers anymore: hogwash. Just the other day I needed to send a book somewhere. Buying a shipping label online was the cheapest option, and printing it myself and dropping the thing in a mailbox was much faster than going to a post office and have them print and attach the label (although I gather that doesn't cost any extra).

I'm still using the original cartridges that came in my Canon color laser after 3 or 4 years.

The majority of people don't need printers now to the point that it's actually uneconomical from a cost perspective. Spending even $100 (which is lower than you're likely to find one) on a black and white laser printer in case you need to print a shipping label once a year is wildly wasteful. The printer probably will last forever at that usage rate but even then it might not earn back the money if I was printing as often as most people do now. What percentage of people ever need to print even one shipping label a year, where they HAVE to do it and couldn't just get it done free? (Post office will print them for you. UPS/FedEx will MAIL one to you.) It all depends on an individual's particular usage. More and more is done online completely so that paper documents aren't needed at all. For me, I like to have paper copies of some documents, or need to send them, and simply like having the option, but I may never make back the cost of the printer and eventual toner replacement with situations where I REALLY needed to print versus just being old and grumpy and insisting on it. Probably half of my printing is just because I needed to sign something so I print it, fill it out and then scan it to email or fax it (online fax service), and I don't want to pay for software or figure out how to even work free software to let me fill in random forms that aren't configured as fill-in PDFs.

 

[steelghost]

Ok, I ordered myself a Brother laser (well, probably LED) printer/scanner for 150 euros! I’ll post some observations on cheap inkjet vs cheap laser later.

FWIW, you can get LEDs where the "L" is for Laser...

 

[iljitsch]

The majority of people don't need printers now to the point that it's actually uneconomical from a cost perspective. Spending even $100 (which is lower than you're likely to find one) on a black and white laser printer in case you need to print a shipping label once a year is wildly wasteful. The printer probably will last forever at that usage rate but even then it might not earn back the money if I was printing as often as most people do now.

That is certainly not an unreasonable position. Another reason to steer clear of printers is the clutter: the thing itself is relatively large, you need paper, other supplies...

For me personally, I like having the peace of mind that I can handle any printing needs without external help, and printers have gotten cheap enough that this peace of mind comes at a modest cost. Also, although my current printer may go a month or so without doing any printing, it’s not like I only use it for that one shipping label in a blue moon.

And once you have printer, it’s nice to print out any bar codes or emails with important numbers rather than having to go through your phone to find them on the spot with people waiting behind you. Not nice enough to splurge on a printer, but if you already have one, certainly worth the few cents that printing a page costs you.

 

[cogwheel]

It’s a bit more subtle than that.

You're correct, but it's definitely a technical topic.

But... around the same time (1990s), I encountered the output of a Linotronic imagesetter, which I remember as 2400 DPI but Wikipedia says 2540 === 100 dots/mm. That was insane. Why? Because the grayscales were perfect. If you want to have smooth grayscales on a device that only has black or white dots/pixels, you need to do half-toning and there 1200 DPI is still a limitation. Although the bigger issue is probably that the laser/LED printer dots aren’t perfect but the toner bleeds a good amount. And of course a printer prints on relatively coarse paper, while an imagesetter outputs to film.

Photo inkjets can go beyond their spatial resolution these days for shading. First, they usually have multiple shades of each ink other than yellow, usually with three "blacks" (more accurately black plus two neutral greys). Second, they can vary droplet size per dot location, further varying the range of effective shades per dot. This all adds up to them being very good at printing greyscale images, probably better than a pure black and white (i.e. 1-bit) process (e.g. the Linotronic you mention) at double the resolution.

Now, this does require very high quality paper to achieve the full effect, both because the paper is brighter (lights can be lighter) and because it can hold more ink (darks can be darker). On generic copy paper you won't get the full effect, so the Linotronic would probably come out on top.

 

[iljitsch]

Got to love that next day delivery thing. So I've spent some time with my new Brother DCP-L2627DWE. This is a 1200 DPI "laser" B&W printer and 1200/2400 DPI color scanner. My old printer is a Canon Pixma MG7550 inkjet printer.

It looks like Brother has a huge selection of different printers in this line. There's really basic ones that only have USB, some models also have 10/100 Mbps Ethernet and you can get them with and without the scanning function. I believe more advanced models have a paper feeder for scanning, so you can easily scan lots of documents in quick succession. Also note that it's hard to tell how recent a model is from the model number.

This printer cost me about 150 euros, and the model without the scanner is a bit over 100 euros. The OEM toner cartridges are about 45 for 1200 pages or 90 for 3000 pages. There's also third party toner cartridges that cost about 20% less and print some 20% more pages. The drum is also replaceable but should last a good deal longer.

Printer setup

This model has a two-line LCD display and a handful of buttons. This works fine for changing most settings and seeing feedback from the printer, but it sucks for entering a Wi-Fi password*. The Wi-Fi button lights up green once you've done that, which I can see annoy me in the future. At least it's not blue. The LCD has a white backlight that turns off pretty quickly. Interestingly, the printer is set for 600 DPI out of the box, with other options being HQ1200, 1200 and 300.

The eco modes are mostly turned off by default, and turning them on didn't seem to change the output or make things slower. (The printer uses a whopping 1000 W for a few seconds when printing! But only about half a watt in deep sleep and my metering device reports 0.000 when turned off.)

The printer has a web server running that apparently contains all kinds of goodies, but it's HTTPS with a self-signed certificate so no self respecting browser will let you go there without jumping through hoops that are best left unjumped. And if you go there anyway, you need the password printed on the back of the printer.

Computer setup

Just click add a printer through System Preferences. Being an AirPrint printer, It'll show up, select it, enter a location if necessary (always useful at work with multiple printers in different rooms!) and that's about it. You may need to set the paper size to something appropriate in Pages and/or other software. On iOS you don't have to do anything, just select "print" in the appropriate place and choose the printer from the list. You can then change a few settings for the print job in question if you like.

I gather it also supports Google Cloud Print for those so inclined. (Wait, what, another discontinued Google service...) And there are hooks for printing/management subscriptions from Brother, with a free trial QR code that I haven't scanned so far. This hasn't gotten in my way so far and it seems you can block all the cloud stuff.

Printing

For some reason, having somewhat noisy machinery spring into action and then a bit later the paper just comes rolling out completely printed feels like a super solid experience, compared to my inkjet printer that often first has to move the print head back and forth for some time, then sucks in a piece of paper, the head moves back and forth and the paper slowly appears as the printing process progresses.

The output is of course great: super sharp, super consistent, and maybe the text isn't quite as black as the heart of a tax collector, but it comes close. A lot closer than my inkjet prints on regular paper. Maybe that's because of the third party inks I use, though.

I tried printing a nice and contrasty B&W photo taken in one of the nicer neighborhoods of Amsterdam:



The very dark and very light parts turned out really well: sharp and detailed, and you really have to look for halftoning issues. But whatever I tried, I got some banding in the light gray sky. The same print on regular paper with the inkjet printer looked like ass. But... on photo paper with the right settings, it's amazing and blows away the laserprinter output six ways from sunday.

Scanning

Image Capture on the Mac just sees the Brother and you're in business. Not sure if I can go beyond 600 DPI, though. The scan button on the printer will initiate scanning from the printer but then you have to change settings through the printer UI and you need to have software running on a Mac or Windows computer. Well, there seem to be a good number of discussion threads on scanning to a NAS so perhaps that's possible in some way, too. And it's possible to set things up for scanning to email. (Or is that restricted to some bigger models?)

When the printer is idle, it takes about 25 seconds for the first page to come out. After that, it should be a page every two seconds, but I haven't tested that yet. Wi-Fi in my home office isn't great so it's possible that printing complex pages will be slower because a lot of data has to be transferred.

Copying

Just place a document and push the copy button and then start. Or you know what, if you don't need to change any settings, just push the start button immediately. The copies came out just a hair on the thin/light side, I'll try some different settings later. (Damn that 500-page pack of printer paper that I got earlier this week is not going to last.)

Note that the printer has 4 mm unprintable margins on all sides.

Paper handling

Ok now for the fun stuff. The printer has a single paper tray that holds 250 pages of regular 80 g/m² paper of various sizes up to A4. But! There's also a manual paper feed: you just pull down a panel on the front and you can enter paper one page at a time manually. Two sliders let you adjust to the paper width so you can feed it straight down the middle. When you feed the paper into the printer, it grabs it. (Tip: now widen the sliders so things don't get bad if the paper is not inserted completely straight.)

If you now print something using the default settings (i.e., automatic tray selection), your print will be on the paper you just fed. Alternatively, you can specify manual feed when creating a print job and then the printer prompts you to feed paper. Don't underestimate how useful this is for stuff like envelopes.

Now if you have extra thick paper or perhaps you don't want your envelopes to be folded over as they're fed to the output tray after printing, you can flip the back open and then the paper comes straight through and it never gets folded. Haven't tried that, though.

Obviously I checked whether the printer supports two-sided printing as this can save a lot of paper, and obviously it does. And much faster than the inkjet, as there is no need for a delay to let the ink on the first side dry before printing on the other side.

Conclusions

A printer like this is truly great for any text-heavy documents that don't require color. This particular one also handles (shipping) labels and envelopes really well, and laser prints have the advantage that they don't smear when they get whet. Inkjet prints do somewhat, possibly enough to kill bar codes, but unlikely enough to make it impossible to read an address.

But despite that black-and-white photo looking better than I expected, this type of printer is just no good for printing photos, while most inkjets kill in this department. (While the photo paper purchases kill your wallet.) Then again, you can easily order photo prints online... There's also stuff like printing on CDs/DVDs/BRs. Believe me, I tried it, it's cool. My old inkjet printer does it well.

My particular inkjet isn't great with black text, but partially that's an age thing and partially either a wrong ink thing or something particular to this (make of) printer. There's no reason an inkjet printer can't output great looking text. But I'm not so sure if any modestly priced inkjet printer will do really good colors on regular paper. I think for that you need a color laser, hello whole new price category!

I'd say a good inkjet printer is more versatile. But there's always the issue where the ink dries out if you don't print quite regularly. So either way you're paying a good amount of money for ink.

This cheap B&W laser (and I assume others like it) is really good at a smaller number of jobs, and it's good consistently, no matter how often or infrequently you print.

 

[continuum]

Since some of Ars is US-based, Brother DCP-L2627DWE you picked up looks like the US market equivalent is the HL-L2465DW (from the "E" at the end of your model maybe there's a HL-L2465DWE too, haven't looked, guessing the E means ethernet?).

The very dark and very light parts turned out really well: sharp and detailed, and you really have to look for halftoning issues. But whatever I tried, I got some banding in the light gray sky.

Oooo. Between that, wifi, and the 4mm margin note-- appreciate detailed review!

You have touched on actually what is one area of difference particularly in black and white laser printers, halftoning issues. IIRC there are still some differences there, particularly on more affordable consumer models. There was a good comparison including print samples of HP, Brother, Canon etc. black and white laser printers a few years ago but I can't find it today.

For some reason, having somewhat noisy machinery spring into action

That is definitely one thing I noticed when we switched from HP to Brother laser printers for personal use about 10 or 15 years ago... the Brothers definitely seem noisier in a "cheap" way, the HP noise felt "heftier" if that makes any sense. (it probably makes no sense).

Edit: one too many "IIRC" removed.

 

[Ardax]

The drum is also replaceable but should last a good deal longer.

This is good and quite preferable. HP used to have to toner and drums integrated into a single cartridge, which made replacing toners much more expensive for them, but increased print quality (at least, that's HP's claim). Many (most?) other manufacturers made the toner and drum separate pieces since the drum should be able to last much longer.

This works fine for changing most settings and seeing feedback from the printer, but it sucks for entering a Wi-Fi password*.

You threw an asterisk here but never came back to it. I wonder if it's something you can configure with the device hardwired in some way?

The printer uses a whopping 1000 W for a few seconds when printing!

Yuuup. There's a reason you're not supposed to plug a laser printer into a UPS, or even a particularly highly loaded circuit. Turns out that fusing toner onto paper with high heat requires a decent chunk of power if you want it done quickly.

Note that the printer has 4 mm unprintable margins on all sides.

That's actually really good. Used to be that the top or bottom gripper required a larger margin (closer to 10-12mm).

This particular one also handles (shipping) labels and envelopes really well

Make sure any material you use that has adhesive (labels/envelops) is laser rated. That's a fast way to wreck a drum too, and they can be one of those "okay until it isn't" kinds of things.

Thanks for providing the detailed review!

 

[Paladin]

Sometimes printers with a wired network port will have a rudimentary integrated web interface you can use to configure things that are not in the 'app' or easy to do on the tiny screen. It can be worth a shot to just get the IP and throw it in a browser address bar and see what comes up. Then again, it might not do anything.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Sometimes printers with a wired network port will have a rudimentary integrated web interface you can use to configure things that are not in the 'app' or easy to do on the tiny screen. It can be worth a shot to just get the IP and throw it in a browser address bar and see what comes up. Then again, it might not do anything.

Brother printers do include a web interface that makes it a lot easier to configure pretty much all the settings (as best I can recall). There really isn't a LOT to configure the with more basic ones, though, since they don't take a lot of paper sizes and it's just black toner. Of course if you can't wire it, you're still stuck with the entering the password by the godawful process of scrolling through the entire sequence of available characters for each password character in the LCD. And it can't be modified in the web interface, so you can't wire it and then set up the Wi-Fi via that.

 

[Ardax]

And it can't be modified in the web interface, so you can't wire it and then set up the Wi-Fi via that.

Oh, that sucks.

My Xerox has a pretty decent web interface, but it doesn't have WiFi.

 

[Lord Evermore]

My Xerox has a pretty decent web interface, but it doesn't have WiFi.

If you really really wanted it to, you could buy a bridge.

 

[iljitsch]

This works fine for changing most settings and seeing feedback from the printer, but it sucks for entering a Wi-Fi password*.

You threw an asterisk here but never came back to it. I wonder if it's something you can configure with the device hardwired in some way?

Right. I planned on a rant about how getting the Wi-Fi password on the printer could be made easier. There is actually an easy way: WPS. But that's not always available (see below).

Apart from WPS, I believe the easiest way to do it is to enable Wi-Fi Direct on the printer, then join the printer's SSID and connect to the web interface. Then there's a wireless setup wizard. (Among many, many other settings, including the ability to generate a new self-signed certificate or upload a certificate.)

But I didn't know about that yesterday. It actually took me about an hour to get the printer on my network. Now most of that time waste was my own stupidity, as I thought my current Wi-Fi router supported WPS, so I pushed the button on the side of the thing. But that didn't work. Turns out the router DOESN'T support WPS and that button turns off Wi-Fi. Yeah, that makes connecting to it somewhat harder. But my initial conclusion was simply poor Wi-Fi reception by the printer, so I ended up firing up an old AirPort Express and managed to enter my password using just three buttons on the printer...

I should have used my Mikrotik instead, as that one definitely does support WPS....

After this, I started thinking about how this could be made easier.

My first idea was to have the printer scan a QR code that contains Wi-Fi settings. But oh wait, how do you print that QR code with the printer not yet connected to your network...? I guess you could print over USB for that.

Or maybe put your phone on the scanner and see if you can scan the QR code off of that. I think this would work well for people like me who know how to create such a QR code and/or have a Wi-Fi router that shows one. But if this works well it should be easy enough to make a phone app that generates these.

Another way would be to OCR the password. But that is probably too tricky with people writing ASCII special characters by hand. So what I think the best solution would be is for the printer to spit out a table with the letters A-Z, a-z, the digits 0-9 and all the allowed special characters on the left, and then columns say 1 - 30. Then you mark the appropriate columns to convey your Wi-Fi password and scan that page to get it to the printer.

So if your password is ABC213 you'd get:

 

[Lord Evermore]

Or maybe put your phone on the scanner and see if you can scan the QR code off of that. I think this would work well for people like me who know how to create such a QR code and/or have a Wi-Fi router that shows one. But if this works well it should be easy enough to make a phone app that generates these.

Most wireless printers support Wi-Fi Direct, and if it supports AirPrint or works with Android, or you have a PC that is wireless, you could then print directly to it. (Or scan your laptop screen!) I didn't know they had a wireless setup wizard in the web interface now, or maybe they have for a while and I just never ran into it. Just about every consumer wireless router or Internet gateway supports WPS, but business-class devices often don't, but the work of creating a QR code and the printer supporting scanning one is probably just not worth the effort (for the user or the developers) for something that usually needs to be done just once.

 

[iljitsch]

... is probably just not worth the effort (for the user or the developers) for something that usually needs to be done just once.

True. Then again, entering a strong password using just three buttons is a really, really bad experience for someone who just unboxed your product.

At the very least they could optimize this a bit, so you can switch between lower case, upper case, digits and special characters rather than have to wade through either digits or special characters just to get to regular letters, and then having to do that for each and every one. And I believe if you enter the wrong password, you can't edit it, you need to reenter the whole thing from scratch.

BTW, just tried printing a larger document and wow, this is fast. Printing a piece of paper on both sides takes 7 seconds after the first one. So that's 17 pages per minute. One-sided printing is even faster, the pages just come rolling out one after the other with no pause in between. And my Wi-Fi was not a bottleneck.

And for anyone who wants to see this type of printer in action and learn some more stuff: Brother Laser Printer MEGA Tutorial HL-L2350DW Wifi Setup and Installation Step by Step Manual

And: yes, my model must be specific to Europe, as the voltage required is 220 - 240 V.

 

[uno2tres]

Nope, keep the B&W laser. 1200 x 1200dpi is as high as things go.

However depending on your needs, in particularly if you have more scanning needs, I would definitely consider replacing with a black and white laser MFP that does both automatic duplex scanning and automatic duplex printing. And yeah, you can get support for more modern standards of wifi.

I think Wirecutter still likes the Brother MFC-L2750dw but i think there's quite a few very similar mothers from Brother, and HP and stuff have some solid competitors.

I picked up a MFC-L2750DW in 2021 when I had a big scanning project (digitizing my late grandmother’s writings— she had a novel and several short stories published, and thousands of pages of typewritten unpublished stories) and I’m very happy with it.

It actually takes up less space than a flatbed MFC since I can keep it on a shelf and don’t need clearance to open it for typical scanning/copying duties.

I do have my network set up to block it from WAN because I don’t want to lose 3rd party toner capabilities.

 

[papadage]

That is certainly not an unreasonable position. Another reason to steer clear of printers is the clutter: the thing itself is relatively large, you need paper, other supplies...

For me personally, I like having the peace of mind that I can handle any printing needs without external help, and printers have gotten cheap enough that this peace of mind comes at a modest cost. Also, although my current printer may go a month or so without doing any printing, it’s not like I only use it for that one shipping label in a blue moon.

And once you have printer, it’s nice to print out any bar codes or emails with important numbers rather than having to go through your phone to find them on the spot with people waiting behind you. Not nice enough to splurge on a printer, but if you already have one, certainly worth the few cents that printing a page costs you.

I have a Canon color multifunction printer (MF733cdw). We regularly use network scanning, and the single-pass duplex capability is a huge time saver. Photocopying comes in handy fairly regularly with family and kids since I can fill out one form for them and then make a copy before adding personal details. That's great for all sorts of things. I am still on my first set of color cartridges, and after going through the black toner, I switched to a high-capacity third-party cartridge that works fantastically.

We print many mailing labels, labels for storage bins, sticker label sheets for cards and invitations, place cards, tags for gifts and goodie bags for kid parties, and other ridiculous family stuff.

But I also have a two-roll Dymo printer for regular envelope labels, and its software has over a decade and a half worth of addresses in it. I had gotten it from work over 12 years ago for free, and I have only had to buy replacement label rolls for it once.

 

[Ardax]

Right. I planned on a rant about how getting the Wi-Fi password on the printer could be made easier. There is actually an easy way: WPS. But that's not always available (see below).

Isn't WPS really busted and unsafe? I remember a lot of attacks coming out over the years against it.

Apart from WPS, I believe the easiest way to do it is to enable Wi-Fi Direct on the printer, then join the printer's SSID and connect to the web interface. Then there's a wireless setup wizard.

That sounds like it sucks way less than entering a password character by character on the front panel.

 

[Lord Evermore]

wow, this is fast

And unlike an inkjet, to reach more than 5 pages per minute it doesn't have to fling itself off the table moving the heads back and forth.