I bought mine 12 years ago for college and last week I plugged it in after it sat for several years and printed off some stuff for family with 0 problems.
They last much longer in storage /without printing because toner is a powder, so it can’t dry out. The print head of an inkjet printer (part of the cartridge) will dry out if you don’t use it for a few weeks.
Still the exact same printer my family has been using for the past 10 years after our old Inkjet kicked the bucket a measly 3 months after it was born. And it has seen some stuff, including being dropped at least twice, plastic film in the paper compartment, coffee-stained (for aged effect) paper, and even a x-acto knife blade that somehow ended up in there.
Conversely, I have a recent-ish (<5yrs old) Brother inkjet printer that’s waiting to be dumped to recycling because it arbitrarily decided that it didn’t ever need to be discoverable or respond to any print requests one day, and so even though there was nothing mechanically wrong with it, even hooking up a Raspberry Pi to run CUPS over USB didn’t fix the issue – because Brother explicitly refuses to publish drivers for the Raspberry Pi, and their inkjet drivers are proprietary.
I’ve since replaced it with the best-reviewed Epson printer I could find that supports a generic PCL driver, so that if Epson ever loses their minds in the way Brother did, I can fall back on an open-source implementation of good ol’ PCL.
I don’t know why you’re getting down voted (or is it called something else on Lemmy?)
Is what you said not true? Maybe someone who would down vote can shine light on this?
In all fairness, my cheap Brother laser printer hasn’t let me down at all. Unlike the HP inkjets of the past.
I bought mine 12 years ago for college and last week I plugged it in after it sat for several years and printed off some stuff for family with 0 problems.
They last much longer in storage /without printing because toner is a powder, so it can’t dry out. The print head of an inkjet printer (part of the cartridge) will dry out if you don’t use it for a few weeks.
Still the exact same printer my family has been using for the past 10 years after our old Inkjet kicked the bucket a measly 3 months after it was born. And it has seen some stuff, including being dropped at least twice, plastic film in the paper compartment, coffee-stained (for aged effect) paper, and even a x-acto knife blade that somehow ended up in there.
Big Brother loves you. Really, those are the best printers right now.
my wife was having some problems finding the right W11 drivers for our Brother HL-2030 and dared to utter the thought of replacing it
I shut that down right quick
Windows Update should find the right driver. Failing that, a generic Postscript printer driver should work fine. Windows should have one.
Conversely, I have a recent-ish (<5yrs old) Brother inkjet printer that’s waiting to be dumped to recycling because it arbitrarily decided that it didn’t ever need to be discoverable or respond to any print requests one day, and so even though there was nothing mechanically wrong with it, even hooking up a Raspberry Pi to run CUPS over USB didn’t fix the issue – because Brother explicitly refuses to publish drivers for the Raspberry Pi, and their inkjet drivers are proprietary.
I’ve since replaced it with the best-reviewed Epson printer I could find that supports a generic PCL driver, so that if Epson ever loses their minds in the way Brother did, I can fall back on an open-source implementation of good ol’ PCL.
That thing’s given us no issues so far.
My experience has also been that laser printers work a lot more reliably.
Heck, even my 7 year old HP laserprinter is doing just fine, still
Granted, I print like 70 pages a year, but that’s still better than the inktjet before!
laser is especially nice if you don’t print often since you don’t have to worry about ink drying up
I don’t know why you’re getting down voted (or is it called something else on Lemmy?)
Is what you said not true? Maybe someone who would down vote can shine light on this?
we have some angry people on here :)