this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Brother is the go to because their stuff is basic and functional.
All the other companies have "innovated" to the point where their shit is unusable for daily use.
Yep, Brother rocks.
Too lazy for my usual lengthy monologue about Brother when this comes up, but works well with Linux, far more reasonable ink cost than any other brand I've tried, and the even low end 'inkvestment' model we have has really lived up to its claims regarding ink longevity. It doesn't even hassle you when you use off brand ink, but I only tried hat once since I had so little complaint about the Brother ink. You do lose ink level indication, which is annoying, but that's it, and manually checking level is also easy with this style of printer.
If you're talking about the laser printers, the toner level is available in the printer's web UI and via the network. I have mine integrated into Home Assistant.
Oh that's neat. How did you accomplish that?
It's a built-in integration: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/brother. For me, Home Assistant automatically detected the printer on the network and showed a notification in the app / on the site about a new device being found.
It provides pretty much all the data you'd want... Remaining drum life, toner level, page count, status (sleeping, idle, printing, paper jam, out of paper), and I think a few other things.
It has a web UI?
Yes!
My kids started school and I had a need to print lots of medical forms and other paperwork, I bought a brother laser printer. Because it was basic and functional and didn’t try to force me into an ink subscription that gave them permission to disable my hardware.
I have a cheap Canon Pixma inkjet that doesn’t seem to be enshitified. Probably about 3 years old at this point though.
Shoot ink on paper. That's all you need to do. Don't give me a built in screen, or onerous firmware, or any of that nonsense.