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Counterpoint: We just bought a Brother HL-L3210CW color laser, and after 90 pages its reporting 90% on the yellow toner, and 100% on the others. Easy (though tedious) to configure wifi on the two line LCD, and cloud print was easy to setup through Chrome with one button press on the printer to confirm. I debated a duplex-capable or multifunction machine, but for $185 it makes the wife happy to have color capability, and I'll probably upgrade our B&W laser eventually (old 2170W) to a multifunction B&W for slightly lower TCO. I looked at the Ecotank printers at the same time, but they were more expensive for the printer, though much less expensive on the consumables.
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May 21, 2020 01:19
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| # ¿ Jul 27, 2024 14:43 |
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I suppose it depends on the color mix and such, but yeah. The Brother toners aren't even super expensive for the high cap ones. But replacing all 3 colors is easily 50% more than the cost of the printer itself. That's assuming the toner is actually "empty" when it says it is. Pretty sure the little B&W laser is at 5k pages on it's starter toner still, after blocking the window and resetting the counter in the printer.
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May 21, 2020 17:56
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We've been happy with our Brother color laser from a few posts back. Mostly printing color activity sheets for our toddler, and some of my wife's work stuff that needs to be color. It's a bit on the bigger side, probably 18-20" square. It's not photo quality, but it's good enough. We send off all our photo printing anyway.
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May 25, 2020 19:48
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We picked up a basic Brother color laser (HLL3210CW, no scanning/duplexing) and it's been trouble-free for the first 1k pages. My wife uses it for her home business, so maybe 20% of that has been an assortment of label sheets as well, and it's handled them without a fuss through the manual feed and straight output tray in the back. Only downside is that after 1k pages, the black toner claims it's empty, and the color toners aren't far behind. I'm doing my usual trick of "reset the counter and keep printing until it starts fading", so we'll see how many pages the original toners are good for. A set of high-cap toners cost about as much as the printer did, so we'd like to put them off as long as possible.
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Mar 5, 2021 16:44
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My wife has a craft shop on Etsy, and I helped her for a month printing/cutting/taping labels for shipping before I convinced her to buy a cheap thermal printer. She's got one of the Rollo that prints up to 4x6 labels from a roll or fan-fold, and she's on her second box of 500 labels with not a single issue. If "printing envelopes" is just putting return/mailing addresses on them, I'd go the sheet label or thermal printer route. She also prints sheet labels on our Brother HLL3210CW laser, but that's run through the manual feed tray, so one sheet at a time. She generally only needs 5-10 sheets of those a month, so I just spend 10-15 minutes once a month and print a bunch of them for her. PitViper fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Jan 22, 2022 |
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Jan 22, 2022 17:20
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I had the opportunity to print using an Epson Ecotank printer at my in-laws over Thanksgiving (my kid wanted coloring pages). It printed from my phone.... sorta.... but dear god was it slow as gently caress. Maybe I'm just spoiled having only had laser printers at home for going on 20 years now.
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Dec 1, 2022 03:55
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Yeah, I went about 400 pages past the "I'm empty" warning on all my toners. Just had to look up the reset process for the printer to make it think the toner had been replaced, then I just check it every few weeks with a color test page (or wait for my wife to complain that the colors aren't right). Just checked. 3800 pages, still on the original cyan cartridge, one actual replacement on the black/yellow/magenta toners.
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Dec 3, 2022 01:59
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I don't know that there's any way to disable the toner page-count alert on the Brother, but my system seems to work well enough. I'll usually order a cartridge when the printer claims it's empty, and replace it when the color starts looking a little off on test prints.
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Dec 4, 2022 01:32
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| # ¿ Jul 27, 2024 14:43 |
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Back to label chat, my wife uses our HLL3210CDW mostly for her Etsy shop, which involves lots of sheet labels and full sheet invoices. As long as you use the straight feed path (all the Brother printers I've had have it, but verify before buying) it hasn't given us any issues. It's color because of her specific needs, but our other printer is a HL2170W that lives in the garage for me to print invoices on, is about 15 years old, and just keeps trucking along. She wanted to print shipping labels on the laser as well, but I convinced her to buy a Rollo thermal printer and boxes of labels. Other than the fact that it's USB only, and thus is shared off my desktop to print from her laptop, it's been the most trouble free printer I've ever dealt with. $20 for 500 labels, no consumables, no wasted half-sheets or whatever.
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Aug 23, 2023 19:04
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