this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Don't buy a smart printer. Buy a dumb printer, then plug it into a raspberry pi.
Who sells dumb printers though? I would buy that in a heartbeat.
I'm pretty sure you can still get brother, Canon, and Epson ones
Canon bricks their printers, only replaces full cartridges and is super touchy about hooking up to the internet.
Canon is 100% as evil as HP
I love their cameras, but yeah, their printers are evil.
I'm going to be in the market for a camera soon, and I'll never touch a Canon because of their printers. If they want good brand recognition they have to earn it and they have not for me
The only Canon printer I ever owned was a piece of garbage. For whatever reason, I couldn't just select my home wifi from a list like literally any other network-enabled device. I instead had to select an option buried several layers deep in the menus to have it try to automatically connect to an open network. Only after waiting 5 minutes for this to fail would it show a list of available networks.
Of course, it also forgot the network and password settings every time it lost power, so I had to go through the whole process again after time I unplugged the thing to clean behind the shelf.
I've never had much luck with the consumer level canon printers, absolute pieces of shit. I used to sell printers and would steer people towards brother or Epson. However last I saw, canon did still have printers that could be used entirely offline.
Brother sells some
Brother is the only printer company I like. I've had a workhorse for ages and it is still going strong.
I've been using them for 20ish years and never had any more trouble than routine maintenance.
Estate sales, yard sales, and tech scrappers/recyclers tend to have em as well.
I have had one printer bricked and my dad had 2 bricked by hooking up to the internet. I didn't realize that was what was happening until it was too late.
we need an easily flashed prerolled Printer OS that makes this easy to make work
What's a smart printer?
A printer that supports network print, typically through an Internet service.
I'd say network printers are fine, but ones that require a 'cloud' connection can gag on my dong. I have a brother business aio printer hooked up via network and it's been everything I wanted from it, after our Epson shit the bed a couple years ago.
Why did you need the internet for network printing? You’ve been able to print over network for decades without needing the internet. I stopped using printers 15 years ago both at home and at work so had no idea this had happened. In a rare situation where I do need to print I use the work MFP or go to the library and pay 20c a page. Happens once every 2 or 3 years.
Okay I made my previous comment before seeing this one. Please disregard it.
I'd like to second the opinion of the other replies here. I love the fact that my printer is networked. I could never go back to having a printer that needs to be connected to the computer I'm printing from.
But it's also just a basic device attached to my local network. I could maybe get behind a printer with optional cloud connectivity, but absolutely do not buy a printer that requires a cloud connection to work.
The ones you plug to your intranet with an Ethernet cable, and which talk the common lpr protocol. Those are really good. E.g. the Brother laser printers.
I haven't bought a printer recently. Wtf is a smart printer?
It's a printer that, when you tell it to print, tries its best to find a reason to refuse to do so.
Most newer models that automatically make themselves available to all the devices connected to the network they are connected to, and manage the printer queue internally. Usually comes with a ton of shitty "features" e.g preventing you from printing black & white when you're out of yellow ink.
2-in-one scanner+printer machines are especially heinous with this, most of the ones I've used block you from scanning a document if you're out of any ink (yes, even when you're only trying to scan and not use the "copy" mode)
Somehow they found a way to make me miss having to boot the "printer PC" and wrangling windows' god awful printer queue system.