Originally Posted by
Need
The problem with Brother Laser Printer is that ... it doesn't break! LOL. I have a 2270dw for about 6 years and it is still running like it was new. I did get a new "generic" drum for it a few years back and it is really cheap. Been using generic ink cartridges since the original one went out 6 years ago. I kept wanting to switch to a Brother Color Laser but just can't throw away a perfectly good BW Brother printer. Have been patiently waiting for it to break, but so far nothing....
That's not even that old. I've still got a B&W Lexmark from fall of 1999 or early 2000 that's still trucking. I've had two color lasers (one Tektronix that lasted years, and one HP that died at like a year and a month) die on me in that time. I think my current Dell color one must be around that age.
It's single-sided, not networked, and not very fast. OTOH, it's from one of the earlier generations of really small ones, so there isn't much space lost in keeping it, and it's just new enough to support USB (I think literally the first generation of Lexmark printers that did.)
Originally Posted by
Loren Pechtel
I wasn't referring to their color lasers, I've never even tried one. It was a black and white laser that was the final straw. It was prone to responding to malformed codes (a document destined for another printer) by leaving the driver in a state where you had to reboot the PC to get it working again. (This was a network printer, the files were being sent from elsewhere.) The same thing would happen if it received an incomplete document. It was prone to doing for no apparent reason, also. (It behaved properly with locally generated documents printed from Windows, it was only the stuff coming from DOS or the network that would barf it.)
Yeah, for small-department printers, my complaint was less about software issues as just the shift from "lasts forever" to "you're lucky to get a couple of years out of it" -- somewhere around 2000, their quality went way downhill. I know people who are still running Laserjet 5 series printers and at least one still-alive Laserjet 4000, but I know of a lot of only slightly newer 4100/4150 era printers that died within a few years, and my 2006 or 2007-vintage Color 4600 died of a motherboard failure at like 13 months, right after the warranty expired.
Originally Posted by
Loren Pechtel
So? I have a color laser all-in-one and a black and white laser that's considerably older. The black and white costs less to run and I use it unless I need color. I worry that the black and white might die of a lack of drivers. (It took a considerable jumping through hoops to get it working as a networked printer with Win 7. I haven't looked all that hard but I haven't found any means of getting it working networked on Windows 10. Drivers are only available through Microsoft's site--and the standard drivers will not do a network install.)
I'm really surprised.
Anything B&W that takes standard PCL3-PCL5 and/o6 Postscript can still be used, as Microsoft has both a generic postscript, PCL3 and PCL6 drivers and when Windows update for printer drives works (it isn't working today) I was able to get an old HP working with the Laserjet Series II (PCL4) driver which should still be there.
Jetdirect protocol and LPD haven't changed since before the millennium, and in a pinch for very old printers you can use a
third party print server (USB ones even cheaper and more numerous.)
You won't get all the features of a fancier printer, and old scan features is often a lost cause.
Scanner drivers have been a really long running upgrade annoyance; I've pretty much given up on scanning directly to my PC after Windows 8/8.1 broke the drivers for my last USB scanner -- it already had scan-to-USB stick and scan-to-network drive, and it still works ~5 years on, and it's actually proved more convenient to scan to the network drive than local scanning used to be.