I got a Brother laser printer (HL-3170CDW) and in terms of economy it's hard to beat. (Never buy an ink printer though. That advice holds.)
About the random bricking though… While this printer doesn't actually brick itself, it does have a very curious failure state where if you leave it off, but plugged into the mains, it will eventually refuse to boot up until you unplug it, wait for ten minutes, and plug it back in. No error message, no blinking lights, nothing to indicate that something is wrong, just nothing until you let it reset itself by removing the power cable for a while. I just leave it unplugged most of the time now.
> Never buy an ink printer though. That advice holds.
With traditional ink printers, yes.
With the new tank-based printers? No. That advice no longer holds.
Tank-based printers separate out the tank that holds the ink from the nozzle that sprays the ink. This allows the printer to fully seal off the tank when the printer is not in use, preventing the ink from drying up. The traditional ink cartridges are not able to do that, which is what causes so much frustration and wastage.
I have a few clients with the tank-based printers, and these products seem to have solved the last major objections against inkjet printers. FWIHS, they tend to work quite well.
How do they keep the ink from drying up in the nozzles? That, in my experience, is the problem. There's always leftover ink in the nozzles from the last print operation.
I did buy a (Brother DCP-J4120DW) colour inkjet printer all-in-one device. And (surprisingly to me) it actually doesn't suck. The Linux drivers work. Sure, the ink is pricey, but it has generally been trouble-free. I left it for a couple of years without printing anything and it clogged up, but when the pandemic hit and I started having to print at home again, it cleared up with a couple of head-cleaning operations. I'm not printing much - maybe a double-sided sheet a week.
So yeah, the advice to never buy an inkjet - it's true but not disastrously true all the time.
I second the trouble-free experience with the dcp-j4120. Printing from Android works fine as well.
It does seem there are Linux problems ahead though, as the drivers seem to support only some deprecated CUPS driver version...
Perfectly. At least from the cable onwards. This seems to be a fairly common problem for Brother printers, oddly enough. I eventually figured out the issue from one of several Youtube videos addressing it.
About the random bricking though… While this printer doesn't actually brick itself, it does have a very curious failure state where if you leave it off, but plugged into the mains, it will eventually refuse to boot up until you unplug it, wait for ten minutes, and plug it back in. No error message, no blinking lights, nothing to indicate that something is wrong, just nothing until you let it reset itself by removing the power cable for a while. I just leave it unplugged most of the time now.