Tough finding an inexpensive wireless all-in one printer/scanner/FAX

Printing is still a "last line of defense" for emergency when you don't have access to a phone or battery ran out. This is especially important if you have kids in school age. When lockdown first started we were printing like 20 pages a day for 2 kids to do homework, 1st grader can't type or do math on a touch screen very well. I think I printed more than the last 10 years combined in 6 months.

Scanner, I don't use that much these days, but sometimes they are helpful if you have documents you want to toss but keep a copy. That's probably the only reason I would want an AIO. My dad keeps 1 AIO Canon around for scan and color but most of his printing (lease agreement, applications, etc) is done on a Brother B&W printer instead.
 
WOW - what happened????

This the one I bought in 2019: https://smile.amazon.com/Brother-MF...81970&sprefix=brother+mfc-j805,aps,156&sr=8-3

Ordered on September 10, 2019

Order Summary​


Item(s) Subtotal: $119.99
Shipping & Handling: $0.00
Total before tax: $119.99
Estimated tax to be collected: $10.32
Grand Total: $130.31

Still works great even with cheap generic tanks (well it may not recognize them, but printing is fine)
 
Other than the several thousand dollar workhorse printers at work I universally hate all consumer-level printers. They're always cheaply built, they are engineered for planned obsolescence and to be thrown away should anything break, and they are always costly with consumables.
Kind of disagree. I had a $1000 Lexmark, what a pain in the butt!

- So big it needs its own desk or cart, weighs about 200lbs.

- Microchipped components like the display board, can't even pull a perfectly good part out of another printer, have to pay full retail to buy parts direct from Lexmark.

- Eats color toner even if only printing black and white. I was quite surprised that having barely printed in color, the carts were empty, which was very irritating because:

- Set of 4 carts costs over $800.

- Advertised time to first page is only if it printed a page recently. Otherwise, power on, let it do a "calibration" run, and time to first page was over 1 minute.

In the lifetime I had it, I didn't print in total, what it was rated for in monthly pages, yet it broke some other way and screwed up printing pictures the ONE time I really needed it to do that.

Midgrade Brother monochrome AIO for the win! Mine is about 10 years old, no way that was a bad value even if I have to replace it some year, but they've been great about supporting it, has drivers from Win2K all the way through Win10. No disappointment at all, except they used cheap sleeve bearing fans and one is starting to rattle a bit, so will have to keep an eye on that. Dead fans make no noise. ;)
 
Kind of disagree. I had a $1000 Lexmark, what a pain in the butt!

- So big it needs its own desk or cart, weighs about 200lbs.

- Microchipped components like the display board, can't even pull a perfectly good part out of another printer, have to pay full retail to buy parts direct from Lexmark.

- Eats color toner even if only printing black and white. I was quite surprised that having barely printed in color, the carts were empty, which was very irritating because:

- Set of 4 carts costs over $800.

- Advertised time to first page is only if it printed a page recently. Otherwise, power on, let it do a "calibration" run, and time to first page was over 1 minute.

In the lifetime I had it, I didn't print in total, what it was rated for in monthly pages, yet it broke some other way and screwed up printing pictures the ONE time I really needed it to do that.

Midgrade Brother monochrome AIO for the win! Mine is about 10 years old, no way that was a bad value even if I have to replace it some year, but they've been great about supporting it, has drivers from Win2K all the way through Win10. No disappointment at all, except they used cheap sleeve bearing fans and one is starting to rattle a bit, so will have to keep an eye on that. Dead fans make no noise. ;)
Well there are still +$1000 printers that suck...the point is for the most part there is a huge divide between the engineering and manufacturing of home printers vs office printers. I'm lucky to get a few years out of home printers with very light duty and while we have 5 commercial-grade printers at work that last 5-8 years and print tens of thousands of pages per year without any problems.
 
I have a Canon ImageClass MF232w all-in-one laser printer that I bought through walmart for around $100. We've had it over two years and it's printed about 2000 pages at this point. It's been awesome and is used almost daily.

I replaced with toner cartridge with an aftermarket off the Amazon for cheap at around 1000 pages.
 
Other than the several thousand dollar workhorse printers at work I universally hate all consumer-level printers. They're always cheaply built, they are engineered for planned obsolescence and to be thrown away should anything break, and they are always costly with consumables.

Consumer level printers are my bane. I can almost never get them to work properly on the first try and it's more of a PITA if I have to set one up at the office because it's only for one person.

Now these babies.....these were the GOAT!

1660590265677.jpg
 
Consumer level printers are my bane. I can almost never get them to work properly on the first try and it's more of a PITA if I have to set one up at the office because it's only for one person.

Now these babies.....these were the GOAT!


View attachment 112670
That's what I'm talking about! That thing is a work horse!
 
Well there are still +$1000 printers that suck...the point is for the most part there is a huge divide between the engineering and manufacturing of home printers vs office printers. I'm lucky to get a few years out of home printers with very light duty and while we have 5 commercial-grade printers at work that last 5-8 years and print tens of thousands of pages per year without any problems.
I only print about 2K pages a year on my Brother MFC-8890DW AIO. It was purchased in 2011 for $400 and I'm fine with under $40/yr. and zero repairs so far. It wouldn't have benefited me to pay much more than that.

I don't want another printer that has its own zip code!
 
I only print about 2K pages a year on my Brother MFC-8890DW AIO. It was purchased in 2011 for $400 and I'm fine with under $40/yr. and zero repairs so far. It wouldn't have benefited me to pay much more than that.

I don't want another printer that has its own zip code!
BTW...I'm NOT advocating buying a $2500 home printer - I'm just preparing people to have their $159.99 printer suck and need to be replaced every few years. I'm glad your printer is still going!
 
Consumer level printers are my bane. I can almost never get them to work properly on the first try and it's more of a PITA if I have to set one up at the office because it's only for one person.

Now these babies.....these were the GOAT!

View attachment 112670

Can't tell which model that is, but the irony is that HP built their laser printer reputation on Canon's print engines.

The inkjet technology was their own, and the ThinkJet and DeskJet/Writer printers, while not cheap, were relatively affordable compared to lasers in their day, and still achieved 300dpi output.

My current Brother AIO laser was purchased in 2009. As a non-prolific home printer, it hasn't required anything but fresh toner cartridges, which can be had for cheap, and the only reason I see it needing replacement will be because a future version of Mac OS won't support it once CUPS is removed.
 
Consumer level printers are my bane. I can almost never get them to work properly on the first try and it's more of a PITA if I have to set one up at the office because it's only for one person.

Now these babies.....these were the GOAT!

View attachment 112670

PC load letter? What does that mean?
 
PC load letter? What does that mean?

I think that's the letter loader in the front of the machine. The front panel swings downwards and has an alternate tray for other sized stationary.
 
Can't tell which model that is, but the irony is that HP built their laser printer reputation on Canon's print engines.

Same for the Apple LaserWriter. But that had a considerably more powerful processing engine. I heard some reports that the processing power on the original LaserWriter made it "the most powerful computer" made by Apple at the time. I think most laser printers of the time were utilizing PostScript and needed a lot of computing power to do so. We had a LaserWriter Plus in my computer lab at school. The lab used Unix-based Digital Equipment Alpha workstations. Even though the LaserWriter had been discontinued, the printers were rock solid and could easily handle 10K pages a month. By the time it was discontinued in 1988 they sold for maybe $5000.

By the early 90s I think Apple had some more affordable consumer level laser printers, but even those sold for maybe $2000 each.
 
Same for the Apple LaserWriter. But that had a considerably more powerful processing engine. I heard some reports that the processing power on the original LaserWriter made it "the most powerful computer" made by Apple at the time. I think most laser printers of the time were utilizing PostScript and needed a lot of computing power to do so. We had a LaserWriter Plus in my computer lab at school. The lab used Unix-based Digital Equipment Alpha workstations. Even though the LaserWriter had been discontinued, the printers were rock solid and could easily handle 10K pages a month. By the time it was discontinued in 1988 they sold for maybe $5000.

By the early 90s I think Apple had some more affordable consumer level laser printers, but even those sold for maybe $2000 each.

The original LW had a higher-clocked 68k than the Mac, but less memory.

Early laser printers like it needed hardware to do onboard interpreting and rasterizing; essentially, all the computer did was send data to the printer, which drew the page and put it to paper.

Adobe PS was groundbreaking, and good, but not cheap to license, so clones were developed to avoid that cost. Faster and better computing power also helped shift those tasks to host computers, which also reduced the need for such hardware in the printers, which also helped drive cost down.

PCL wasn't as capable, but "good enough" for general tasks, and cheaper to implement, so it became the de facto standard otherwise.

Computing might be a lot different if Xerox PARC had not existed.
 
Adobe PS was groundbreaking, and good, but not cheap to license, so clones were developed to avoid that cost. Faster and better computing power also helped shift those tasks to host computers, which also reduced the need for such hardware in the printers, which also helped drive cost down.

I remember occasionally there was some misinterpretation and a print job would go out as a text file print of a PostScript file. Then we’d run back to kill the print job before it used up dozens of pages.
 
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