Hey lemmy. I’ve been paying out of pocket to get stickers printed from online printing companies. But its getting expensive and I think I’d like to get a printer to do the job.
HOWEVER, I’ve been avoided getting a printer, because, well, the whole thing is just a shit show. Our household went through like a printer a year for almost four years. Between ink prices, and the printers just failing, we threw our hands up and said fuck it. Not playing this game, so we shifted to printing services or the local library.
So I’m looking for a very basic (I think?) printer. Honestly, a black only printer might even be fine. I’ve heard I think that maybe Canons or Brothers are the ones you want and HP’s are to be avoided. The purpose of the printer will be to print stickers on sticker paper. What printer should I buy?
Brother is the only real choice. Their MFC are very versatile and handy and quite reasonable.
You are correct that Canon and Brother tend to be the best straight forward printers. Brother is better for laser printing and Canon is better for ink jet printing. If you go ink jet go with individual cartridges instead of the combined cartridges it’s way less fuss.
If you can do laser the basic Brothers just work. We had one in our woodshop for almost a decade. Sawdust spray paint etc. and it just did not care. It didn’t end up dying even, we just swapped it for a color version, and we’re on year 4 with that one.
I’ve got a small Canon MFC laser printer/copier. No complaints at all. It only prints black and white but I tend to scan more than print so that was a big focus for me when I bought it.
Brother laser printer. Mine’s going on 9 years now, a cartridge lasts so long I have to look up how to change it when it finally needs it.
I’ve had mine for about that long and changed the toner cartridge once. It’s super easy. I think I paid like $80 for two cartridges. Guess I’m good for another 20 years.
Echoing others, Brother laser printers. Cheap, reliable, and toner lasts forever. Initial one with purchase is like…40% of standard, and will still get you a few hundred pages. The regular ones are like 1200+, and the large ones are I think pushing 2k for like $70.
You can do stickers on sticker paper with lasers, but idk the quality. Is it like…address labels? If so, lasers are perfect tly fine for that. Fine details? Idk.
Brother laser printers are my current go to
My wife has a brother black/white laser printer. I got it about 5yrs ago and still going with no issues. She does sell things and makes labels and also uses a small thermal printer that pumps out label packages. Not sure if that can double for stickers for you, but could be an option.
My Brother printer can legally vote in the next election and it’s still kickin
Only advice I can give is if you are just printing on paper, pay the extra $ and get a laser printer. Avoid inkjets - they are a complete scam and a waste of money. The toner will last 10x longer, never goes bad or clogs up the print heads, and the quality is better.
I don’t know how laser printers handle sticker sheets, but for all practical printing purposes I wholeheartedly recommend a laser printer.
Brother is also a solid brand. I have had mine for almost 10 years now and it’s still running like the day I got it.
I had a brother printer (mfc) that i bought and gave to my friend after a couple years. bought another and the colors are off but it works. the ink dries out tho so i was thinking my next printer might use toner/lasers. i just buy ink cartriges, i don’t refill.
Make sure you know the price of sticker paper and whether you’re really saving any money.
I think canons been enshittified, but mines been solid for over a decade. I buy cheap third party ink, and the difference is big enough to save money even if it’s another cartridge per session. Realistically I haven’t printed anything in like two years
Cannon definitely enshitified. I have one from 5 years ago that is taking up space on my desk because I haven’t got around to the Office Space treatment.
My first big problem was when it wouldn’t scan documents because the color ink cart was out, completely unnecessary for the task at hand! It always had issues with feeding paper unless it was perfectly aligned and you’d made thr proper blood sacrifices but it just doesn’t load paper at all any more, just spins wheels pretending it wants to move paper.
I have bought a brother laser printer 8 years ago. It just stop working, because of a know problem of not turning on. There’s a workaround that a used, and lately let it always on, but it finally stopped working, even with the workaround. Although it was a good printer because I would have spend many times its value if I had used the cheap ones. I also have a xerox and canon laser printer and so far so good.
After a long time with HP printers, i switched to Epson Ecotank series. Way better with regards to ink usage and prices.
Key features for me: all-in-one device that also scans and copies, feeder for the scanner, double-sided printing, color.
Like other posts - brother, laser.
My ancient HP laserjet died a few months back so I picked up a brother. It amazed me that I just plugged it in (Linux) and it worked. No hplip, no cups config, just worked.
Even more impressive, I tried the network/wifi print out of curiosity and it also just worked… Nothing special, Debian 13 auto discovered it on the network and added it to my printer list.
I had the HP for over 15 years and it was always a bitch to get working with Linux. Hoping this brother lasts at least as long.
How many stickers are we talking?
I was just thinking about something similar myself, and as I’ve recently got into 3d printing, I’m going to try printing out some custom stamps out of TPU for each color layer. Maybe it’s a flop, but it might also be sick as hell.
Don’t even think about getting an inkjet printer unless you really, really need color, and need it often. Even if you aren’t dealing with DRM and price-gouging BS, the ink dries and gums up the print heads unless you’re using them regularly.
For me, color is a want, not a need (meaning I’m not relying on the quality of the output or making money from it), and only an occasional one. But I did want it, along with other bells and whistles like automatic duplex printing, for my “buy it for life” printer. So I decided to go with a Brother color laser.
I ended up buying two used ones from some office getting rid of them on Craigslist for maybe $50? each. The one I actually print with – the other is basically for spare parts – has almost 60K pages on it and is complaining that it’s due for some expensive “fuser” and “PF Kit” replacements, but it keeps working, so I haven’t actually bothered yet.
If your use case is very much about stickers on sticker paper, and you’re doing it regularly and often (not necessarily tons of pages at a time, but not going weeks at a time without printing anything), you may actually want an inkjet rather than a laser. Aside from the images not being as pretty as with an inkjet, the other disadvantage of a laser for you is that because it heats the paper, you might have to worry about paper compatibility to avoid gumming up the machine with melted adhesive.
See if you can find a used Brother laser printer. The older Brother printers are fantastic. I thought I heard somewhere Brother had started to enshitify their newer products (last coulple of years). But I might be wrong there.
It was a mountain out of a molehill situation. Basically, brother toner cartridges can do an internal calibration to fix minor alignment issues. For off brand toner, it needs to be done manually. It had been that way for a while. The original author just got some particularly misaligned cartridges and “discovered” this.
Other than that, I’ve seen no signs of enshitifcation from Brother. I ended up buying a brother colour laser not long afterwards, and have been quite happy so far.
