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What's a good printer for minimal usage ?
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pcprogrammer:
You can better start a rant about the ID chips they stick into the cartridges and force using the manufacturers cartridges only and then fail to even work with official ones due to what ever. Wasted good money on buying a new color cartridge to find it not working. Ditched one HP inkjet printer due to that. It would still scan and with some fiddling print in black and white, but the hassle to get it working even when only using it once in a while is still aggravating.

The new laser is doing what I expect from it and hope it keeps on doing it for a long time. Bought it in 2021 and when I turn it on it prints or scans what it needs to print or scan. Use it maybe once a month or even less.
EPAIII:
First fact: printer companies do not make a penny on low end printers. If you watch for sales they almost give them to you. They make their profits on ink or toner cartridges. That is a fact. In fact one of my printers did cost me under $10 after coupons and a sale price.

I have gone through a number of printers for personal use. I don't print a lot, but I do print a variety of things, like schematics, drawings, larger format (11" x 17" and larger), etc. At first I bought 24 pin dot matrix ones. They worked fairly well and the ribbon costs were OK. But the quality level was surpassed in time and I just wanted better. My last one was a HP inkjet but the cost of HP ink was staggering.

My present printer is a Brother, large format (11 x 17), four in one, ink jet and I love it. The cost of ink is reasonable and I can buy individual colors. B & W quality is good and color is OK, but not real photo quality. I still have the HP that I can use for photos. The Brother also does faxes, 11 x 17 copies, scans, and more. I have used it for several years now and it is great - IMHO. I paid under $175 for it a few years ago. But I am sure there are less expensive Brother printers available.

As to the cost of the ink, I saved enough in about 18 months to pay back the full price of the Brother.
tooki:
How has clogging been on the Brother? I’ve been considering a Brother precisely because of the large-format capability. But since my print volume is going to plummet once I finish school this summer, I don’t want something that’s going to suffer from infrequent use. (My Canon has had no trouble at all going weeks between uses.)
JohanH:
Laser printer with ethernet port that supports PostScript. PostScript is the common standard for "better" printers. Cheap ones might not support it and then you have to mess with drivers that stop working after a couple of years (guaranteed). PostScript works with all operating systems including Linux without messing with any drivers. I have a Brother HL-2250 many years old, before that had another Brother. I'm probably on my third toner cartridge. There are relatively cheap aftermarket toner cartridges available for these printers (in theory you could fill up powder yourself; haven't tried to mess with that).

For scanning I use an old HP ink jet (only using the scanner part), works nicely in Linux with HPLIP/Xsane software.
jfiresto:
I fully agree: getting Postscript on a printer generally means you can just plug it in and expect it to work. I can not remember an exception – surely there must have been one – which probably means that what few issues there were were trivially dispatched, for example, to get model specific features.

I do remember that outputting to a Postscript printer through a Centronics (parallel) port can be really slow, but I suspect that no longer matters.

EDIT: Now that I think of it, I have been getting network printers which have required perhaps an hour or two, total, setting them before first use. I go through many more computers than printers!
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