Monochrome Brother Laser printers only need black toner. Brother printers specifically are great because Brother does not do any sort of toner cartridge DRM, so you can use cheaper third party cartridges with zero issues (obviously the brother brand cartridges are higher quality toner but it’s nice to have options). Toner does not dry out, so your printer can sit for literal years, and when you send a document to print, it will just…print. It won’t bitch about low ink. It won’t spit out a useless paper because all the ink dried. When the toner finally does deplete? Toner cartridges are often very cheap compared to ink cartridges, and high capacity cartridges can be good for ~2000 pages worth of printing. The only headache you might get is, if it sat a while, you might have to pull out the cartridge and give it a few good taps and shakes to loosen the settled toner, and reinsert, but then it works good as new.
If you only need black and white documents, you shouldn’t be using an inkjet anyway. The only downside is the brother laser printer might cost you $140 upfront vs the $50-$70 an inkjet might cost you, but they’re far more reliable and WILL last for years. They’re just superior in every way.
And yes, you can spend more and get the color laser printer with all the same benefits if you want, but it’ll cost more in toner and the printer cost.
My Brother brother. I used to work at Office Depot and the ONLY laser printers I would sell were Brothers because the only laser printers we never had returned or had customers bitch about were… Brother laser printers. They’re the best consumer level monochrome laser printing devices available, full stop.
Also, for anyone worried about the upfront cost of buying one - buy a used one! They’re like the Toyota Tacoma of electronics. I bought a HL-L2390DW off fb marketplace for $50 a year ago and I’m still working through the off brand toner in it that the person sold me with as “almost empty”.
It also cannot be overstated that the ability to buy the toner and the drum separately means a significantly lower cost when replacing the toner. HP used to (and likely still does) make a single toner and drum product that is replaced each time, even though the drum can likely function well past 4x the printing volume of the toner attached to it.
Anyway if you want to buy a laser printer and have questions, this is my flavor of neurodivergence and I’m happy to field questions 🖨️
I feel like a lot of people ask about the cheapest laser printer around since that's what these things specialize in, but is there such a thing as a luxury / high-grade B&W laser printer, or do you have to go full color to get the really good stuff? (possibly more importantly, what even is "the really good stuff" for a laser printer?)
I like Ricoh and Lexmark for a step up from consumer grade. Too expensive to buy new but used ones can be quite reasonable. I like them because they feed really well when scanning and have some nice features around auto-detecting document type, color management, etc. For just printing at home I'm not sure they would make sense unless you do a lot of printing.
I mean unless you’re printing THOUSANDS of pages per day and need functionality to staple or collate into different piles, not really. Monochrome laser printers are meant to be dead simple, foolproof, reliable machines. All they do is turn blank paper into printed paper by rolling the sheet through. If you need a ton of extra special features, you’re moving into professional-office-level copiers and are talking $$$$$$$.
Hello fellow ex Depot employee. To add to this, Brothers inkjets were dope too. The Brother j480 was the smallest AIO printer with dirt cheap carts. What most people failed to realize is that page count ain’t shit when most manufacturers put in baked in Expiration Dates on the carts (looking at you HP) and home consumers pre-covid weren’t doing a ton of printing. Usually just occasional random homework for kids or a recipe or paperwork that needed a signature. So I’d tell customers all the time, this will run out eventually. But pay $40-$50 for a new set at the time will always be an easier pill to swallow as opposed to $150-$200 for a new set of the HP 950/951.
When I was in college I used to just buy the cheapest $40 printer. I’d run the starter carts empty then donate the printer to a professor/teacher/school/friend.
I bought like 10 printers and still came out cheaper than replacing carts.
Assuming that’s your old ID, in which case damn, hey old timer haha. I was in the 5’s. One of my managers was something like number 000094. Dude had been around for a while.
Edit: wait that number seems familiar for some other reason
FWIW I love my Xerox color Phaser, but I don't think they're made any more. You can still easily buy third party toner, and they are similarly built like tanks so you can buy them second hand for very little money.
I'm not printer shopping, but I'm curious about the quality of modern Samsung monochrome laser printers. I've got one that is 20+ years old and gets used every week and just keeps trucking along. No idea how many toner cartridges I've fed it. Only complaint is the paper capacity is like half an inch. Every now and then the wife talks about getting me an upgrade, but I think it does just fine for what I'm asking it to do and modern stuff is probably worse.
I still have my Brother color laserprinter from 2010. I had 2 times a paperjam but that was it. The best part is that i never had to buy new toner as i always told the printer that i just changed to a new toner and he kept printing. Meanwhile the color does fade a little. I'm using it on and off but it printed out my whole divorce documents and everything i needed to be printed the last 16 years. I would say those 390 bucks were well spent
Why the heck don't the put cables to printers anymore? My Brother printer had serious problems with connecting go WiFi, so I had to do it via a cable to my PC. Funnily enough, the cable I bought at store DIDN'T WORK and I had to go to a printer store where a guy told me it's probably because the cable was too long...
He was cool guy and gave me a cable for free, but man, this experience was so annoying to go through.
Also - do you often get complains about software? Sometimes my printer doesn't show up for whatever reason and I can't print unless I redownload the drivers
Brother color lasers still require color toner to print black and white.
Source: own a Brother color laser. Great quality machine for the price, but my spouse is a teacher so we mow through toner. Still much cheaper than inkjet though, and surprisingly better quality prints.
My partner's a new teacher and I was thinking about getting him a printer for christmas or the likes. He works at a big school and can never seem to get time at the printer unless it's at ungodly hours.
We owned a HL-2460DW for several years and upgraded this year to the MFC-L3780CDW. Just great printers.
It will cost a few hundred dollars to replace all four toner cartridges; the included ones don't have a lot so plan on doing it early (this is not unique to Brother, to be clear). The retail ones will last a lot longer.
Another laser printer recommendation from me. They also tend to print much faster than inkjet (in addition to not drying out). There's a reason university and business offices almost exclusively use laser.
Anecdote: I can always tell when something is printed with inkjet, always feels lower quality. I bought a Brother color laser printer for home use and have not been disappointed.
Hi, color brother laser printer owner here who has been using it with no yellow for years. You just need to make sure you have installed the proper brother print driver and send the print job as monochrome. It can be a little touchy if you try to use the default Windows print driver, as I think it doesn't properly communicate that the print should be monochrome.
Edit: On at least some printers (on mine there is) there is also a setting on the printer itself to tell it that it should print monochrome instead of color. That seems to help too (it did for me), but isn't necessary
I've had my Brother for like six years and I'm still on the toner cartridge that came with it. I rarely need to print (obviously) but every time I do it works flawlessly and looks great. Soooo worth the little bit extra up front cost
You sound like one of the guys i sold a printer too when i was a paid office depot shill. But in fairness i was pushing brother printers for a reason. Those bastards are every bit as good as you describe. We use them in the offices i work at because i convinced my boss to change them out for brothers and his costs are down by a mile. Bro was very happy with the change. And the docunents are never fucked because if a sputtering head or whatever the hell causes all the streaking normally. That flaw just doesnt seem to exist for laser printera.
I don't need my home color printer to be 'very good' I print materials for tabletop gaming and everything looks better in color. I print a lost cat flyer with bold red lettering. It is there when I want it and that's reason enough for me. If I'm printing something to frame, I use a print shop.
As someone who was in IT Operations in the early 2000s, Brother was a joke. HP Laserjet all the way. Until Brother wasn’t a joke and started making the iron workhorses that they are today. For the past 15 years I have recommended nothing but Brother laserjet and they always work. I will say that the need to shake settled toner is mostly a third party toner problem. Brother first party toners are legit.
Do note that there was some dismay around Brother last year due to a firmware update being claimed to block third party ink / toners in their printers, including older ones.
Afaik it turned out to not be the case, with some follow up claims about print quality being degraded. Nothing much came of it iirc, so I think they still are safe to recommend.
Been loving mine that is probably pushing a decade now, bought it 5 years ago and still haven't had to change toner. Just black and white, but that's 99% of our use anyway, and not having to change dried out ink after a year or two is bliss.
I got a free one for work nearly four years ago it had the same crappy toner cart I refuse to replace and still prints. It looks like shit sure but for shipping labels it’s fine.
I have a Brother mono laser now. I do not want ink/toner shenanigans. Only thing is I could not get a more basic one with wired network, which is what I want.
The included cartridge supposedly is a reduced capacity, nd they have an opt-in toner subscription. It is wait and see.
The drum is a separate replaceable unit.
I switched from an HP mono laser that connects with WiFi. It and my WiFi network do not get along. But it seemed to accept 2rd party toner fine.
Before that, three color inkjets (all Canon). The last one used chipped carts, which was getting expensive.
A mono inkjet that happened to be compatible with slightly modified HP 26 carts, and a couple 80s/90s lasers.
Canon laser printers are also comparable in quality and price. I got one because they didn't have Brother where I was shopping but I definitely have no complaints about my Canon! Meanwhile at work we have all HP's and they make me want to SMASH!
You buy one. You set it up and leave it plugged in, somewhere out of the way. Every time you ask it to print something it does so, reliably, into the far mists of the future. Might need toner in a decade or so.
Make that two decades: I have a HP LaserJet 1018 from 2006. It still has the original cartridge and everything. Whenever I have to print a stupid PDF form I fire it up and 12 seconds later it's ready. I'm certain this is the last printer I will own.
Hi u/penisbelieving. Black and white laser printers only print black. It would also be hard to make convincing counterfeit money with only black though.
Mine's a Canon color laser, but still... best buy ever! I've had it for at least a couple of years and am still on the original cartridges.
[Edit: Buck_Thorn -2 points 58 minutes ago ... what kind of idiost would downvote a personal opinion like that?]
[Edit: Updated because of more idiots]
Do you have a source for this? It's not that it would surprise me, but the excuse for the yellow tracking dots is an anti-counterfeiting measure, and that doesn't apply for a b&w printer.
I've read that they try to identify printers by the pattern of wear on their drums, but that's a different thing (especially since drums get replaced periodically).
Printer manufacturers have implemented these systems because governments they operate with have shown it to be in their best interest.
No I can't provide any citation that will prove that indicators exist, but I think it would be somewhat ignorant to assume that they don't apply these techniques on black/white toner based prints purely because there is no empirical data to show it.
The only reason we know about ink-jet and color toner dots is because it was reverse engineered by the EFF after a leak from Dutch authorities, not because it was officially disclosed by any government entity.
I think if B/W print already had something for that color printer would've used same thing, not yellow dots: Printer company have no reason to reinvent tracer again for color printers when you can print same black dots
Here are a few methods on how to do it. However I'm sure that no one would ever bother doing it for something as unimportant as tracing documents printed on a B&W laser printer. ( I used to Geocache and used steganography for some of my puzzle caches.)
Pixel/Outline Modulation (Font-Based Alterations): The printer’s internal firmware could subtly alters the outer contours of specific letters. For example, a character like an "o" or an "e" might have its curvature flattened by a single pixel or a fraction of a millimeter. The sequence of modified vs. unmodified letters acts as binary code (1s and 0s).
Laser Intensity & Grayscale Variation: Academic and forensic research shows that monochrome laser printers can alter tracking by shifting individual pixels at the edge of letters into extremely faint shades of gray rather than pure black. This is achieved by rapidly modulating the printer’s laser intensity as it draws the characters. Human eyes have trouble seeing white vs. nearly white. Or black vs. nearly black.
Micro-displacement (Kerning/Spacing Changes): Rather than altering the letter itself, this technique subtly shifts the horizontal spacing (kerning) between letters or the vertical baseline of a word by micrometer increments. A slightly lowered "t" or a microscopic gap in "th" could serve as the tracking data.
Printer tracking dots (or Machine Identification Codes) are secret yellow digital watermarks added to printed pages by many color laser printers and copiers to record the date, time, and specific device used. Developed by Xerox and Canon in the mid-1980s, their existence was first made public in 2004.
The tracking dots are not a software "feature" that can be turned off with a simple toggle. They are baked directly into the proprietary image processing chips (ASICs) or the low-level rendering pipelines.
Some security tools like the open-source forensic toolkit DEDA (Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymization Toolkit) anonymize documents by adding more randomized yellow dots to the digital file before sending it to the printer. This completely scrambles and corrupts the original grid pattern, making it mathematically impossible for investigators to read the real data.
However, the best solution I can give to you is just switching to a standard monochrome (black and white only) laser printer.
Or just put some tape over the yellow cartridge preventing any ink from getting out? It's probably also easier to get an ink cartridge that doesn't have any ink in it, but pretends to be full. Printer firmware can only go so far.
Isn't that just a really thin strip across the width of the toner? That would probably be easier than an inkt cartridge, it requires much less accuracy.
( Image author: Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - Robert Lee, Seth Schoen, Patrick Murphy, Joel Alwen, and Andrew "bunnie" Huang)
The microscopic yellow dots (roughly 0.1 mm wide) are laid out in a repeating rectangular dot pattern (for example, an 8-row by 16-column grid) across the entire page.
Each row in a specific column corresponds to a numerical binary or positional value (such as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64). When a dot is present in a specific row, its value is counted.
The summed values of the dots in specific columns directly translate to decimal numbers representing metadata: the printer's unique serial number, the four-digit year, month, day, and the exact hour and minute the page was printed.
No. Even if your printer had tracking dots (one dot is not useful, you would have to see a full pattern on the sheet), thse use next to no toner. You run out of yellow first becaus eit's the most used colour in printing colour photographs. Even with regular graphics yellow is used in both reds and greens so is used more often than cyan and magenta
First publicly acknowledged in 2004. Tech community knew about it long before then. I can remember discussions with printer driver guys at MSFT in the mid 90s.
And btw, it’s not in the driver. Would be too easy to patch out. It’s in the firmware (low level code) of the printer that the driver talks to.
Man, seeing the actual dots up close is wild. They look almost organic, like some kind of mineral formation rather than something a machine stamps onto paper.
Well by itself it's just a small drop of colored liquid on paper so it's not far off from an organic process. It's when it's lots of drops printed together that it becomes highly organized and machinelike.
“Your printer timestamps every page it prints so that the government can track every single piece of paper back to you to the specific time it was printed” isn’t a great sales pitch.
( Image author: Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - Robert Lee, Seth Schoen, Patrick Murphy, Joel Alwen, and Andrew "bunnie" Huang)
The microscopic yellow dots (roughly 0.1 mm wide) are laid out in a repeating rectangular dot pattern (for example, an 8-row by 16-column grid) across the entire page.
Each row in a specific column corresponds to a numerical binary or positional value (such as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64). When a dot is present in a specific row, its value is counted.
The summed values of the dots in specific columns directly translate to decimal numbers representing metadata: the printer's unique serial number, the four-digit year, month, day, and the exact hour and minute the page was printed.
To see them more easily. Use a blue light when looking for them. It makes them show up. You'll probably still need a good magnifier to actually read them.
It only works if they have a suspect. It confirms a suspect but doesn’t identify them because there isn’t a central registry of who owns which printer.
The govt. knows where each of its own printers is located and can see from the print logs who sent the document to be printed at the time encoded by the dots.
The “government” doesn’t know where all of its printers are. At best, an IT department might have a registry. And that’s probably not to the printer serial number but more likely to an easily scanned asset tag.
One method is vary the number of spaces between words. Another method is change the number of spaces between words. Sending everyone the same eMail but a few changed words.
No Yellow Toner/Ink: The standard Machine Identification Code (MIC) uses microscopic yellow dots that require yellow toner or ink to remain nearly invisible on white paper.
Counterfeit Deterrence Focus: Tracking dot technology was originally designed by manufacturers alongside governments to trace the counterfeiting of color currency, making it primarily a feature of color laser printers and color copiers.
Research Findings: Studies by privacy organizations and technical analysts, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, indicate that monochrome devices generally lack this specific yellow-dot tracking mechanism.
For people who already bought color laser printers, DEDA is the best option to bypass this while still being able to print color.
DEDA (Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymization) Toolkit is an open-source security tool developed by researchers at TU Dresden. It operates entirely at the document level, handling digital image files (like TIFF or PNG) and print stream to analyze or neutralize tracking dots without touching the printer's firmware.
I still believe this is the only reason, why printers still suck tremendously in 2026.
Every printer has been legally required to have these tracking systems by law for decades. This government interference means that only a handful of companies are legally allowed to produce printers. And any developement must be approved through tedious legal examinations. But who cares, they have the monopoly anyways, right?
I'm sure if the free market was allowed to sell printers, we would have much better machines in all our homes.
The tinfoil hat in me thinks that making bad printers is just a plot into forcing people to store more data online and use digital services
If you had the most efficient and maintainance-free printer in the world, I'm still going to store my data digitally because I don't want to file thousands upon thousands of printed documents and reprint them if I ever want to edit them.
I don't think bad printers is why people don't store their tens of thousands of photos, thousands of pages of PDFs and text files, etc in printed format.
You may be surprised to learn that most priner drivers supported by CUPS (the primary printing subsystem for Linux and OSX systems) are open-source, or at least not source-obscured (since the drivers are often plaintext or use a standard API).
I took the photos of the post and one of my comments by taking a picture with my phone through the eyepiece of an optical microscope, the most common type of microscope, at a magnification of something between 40x and 100x.
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u/teivaz 22h ago
This is the reason your printer refuses to print black and white when you low on color ink!