I just held a somber funeral for my 1999 HP LaserJet 4000n. No app, no subscription, reasonably priced toner, built like a tank, survived thousands and thousands of pages, five house moves. It was finally done in by multiple critical plastic pieces that broke and a power supply failure. I don't know what I'm going to do with my life now. I feel there are no new substitutes anymore. I heard Brother is good but I can't imagine it being the same great vibes...

I had a rotten time with Brother and drivers, especially (but not limited to) on Linux. I'm currently only one year into a Xerox 6515 but it has been extremely reliable so far, and works reliably across Android cell phones, two Linux machines (with a PPD downloaded from GitHub), and a Windows machine.

My line of thinking is that hopefully their pedigree is worth something.

Wonder if there is a 3d printing community to support older but reliable devices.

I ran an HP laserjet 5si into the ground years ago and kept it alive by picking up dead ones for parts here and there.

Thing was an absolute beast of a beast.

lol wow we had hp 4000n printers in my high school in the late 90s and they were amazing.

Glad to see they lasted so long for you. Not surprised.

I wish I could buy them today.

Running stuff well within its intended duty cycle is also a good way to get a long life out of something. I like to buy second hand enterprise gear, and I really never see failures out of anything that wasn't already worn out.

I bought an HP Laserjet Enterprise M601DN off Craigslist 5 years ago for ~$150 from a business that closed down. Had 250K pages printed when I bought it, and I printed tens of thousands more (law school books). Still going strong with no issues.

If you have the space, older HP Enterprise printers are absolute tanks.

Same here. Firmware updates are often unavailable, sometimes you end up with a janky Java-requiring interface, but overall it's approximately the same as the equivalent consumer gear and it'll last 2-3x longer (that's _after_ it was discarded).

The JetDirect 600 series got a few firmware updates (and they will take any firmware you send it over PCL) and did away with the Java based interface IIRC.

The duty cycle on the regular LaserJets (not P or L) was high enough (I want to say something like 50,000 pages per month) that if you come anywhere near it you'll need to start servicing it regularly. I think most folks (even businesses) who owned them didn't come near their rated duty cycle.

As for correcting the lack of vendor lock in, HP did that with starting with the 4100 series. I think HP used an RFID chip on the cartridge itself. Eventually they backed down a bit with the 4200/4300 but they did make the various cartridges non-interchangeable which is absolutely asinine.

I'll have to take a look and see if my JetDirect 300X has new firmware.

EDIT: Nope, it's a Javapocalypse for that particular device.

Oh that's too bad. The 620N I put in my printer was new-in-box so it came with the original Java based firmware. Yuck. The other reason to look for new firmware is that there were various security issues that were resolved.

FWIW it looks like you may be able to use HP Web Jetadmin which is some sort of .net monstrosity.

TBH it's been set up and working for so long I never ended up using the Java interface. There's also a telnet interface iirc that can configure pretty much everything.

I should probably hide it behind a Pi but it works, never breaks and I can't really complain.

I have a cheap, domestic HP1020.

Absolutely fantastic piece of kit for printing text.

It is from the before times, apparently it was so good it started eating into their low end commercial unit sales so they discontinued it.

How does it handle curling of paper? I had this model but it would start to curl paper if you printed more than a few sheets at a time.

Seems to do fine. I printed out a manual for a thing recently and the pages came out flat I think.

It _is_ weirdly muddy with images though bit noone is buying a monochrome printer for images.

How does it handle documents with complex graphics/large files? I had this exact same printer and for anything other than text, this thing took forever to "process" the document. Eventually I trashed it.

I've never had issues w/complex graphics. Are you using PCL mode + a print server? It might have also had one of the lower memory configurations.

I'm mainly using it for shipping labels and other simple print jobs, but for sure I've printed complex graphics on it and they're always pre-rasterized on the printing computer.

Yes I used a print server + PCL mode. Makes no difference between PS and PCL from from I recall. (Its been 10 years since I scrapped it). I'm talking like 20+ MB PDFs. The printer was blinking forever before it started and it would pause for another eternity between pages. Modern printers, you know...just start printing.