With all the crap going on in the world, it's nice to have some nice trivial diversions to take our minds off of everything. Keep up the great work! I love this channel.
In my experience, the print head is the Achilles heel of all inkjet printers. I think that lack of regular use is the big problem. People tend not to print except when absolutely necessary, due to the cost, and so the printer tends to to sit for long periods of time, which allows ink to dry in the tiny ports through which it passes from reservoir to paper. This can be more serious depending on upon the type of ink used. Physical cleaning of the print head surface is a crapshoot, as they are easily fatally damaged. If you’re lucky - as I think you were - You can get a good deal. But, bear in mind that printers are seldom disposed of on a whim. They are there for a reason. If you’re lucky, it might be minor, and as easily sorted as yours was.
I used to buy third party HP compatible cartridge and a black one would last for over one year: ink would discolour just by sitting there unused and after some time it would print in gray rather than black ...
Absolutely correct. After wasting a lot of money on these things, I quit a long time ago and just went with laser printers. These things should just work, there shouldn't have to be all of this monkey-business cleaning heads and running diagnostics that use expensive ink. Twenty years ago, I worked at a company where we used cheap Epson printers, but we used them so much that we bought ink by the case. Those printers were great, so I bought the same printers for myself and my Dad... nothing but problems. You have to use them a LOT to keep issues from cropping up. I also saw a video on how those ink cartridges are very much not honest with ink use, nor efficient. I haven't even considered an inkjet printer since my poor experience. My laser Brother works great.
My brother printer seems to do an "auto cleaning" regularly if I keep it switched on (sometimes heads make noises). I think it's to avoir this kind of issue. It's called "maintenance purges". Either way brother is the only brand I have no issue with printers and I can keep more than a few years...
@@RandyRydberg I worked for a company that bought four Epson printers to use in a training course. Six months later when they ran another course all four were completely clogged up. The advantage of printers where the head and cartridge are combined is that you get a new head with each cartridge, although sometimes a set of cartridges is 2/3rds the price of the printer.
We fixed that with a HP 1102W. They tolerate this use no problems. But you are stuck with B&W ... color would be more expensive, not just the printer but the toner. The 1102 did a pretty decent job, very sturdy machine. Good for a home or a small bussiness. And way more reliable than HP is willing to offer now. I know the have the same or a similar. I dont trust them anymore.
Amusingly, printers are usually the first thing that are binned when my charity shop gets a large donation. Not only are they likely to be broken in some way, they'd be too much of a pain to test - ie having to connect them to a laptop, getting A4 paper and (most of all) finding the correct and probably unavailable ink cartridges.
I bought a second hand laser printer about 10 years ago and have not had a single problem with it - I bought a £7 toner about seven years ago and it's about to run out. Inkjets are, always have been and always will be, crap. (My printer is a Samsung M2020 for those that want something reliable that never breaks down).
@@jul1440 the problem is that they don't let you fully use the entire quantity ink, and as far as I remember, even lied about how much ink you have left, forcing you to order more.
Faxing over modern VoIP/SIP can sometimes be problematic, since the compression can distort the tones enough to cause failures, where this was never a problem in the past with the fully analog signal over a copper pair.
a good voip service can accommodate faxes.i recommend callcentric for people on this channel. it has so many user adjustable features to geek out on and very fair pricing.
Most Brother printers have a secret hidden service menu that lets you _really_ clean the heads. The paper towel method works too, thou. ;-) I love Brother printers, btw! I just recently did exactly what you suggested in this video: After almost 20 years of daily printing the one in my office finally was so out of alignment that my clients couldn't read my letters and bills anymore, so I needed a new one. Luckily one of those clients wanted to throw their big A3 size Brother out because of clogged nozzles. After some cleaning it works fine now! And as it is an older model you can get cheap third party ink for it! Now I hope I won't have to buy a new one until I retire! :D And as an added bonus I got a working Brother laser printer from another client of mine. (b/w only, sadly.) ;-)
They aren't perfect, especially the newer ones are being build to a price. But compared to other companies they at least work as they are supposed to. Epson is ok, I guess, they just break early and the ink is more expensive. HP builds insanely good printers and equally bad drivers/software. I can never get them to work as they are meant to on the first try. And they have a tendency to break at random and than repair themselves over night. Probably bad firmware if it is written by the same people who wrote the drivers. 😂
I have a Brother A3 inkjet printer I got for free. Problem was there was a bunch of air bubbles in the print head and lines. I found the service manual online, and tried running a purge. That worked and it prints well
I have a Brother DCP from like 17 years ago. Still works perfectly, NEVER has an issue with it. Yes the software is ancient, but Beother still support older printers, and it works on windows 11. Never looked back after going Laser.
I bought a brother color laser printer a few years ago and as my regular printer I'm not going back to inkjet anytime soon. Well over a decade ago I curb rescued a laserjet 5 and it worked with the toner I found it with. It started having some print issues and life got in the way so I ended up disposing of it. I miss it and I wish I had taken the time in keeping it going.
I got my printer from one of my professors; he got too carried away when cleaning the printheads and couldn't put it back together. It's a ~16yr old Epson Stylus SX105 and you'd have to *pay* me to upgrade. Sellers seem to be unable to get rid of ink for it - I can buy a 4-pack of cartridges for $10. Plus being so old, it has drivers for my vintage computers I like to use for graphics design. The only thing showing it's age is the pickup roller which has a worn coating stained with ink, but it ain't that bad, it sometimes just puts small dots on the edge of pages.
Best decision I ever made was getting a cheap laser printer. Only does B/W but that's all I really need, and it hasn't failed or needed anything in 5 years
The best printer I've ever had is the Brother HL-L2390DW. It's only black/white, however it always works, it's fast, and it's very cheap to run. In 6 years of ownership, I've only had to replace the toner once, for $30 with an off-brand one, and it still works great. About 3000 pages so far. I've tried the "ink tank" printers, but they don't work very well in my opinion. Tried a Canon one and the colors just aren't as good as a regular inkjet.
How is your experience with off brand Toner cartridges? Our Brother monochrome has served us phenomenally well, and Im slightly hesitant to experiment with off brand refills
@@johnernest5843 Off brand toner isn't quite as good as brand cartridges but most of them are more than good enough for almost all home and small business use. The only spots where you might run into issues is printing stuff like gradients as off brand toner can be a bit inconsistent in that regard or if you need deeper blacks. I like to use Moustache, it's a bit more expensive than other off brands but they've been around a long time and offer cartridges with chips for models that use DRM in their toner like the Brother TN760. In terms of quality it's the closest to original out of the cartridges I've used I'd say if your usual Amazon noname toner is 80-90% of the quality I find Moustache to be consistently 90-95%. I have yet to come across third party toner that was outright bad though so if you aren't doing serious printing might as well save the couple bucks
All the problems with inkjet printers that are mentioned in the first minute , correction, in the whole video, have an easy solution: NEVER buy any inkjet printer, only buy laser printers. They last forever, the ink won;t dry up (because it's not ink but powder) and are only slighlty more expensive, but in the long run much cheaper. I used my old Samsung color laser from 2014 last month (June 2024) for the first time in 5 years (because I do almost all my printing at work now ) and after 1 test page that was a bit shabby the next pages were just as good as they were in 2018.
The biggest downside I've encountered with old laser printers is that the scraper blade can degrade over time, leading to cloudiness and speckles all over the printout.
I got a Laserjet 3200 for free in like 2005. I had to fix the front panel because the circuit board was smashed in, but after that, it worked fine. I got a Brother B&W laser in 2012 because I wanted the printer to be on the network (and better print quality than the 3200). I still have them both and they still work. I do not miss trying to unclog the EPSON inkjet I had, or spending exorbitant money on HP carts.
6:35 Thank you so much for showing how you manually cleaned the printing head. Just tried this on a decade-old Epson printer and you saved me from creating more e-waste and spending money on a new printer. Love your channel. Keep up the great work.
Lol, he did say that. Could have been worse though. He could have said feet sheeder.
หลายเดือนก่อน +10
Great video!!!!! USA has wonderful ideas as thrifts stores; they do not exist in Argentina where printers are amazingly expensive, a luxury. Cheers from frozen Patagonia.
The problem is you have to do this every couple of months if you don't print very often. I just bought the cheapest WiFi Brother laserpri for about 100 dollars. After market toner for 1000 prints is 30 bucks. This will last for decades.
this is the way to go, unless you really need all those extra functions. but who needs that unless they are a business? And a business can afford a few hundred more for a laser printer with all those functions
Enabling quiet mode on it will definitely help. 2 things why, 1. It doesn't feed the paper too fast potentially having paper jams. 2. It doesn't print too fast and won't have much potential missing lines.
Careful, some print heads (especially commercial printers like HD Printer inkjet heads) can be seriously damaged by isopropanol. At my factory, we use Windex instead. A few times is probably okay, but if used isopropanol everyday, it will micropit and we would always have to replace a print head that costs as much as a fully loaded class-A Winnebago.
I bought a Brother MFC-J680DW at Savers/Value Village for 10 dollars and it was basically brand new with the stock ink cartridges still in it and the plastic on the screen. It works flawlessly and is miles better than my old HP Printer. Not to mention third party Brother Ink is extremely cheap and just as good as OEM.
2 or 3 of the ink cartridges in the printer look like refillable 3rd party ones to me. I don't know about newer brother printers, but the mfp one i had, didn't have any chip on the cartridges, but a floater that would interupt an led light from reaching the sensor to detect if ink is low. Edit: I just searched the cartidges number online and yes, they are refillable ones (hence the easy leak) and it does use the floater, so it's an economical printer to have. you can just buy 1 liter ink bottles and refill them, only the magenta seems to be an original, but you could either drill the a hole in the top, or get only that in refirable form.
The newer Brother printers have chips now and they seem to have abandoned the physical ink level sensor, but from what I’m aware, the printer internally tracks how much ink is used and only remembers if the ink cartridge ID from the chip has been used or not. And if you install a different cartridge (can be a used one), it forgets the previous cartridge and will think it is new and full. Which makes refilling easy.
I wouldn't have been surprised if the print heads aren't all dry and grody and very difficult to recover from. Happens easily if you don't print frequently with an inkjet... Luckily for you that was fixable, you're that one in a million!
I picked up a Canon PIXMA last year for $10 while out thrifting and it was practically new in box. It had less than 100 prints on it and it's been wonderful to print high quality photos for practically free.
I've owned many printers in my life and almost all of the inkjet printers were binned because of irreparably clogged heads that ate more ink than the printer was worth in trying to get it cleared out (even after manual head cleaning). I still have my last inkjet because of the multifunction capabilities, but have a decent color laser printer. That inkjet is an Epson EcoTank ET-7700 that uses ink tanks instead of cartridges and came with 2 refills of each color. I used that printer for ~ 4 years and printed ~ 10000 pages with it before the heads were either worn out or clogged to the point where they just sprayed ink into the printer and all over the printed pages. I never did run out of that original ink and it's a real shame that the heads aren't treated as a consumable for those. I do remember a point in the early-mid 2000s where inkjet printers used to come with full capacity ink cartridges and you could buy the printer for less than the set of cartridges.
Cool. I used inkjet printers for 20+ years; the only one that didn't have any clogging issues was a Canon Pixma (RIP 2010-2016, it gave "low ink" warnings all the time, but I could still print about 30 pages before cartridges actually ran dry, LOL). I got a color laser printer a few years ago. It's a printer only, but it's so nice not to have to deal with ink cartridge issues.
Great video on how to fix these thrift shop printers, they are very underrated. I got lucky recently and scored an Epson Ecotank printer for $5 at the thrift shop. I was looking at getting the same model 3 years ago and it was $300 then. I had to settle on a Brother machine similar to this one because they were sold out. This was before I knew that nice printers got donated on a regular basis in my area (college town) but they usually have the same problem. I always fixed it by taking the print head out and soaking it in a 1:1 solution of rubbing alcohol/ammonia in an ultrasonic cleaner, use a syringe to unclog the ports, and let it completely dry out for a couple days. Thanks for sharing!
I'll definitely try that cleaning method next time the nozzle clogs up on my old HP Deskjet. Thanks for the handy hint! But we really need to bring back dot-matrix. I used to love the noise they made.
LGR had recently a different experience and he ended up wasting a lot of money on an inkjets (two actually) which would not work. I would generally stay away from a used inkjet printer, unless it's Hp where you changes the printing heads with the ink. Inkjet is a hit or miss, but mostly a miss ...
My dad told me about how in 2000, he bought a color inkjet printer. The printer was $500. After printing a few photos, it was already out of ink. Each color cartridge was $30. 2 weeks later the print heads were already clogged, and cleaning used a lot of ink. It was a piece of garbage to begin with and made no financial sense to the user.
We replaced our older canon inkjet photo printer cause the ink would dry out between uses and it was getting expensive to replace. We replaced it with another canon photo inkjet that uses the refillable tanks that some companies seem to be going with. Which honestly seems like a smarter way to deal with the whole ink situation.
To be honest I am surprised that this project turned out so well. But then I have heard many positive things about Brother, so that probably helped too. Not sure if a model by Epson or HP would have yielded the same good result...
Great that you could shine a light on this Brother series of printers, having bought the current model last year it continues to impress with its performance and versatility. Epson, HP and Canon among others have screwed their customers long enough with ridiculously priced micro ink vessels, particularly when you buy their product and they are supplied with only partially filled demo ink cartridges which will have you forking out for new ink at nearly the price of the actual printer in no time. Not only is Brother introducing a far more courteous, full ink solution out of the box but the product is a class act that is fully featured, nicely styled and aggressively priced. Your video shows not only are they backward compatible but future compatible with a reliable and serviceable platform.
I picked up a brother from about 2011 on the side of the road and after doing these same steps it works flawlessly and i was able to get 6 sets of black and 2 colour for about £60 only downside is that the print speed is abysmal but it was definitely worth taking it home
This is why I just broke down and bought a black/white laser printer. I can leave it alone for a year and it still works, no ink clogs, no having to buy $80 ink cartridges. I have been using it for years just to print out forms and I'm still on the same toner from 10 years ago.
I got a Canon Pixma printer from goodwill for around 20 bucks few years ago, it was loaded with features like SD memory card slot and direct photo printing from a digital camera, it also has CD/DVD printing which is cool. But I hate the multiple color ink cartridges which are expensive, I don’t print as much on that printer, only for photo printing particularly glossy photo paper! My HP deskjet printer from the mid 2000s still works and it’s more ink efficient.
@@23names make sure you don’t use the low end Canon printers, the good ones are upscale models, those are built like tanks! They do large photo printing for office projects, and they don’t need to connect online nor a mobile app for authentication!
As someone who's been lucky enough to use one of these for 10 years, I can say I'm very lucky. The only thing broken is the two sided printing. I remember trying 3 different printers 10 years ago and have stuck with brother since. It's wild to see this exact model lol. A trick to use more ink is to duct tape over the liquid level in the cartridge as the printer uses a light to read the levels. The cartridges usually have a lot leftover from experience, so this helps squeeze out all the ink.
I managed to pick up a dirty EcoTank printer from the side of the road a couple years back. All it took was a good, thorough flush to get it back into working condition. Same with the Canon photo printer I scored from the thrift store for 40 bucks. With a set of tools and some repair chops, secondhand will rarely fail you
4 years ago I got two "broken" Epson printers from the scrapyard for free. They both had very low quality aftermarket inks in it, which caused the inkjets to become clogged. I bought some cheap aftermarket inks and did 5 cleaning cycles and since then both printers work fine to this day. No errors.
It's been many years since I had an inkjet printer, but back when I did, I ran in to that problem that a lot of user have, the heads dry out because I would only print once in a blue moon. What was crazy though, I would go to the big box store to buy a new set of ink cartridges, but one black and one color cartridge would cost more than a new printer that came with two new cartridges, so naturally I bought a new printer each time. I believe I did that three or four times before I eventually no longer had a need for a printer and throw the last one out.
I can only assume the ports being hidden is to prevent moving the printer around breaking the ports, or to make it easier to plug in quickly without pulling the printer out. not something I would consider a design flaw per se but quirky nonetheless.
I got one of the EcoTank printers which are great because the ink does last "forever" and I got it refurbished so it was 1/2 the price of a new one, but also just like any other printer, if it sits too long... yep.... cleaning cycles abound!
I got a free Epson printer 5 years ago that hadn't printed in several years and didn't work right anymore. It was also out of ink. I bought some cheap ink carts and cleaned the heads using the syringe method - it's worked perfectly for the last 5 years. It was sold in 2016. So I'm happy to see others fixing something that would otherwise maybe be trashed. I'd just say, instead of a thrift store I think a lot of these could be had for free...
And I had to pick up a waterlogged Epson L series from the side of the road to have a scanner, since the printhead is dead. Needed some hacking to make it think the printhead is there. Unfortunately the printhead costs $40, and for a low end, USB only printer it is a tough deal. Got a good scanner though!
Instead of buying a printer with the printhead in the printer you can also buy a printer with the printhead in the cartridge. They are more expensive but you never have several years old clogged printheads.
The problem with printheads in the cartridge is that the only way to get a fresh one is to buy it from the manufacturer for $60 or whatever they charge. Aftermarket cartridges are refilled OEM ones which will be clogged out of the box half the time.
I've bought a Dell (rebranded lexmark) from a thrift store a decade ago and it wasn't all too good - maybe I didn't try enough to properly restore it back then (although it was multifunction with an auto document feeder) A couple months ago I got a 1996 HP deskjet 660cse from a maple shade goodwill for less than a Hamilton and with some reputable brand refurb ink cartridges it works very good. Old printers just work as long as you can find ink for them and you know how to get them back into working order.
I switched to lazer a couple of years ago and never wanted to go back. It does need a big clean right now since I'm getting some bad ghosting going on, but I just simply can't be arsed to take the rollers out and clean them.
I thought Brother printers made here in the Philippines are only for the Philippine domestic market. I wasn't expecting them exporting the printers abroad. Brother is the second brand in the Philippines that adapted ink-tank systems after Epson.
I have an HP 8600 multi-function printer I think older than your Brother model. I do not know about Brother printers, but my HP has a major design flaw. If a colour cartridge is low, it will not print or scan B&W. My printer is throwing an error, apparently this is common with the older models. The error is with the print head, but HP did not bother to allow the scan or fax functions to work if the printhead is not working. I should be able to scan to a memory card. I will not purchase a new HP printer, since they require HP inks, and as you said, some require ink subscriptions. Dave.
Amazing that you've given me some positive feelings towards Printers after years of fighting with them, using their hateful proprietary software (which constanly nags you to buy more ink), buying non-functioning 3rd party inks, returning them, buying obscenely priced OEM inks which last no time at all, of which even if you print in Black ONLY, they sneakily use small amounts of the CMY inks - when THOSE run out the Printer refuses to print entirely ... EPSON is to blame for my examples here. But thanks for your positivity at least!
$20 for a used inkjet at a thrift store? Come to alabama they have them at America's Best Thrift Stores for $6 or so dollars. I picked up a couple in the last few years and used them for a while till I got my color laser. I do not print that much.
My trick for buying new printers is to grab a low end business workgroup laser printer on sale. Their main downside is that they are large, and they cost a bit more, but last much longer, and the toner per-page is significantly cheaper than consumer models. I just replaced the color Xerox printer I bought for $300 after 12 years of use. It's replacement is another $350 Xerox that does scanning and copying as well, though the toner cartridges are much smaller.
I had several Brother MFCs over the years. Super reliable but I got sick of the hassle and expense and waste of ink cartridges. Changed to a Canon with permanent ink tanks that are refillable with cheap ink bottles from China. Very happy with it!
Many of us are not in an area where we will ever find used printers. You live in an area with lots of thrift stores so you have many opportunities to find the neat stuff you show on your channel. I do a lot of color printing for a hobby at high resolution so I have owned various printers. I bought a Epson Ecotank on sale a year ago and it has been the best printer yet. Laser printers are nice but now the toner is expensive. Unless I saw it working I would not buy a used laser printer. You were lucky with this Brother because the scanner might have been dead.
Some great tips, but I'd still be a bit wary of buying used sold-as-seen. Besides, it's good exercise to cycle down to the local library to print for free! :)
Hey, I am following for some time now, and I especially like the videos about -old and/or new- cassette players. Well, I recently bought the Aurex model AX-T10, which is a boombox/cassette player, and I must say I'm pleased with the sound and quality of the device. It has also some light effects on it, which I don't like and have turned of. Maybe you could do also a review about this device. Love your videos
I have a similar brother model. It's been a solid printer. What I like about the brothers is the ink carts are slightly cheaper plus the colors have individual parts thus hold more than a HP or something. I don't manually anymore so the cartridge cost over a long period far exceeds the initial cost of a printer.
I also picked up a brother from goodwill about 4 years ago - MFC-J8250DW; ink is cheap and plentiful, and its worked perfectly... Only issue is the wifi printing, which uses iffy drivers and has hit or miss usage with some of my phones. Still the most reliable printer I've owned!
I'd mention one great feature is the auto cleaning, especially for someone who doesn't print regularly; you can set the time and day, and once a week it'll run through a head cleaning to keep from dried ink clogging up the heads
Older hp officejets with large ink cartridges have been useful for me. They were not the cheapest when they were new. In Hp and Epson multifunction printer it is quite easy to remove the printhead and make deep cleaning with syringe.
In my long experience working with anything that come across to me from PCs and VCRs to water heaters and lawnmowers. I work a lot with printers and it's an absolute nightmare. If you print a lot, the only thing that i recommend is a modern epson with built in ink tanks. There's models available, at least in my country (type L3xxx) and they are surprisingly reliable and you refill them with bottles that the original ones are cheaper than aftermarket ones. Anything with cartridges in these days is a scam in terms of cost and reliability. You were very lucky with that printer. I serviced some similars in the past with tons of mechanical problems and print heads that absolutely refused to unclog. My general advice is, to print at least once a week to prevent massive ink clogging. And also keep the printer away from dust, keeping them covered when is unused.
Having had the ever so fun job of trying to revive stacks of cheap printers when I worked at a comptuer shop, getting covered in ink and mostly scrapping them anyway (this was in the era where you could get a cheap Epson for £20-30, which is mostly what I got put to working on!), I fully became a Laser fan, my laser printer cost me £36 used, with 2x mostly full toners, and I bought a second, less-featured similar printer for again £36 (different seller too!) which came with all full toners, and this was 8 or 9 years ago, not had to buy anything for it since given my infrequent need to print... :)
We have a very similar Brother printer at home, and it gets used about a dozen times a year now that no one is in school anymore. My only complaint is the wireless connection software is useless, to the point where I can send something from my phone no problem, but not a computer.
I got a Brother DCP 7000 series laser printer last week for 20€ (came with some paper in the tray). Spent 15 more on a new toner and drum and now have a reliable and low printing cost per sheet printer. On a side note, Brother inkjets are a no-no for me, had lots of issues with the remote ink cartridges drying up on the transport tubes and print head, like you had. More a fan of Epson or HP, as long as I can get cheap 3rd party ink cartridges.
I've always had really good experiences with Brother. To this day I have a Brother inkjet. Lightyears better than HP. Lots of dirt cheap clone cartridges but the real ones are reasonable and worth it in my opinion.
I recently had a problem with my Epson XP605, where it displayed a warning that the ink "well" (the pads where it dumps the excess ink during cleaning) was nearly full and the printer would soon stop working. I really didn't want to put in landfill as I still had spare ink and in all other respects it was working well. After a bit of browsing I found a conpany selling replacement foam pads for the ink well and an unlock code to reset the printer's level measurement. They also had a video showing the procedure, which was really simple. So for about £18 ($23) this one is hopefully good for a few more years - it is highly depressing to think perfectly functioning printers are chucked away just because of this issue.
I have some experience with a Canon Pixma multifunction model which started giving error messages on power up that, upon consulting the manual, indicated that the "sponge" was full. This was a bit of foam at the end of the track for the print head where it would drop its load in a fairly messy fashion. It was possible to silence the error with a button combination, which you had to do every time you switched on, but eventually it wasn't willing to print. Canon's Web site suggested that to deal with the problem, you had to contact an official Canon service centre, which is a bit of a joke for a several-year-old consumer printer. Even if you can find such a centre, and even if they would do the work, you know it is going to cost a fair amount for "parts and labour". That's why most people end up throwing their broken printers away and buying another cheap one. In the end, this particular printer went to e-waste, too, minus the scanner for potential repurposing. I guess these corporations are happy to see their products disposed of, all because an absurdly cheap bit of material gets saturated with ink, thanks to their negligent design. They all make yet more money on another sale, to be consigned to e-waste in due course, along with their proprietary ink cartridges. Then again, with the supply chain issues forcing Canon to tell people how to circumvent their own restrictions, I suppose karma did at least pay Canon a brief visit.
I have the Brother 6350, can't do what I would call 'Hi-res' (I use my Epson for that) but it is a great printer for everyday use. And NO subscription.
I actually bought a used color laser printer for about $15. The supplies were full when I bought it, and are still full 3 years later. With 1000s of pages of yield I expect this to always be ready to go when I need to print something. Though I wish I had a decent inkjet for photos, but one that can take generic supplies.
Firstly, that is a printer/scanner combo and it really depends which model you use. Mainly they have onboard heads plugged and unusable, while scanner part depends on availability ofthe drivers for newer PCs. I use Epson SX115 as a scanner (printer is dead) since there is a win 10 driver for it. BTW, I use HP2200TN for the output. Secondly, if you wish to present usable vintage inkjet printer, then get a PRINTER. Look for HP inkjet models 6xx-7xx (parallel port) or 8xx-9xx series with USB ports. Their heads are part of cartridges and as printers are really sturdy, despite appearance. We used them as office printers and had some spare black cardridges that we just rotated when they needed to be refilled, no quality drop.
I got a steal of a deal on a new Brother MC-L8690CDW, all-in-one with fax and duplexer (including double sided scanning with the ADF and an extra scanner head). With a £100 rebate and a 5%? off ebay voucher it cost me under £140, rrp now I believe is over £400. Interestingly being the bottom of the range there are some things it supposedly doesn't support, like an NFC card reader and the larger cartridges but in fact it does (the physical cartridge size doesn't change for different capacities like some). Cartridges are surprisingly not chipped and use a mechanical method for toner life detection so there is no way of it stopping the use of non-genuine cartridges.
The only thing I can 100% recommend you steer clear of is any HP printer that takes the separate ink cartridges for each color those have print heads that fail and are impractically expensive to replace.
The nice thing about old printers is that the cartridges might have simpler or no tracking chip. This allows you to install a Continous Ink Supply System on your printer. Also to home your brother printer head I think you can hold the stop button
I had an old inkjet that didnt get much use for a few years because ink prices were insane and I ended up getting a laser printer. The print heads were absolutely dried and crusted over that no amount of self cleaning could get it to work. I wound up having to take the whole print head out and soak it overnight to let it clean out. Worked a treat and here I am printing photos with cheap amazon ink. Not too bad!
For me, the age of printing photos is more or less a thing of the past. For the past few years a monochromatic laser AIO has served me pretty well, since nowadays I mostly print forms, where color isn't important.
You lucked out with this one. I cringed when you got out the paper towel and cleaned the printhead. With the newest printers, the nozzles are many times smaller, and many times the quantity. I have destroyed print heads with paper towels. The lint gets caught in the nozzles, or it scratches the surface and causes ink to spray not very well. I have an HP and I have used the "forced cleaning solution" method. Nice choice of what to print for the test!
Used old printers is dependent on if the print head is in the cartridge or the printer. If in the printer, it can get horribly clogged & then burn out the jets. If in the cartridge, then better hope the electronics is still firing the jets. We used to refill the cartridges for an old HP printer which ran the risk of print heads going bad but it saved a lot of money. A BJC250 printer which I rather liked was very flexible with refilled ink. My current multifunction Brother printer I absolutely love. Separately purchaseable inks, it maintains itself even when off. And I order authentic inks on Ebay. Cheaper than Amazon! My printer has the added capability of printing on DVDs & CDs. 😊
"Real camera", ay? I got a Sony camera from this year that has a MemoryStick (Pro Duo) slot. I thought that format was still dead (to be fair, the slot is one of those double slots with the contacts on opposing sides of the slot, but still, it's 2024, I thought Sony abandoned that format and switched over to CFExpress type A on their high end cameras). Now, more in line with the video, I can't find any printers which will take that new Sony format, but all of the ones I can find in the thrift store today have SD and MSPD slots (and clogged heads, but I might try that alcohol method for cleaning and see what shakes loose).
I bought a Canon G3600 series tank printer earlier this year, and I am extremely happy with it. I don't print much volume but I've done a couple dozen high quality A4 photos, a few dozen documents, god knows how many J cards for my cassettes (lots of tests that go in the bin) and other miscellania. I also make sure to print a test page at least once a week if I'm not printing anything else to keep the heads clear. And from that the ink levels have yet to noticeably move from their full marks so I have no reason to doubt their ~7000 page claim before refill is required. And when it is required it'll cost me about $70 AUD total for genuine ink for all four tanks, which is significantly less than equivalent cartridges that have less than a tenth the ink capacity. As a result in 2024 I would absolutely not recommend any cartridge injket to anyone, just save the money to afford the upfront cost for the tank printer. But not Brother's tank printer, because it's a complete lie and still uses cartridges. Even if you barely print at all, BS cartridge expiries and blocked heads means you'll break even in a couple years with the tank printer vs. the cartridge. And you can guarantee the heads on the tank printer always stay clear because it costs next to nothing to do test prints every week. If you print a lot you'll break even within months. Edit: I also forgot to mention that even if the heads get irreversibly clogged on my machine, they are easily replaceable
I ditched inkjet. Went full thermal. Portable thermal printers with thermal paper is less expensive for the rare occasion I need to print something. Works great, especially as a digital nomad.
At this moment in time, in the year 2024, I would probably only attempt this with Brother printers. They're one of the last companies at least vaguely trying to sell good printers, and seem to be the least evil printer company. Subject to change of course. I bought a used Brother all-in-one laser printer last year and also had success. It did need a new drum but the knockoff has been working just fine. I also own yet another Brother laser printer from 2009, which I bought brand new, and that still works just fine with drivers supported through Windows 11. I only bought the other one because I needed a scanner.
Even if you didn’t go over refilling the ink cartridges, which is one of the bigger reasons of going with an older used model, considering that I had to spend a couple hundred on a laserjet that’s only capable of B&W that’s pretty bargain priced for a relatively newish printer that’s an AIO.
I gave up on inkjet printers years ago when I found I could get beautiful large color prints from places like costco very cheap. We've had a brother multifunction regular toner printer for years and works fine for household printing and copying.
This model has both distinctive pros and cons. For the pros, the mechanism is incredibly durable; I have a model based on the same mechanism since 2014 that is still used today and has never experienced any mechanical failure. Since this model has no chips on the ink cartridges, you can buy refillable cartridges and use genuine bottled ink for ink tank models, reducing costs and maintaining high-quality prints. But there is a huge con for this series: the well-known "ink absorber full." The absorber is a foam pad under the carriage resting position, and you dump ink on it when using the "clean" or "purge" function. That's why you consume so much ink but never get ink spilled inside the machine. Still, the foam has an upper limit, and the machine detects it and gives an "ink absorber full" error, which shuts down all the printer's functionality. Since no replacement parts are available, once the error is triggered, your printer is guaranteed to be doomed sooner or later.
If only you could have posted this video in January. I needed to print out assignments for a college class, and I decided that it would be good to have my own printer for future use, rather than have to pay the campus $0.50 per page on inconvenient out of the way printers, especially after they removed the free one from the library. I purchased an MFC-j4335dw on Amazon. It seems fairly similar to this one from what I can tell, wonky Port placement and all, though mine does not have ethernet or memory card readers, though it does still have the fax machine function.
15:53 Didn’t know that HP’s Faxback service still puts their old “Invent” logo on the test pages even though they changed it a decade ago! Speaking of printers, are you gonna use this Brother model from now on, because I saw that you’re very satisfied with it. 😊
LOL, yes and "YOU + HP" slogan as well. The other was "The computer is personal again". Probably the last time they made a big investment on advertising and got the people hocked. Away from corporate stuff, they suck so bad now.
“Is PBS Worth Saving?” right on top of some deeply whatevery hunky-firefighter drama show has me grinding my teeth down to the roots
"Is BBC Worth Saving?"
No
Is PBS worth saving? *DAMN RIGHT IT IS!*
Chicago Fire is a great show. Very little muscle on show though relatively speaking.
@@neilforbes416 I second that!
That’s sensationalistic TV Guide for you. 🙄
And we had to use a magazine w/ a pair of "hot" fellas on the front!
Deeply in me I was thinking of that too hahaha
With all the crap going on in the world, it's nice to have some nice trivial diversions to take our minds off of everything. Keep up the great work! I love this channel.
By next year at this time, it will be the least of your worries.
In my experience, the print head is the Achilles heel of all inkjet printers. I think that lack of regular use is the big problem. People tend not to print except when absolutely necessary, due to the cost, and so the printer tends to to sit for long periods of time, which allows ink to dry in the tiny ports through which it passes from reservoir to paper. This can be more serious depending on upon the type of ink used. Physical cleaning of the print head surface is a crapshoot, as they are easily fatally damaged. If you’re lucky - as I think you were - You can get a good deal. But, bear in mind that printers are seldom disposed of on a whim. They are there for a reason. If you’re lucky, it might be minor, and as easily sorted as yours was.
I used to buy third party HP compatible cartridge and a black one would last for over one year: ink would discolour just by sitting there unused and after some time it would print in gray rather than black ...
Absolutely correct. After wasting a lot of money on these things, I quit a long time ago and just went with laser printers. These things should just work, there shouldn't have to be all of this monkey-business cleaning heads and running diagnostics that use expensive ink. Twenty years ago, I worked at a company where we used cheap Epson printers, but we used them so much that we bought ink by the case. Those printers were great, so I bought the same printers for myself and my Dad... nothing but problems. You have to use them a LOT to keep issues from cropping up. I also saw a video on how those ink cartridges are very much not honest with ink use, nor efficient. I haven't even considered an inkjet printer since my poor experience. My laser Brother works great.
My brother printer seems to do an "auto cleaning" regularly if I keep it switched on (sometimes heads make noises). I think it's to avoir this kind of issue. It's called "maintenance purges". Either way brother is the only brand I have no issue with printers and I can keep more than a few years...
@@RandyRydberg I worked for a company that bought four Epson printers to use in a training course. Six months later when they ran another course all four were completely clogged up. The advantage of printers where the head and cartridge are combined is that you get a new head with each cartridge, although sometimes a set of cartridges is 2/3rds the price of the printer.
We fixed that with a HP 1102W. They tolerate this use no problems. But you are stuck with B&W ... color would be more expensive, not just the printer but the toner. The 1102 did a pretty decent job, very sturdy machine. Good for a home or a small bussiness. And way more reliable than HP is willing to offer now. I know the have the same or a similar. I dont trust them anymore.
Amusingly, printers are usually the first thing that are binned when my charity shop gets a large donation. Not only are they likely to be broken in some way, they'd be too much of a pain to test - ie having to connect them to a laptop, getting A4 paper and (most of all) finding the correct and probably unavailable ink cartridges.
just sell for scrap
@@Mizai baffle me why they don't do this or give away to those in need & complain later about pollution....strange logic
@@Mizainope, they don't want em either. They're 99% plastic, very very little recyclable metal.
I bought a second hand laser printer about 10 years ago and have not had a single problem with it - I bought a £7 toner about seven years ago and it's about to run out. Inkjets are, always have been and always will be, crap.
(My printer is a Samsung M2020 for those that want something reliable that never breaks down).
@@pokemonprimed plastic can be recycled. I think he meant parts
HP is actually discontinuing their instant ink program again, as they are being sued
It's the toner program that's being discontinued.. not the ink..
Good, hopefully this crappy mentality that everything should be a subscription, will be gone in the next few years.
@@a4andrei I have no complaints with it. I spend $24 a year for ink, far less than the price of a single cartridge for my machine.
@@jul1440 the problem is that they don't let you fully use the entire quantity ink, and as far as I remember, even lied about how much ink you have left, forcing you to order more.
HP never built anything working well
Faxing over modern VoIP/SIP can sometimes be problematic, since the compression can distort the tones enough to cause failures, where this was never a problem in the past with the fully analog signal over a copper pair.
If you have the ability to, set your VoIP adapter to always use PCM, which will send the uncompressed audio instead of a lossy compressed stream
To allow fax via VoIP/SIP is an addon to my ISP..
a good voip service can accommodate faxes.i recommend callcentric for people on this channel. it has so many user adjustable features to geek out on and very fair pricing.
@@rzpogisounds like they’re charging you for the privilege of changing that setting Josh mentioned above you 😅
Most Brother printers have a secret hidden service menu that lets you _really_ clean the heads. The paper towel method works too, thou. ;-) I love Brother printers, btw! I just recently did exactly what you suggested in this video: After almost 20 years of daily printing the one in my office finally was so out of alignment that my clients couldn't read my letters and bills anymore, so I needed a new one. Luckily one of those clients wanted to throw their big A3 size Brother out because of clogged nozzles. After some cleaning it works fine now! And as it is an older model you can get cheap third party ink for it! Now I hope I won't have to buy a new one until I retire! :D And as an added bonus I got a working Brother laser printer from another client of mine. (b/w only, sadly.) ;-)
After years of cheap HP and Epson printer, we bought a Brother. Never buying another brand.
They aren't perfect, especially the newer ones are being build to a price. But compared to other companies they at least work as they are supposed to. Epson is ok, I guess, they just break early and the ink is more expensive. HP builds insanely good printers and equally bad drivers/software. I can never get them to work as they are meant to on the first try. And they have a tendency to break at random and than repair themselves over night. Probably bad firmware if it is written by the same people who wrote the drivers. 😂
I have a Brother A3 inkjet printer I got for free. Problem was there was a bunch of air bubbles in the print head and lines. I found the service manual online, and tried running a purge. That worked and it prints well
I have a Brother DCP from like 17 years ago. Still works perfectly, NEVER has an issue with it. Yes the software is ancient, but Beother still support older printers, and it works on windows 11.
Never looked back after going Laser.
I bought a brother color laser printer a few years ago and as my regular printer I'm not going back to inkjet anytime soon. Well over a decade ago I curb rescued a laserjet 5 and it worked with the toner I found it with. It started having some print issues and life got in the way so I ended up disposing of it. I miss it and I wish I had taken the time in keeping it going.
Brother makes good printers. My MFC is more than 10 years old and still works like new.
Brother mfc-j430w about the same age. No issues even after being put aside for a couple years where I really had no need to print.
What matters most is that the software is reliable/stable.
Agreed. The Brother software has been trouble free on Windows 7, 10 and 11. Also no problem printing from iPad and Android devices.
I got my printer from one of my professors; he got too carried away when cleaning the printheads and couldn't put it back together.
It's a ~16yr old Epson Stylus SX105 and you'd have to *pay* me to upgrade. Sellers seem to be unable to get rid of ink for it - I can buy a 4-pack of cartridges for $10. Plus being so old, it has drivers for my vintage computers I like to use for graphics design.
The only thing showing it's age is the pickup roller which has a worn coating stained with ink, but it ain't that bad, it sometimes just puts small dots on the edge of pages.
Best decision I ever made was getting a cheap laser printer. Only does B/W but that's all I really need, and it hasn't failed or needed anything in 5 years
I wish I had a black and white printer, because I don't need color to print out important documents.
I think you should start a "Thrift Series" - "VWestlife Thrifts"
The best printer I've ever had is the Brother HL-L2390DW. It's only black/white, however it always works, it's fast, and it's very cheap to run. In 6 years of ownership, I've only had to replace the toner once, for $30 with an off-brand one, and it still works great. About 3000 pages so far. I've tried the "ink tank" printers, but they don't work very well in my opinion. Tried a Canon one and the colors just aren't as good as a regular inkjet.
How is your experience with off brand Toner cartridges? Our Brother monochrome has served us phenomenally well, and Im slightly hesitant to experiment with off brand refills
@@johnernest5843 Off brand toner isn't quite as good as brand cartridges but most of them are more than good enough for almost all home and small business use. The only spots where you might run into issues is printing stuff like gradients as off brand toner can be a bit inconsistent in that regard or if you need deeper blacks. I like to use Moustache, it's a bit more expensive than other off brands but they've been around a long time and offer cartridges with chips for models that use DRM in their toner like the Brother TN760. In terms of quality it's the closest to original out of the cartridges I've used I'd say if your usual Amazon noname toner is 80-90% of the quality I find Moustache to be consistently 90-95%. I have yet to come across third party toner that was outright bad though so if you aren't doing serious printing might as well save the couple bucks
@@DigitalMoonlight Thank you for your extremely informative reply! I might dip my toes into more off brand stuff based on your experience!
All the problems with inkjet printers that are mentioned in the first minute , correction, in the whole video, have an easy solution:
NEVER buy any inkjet printer, only buy laser printers. They last forever, the ink won;t dry up (because it's not ink but powder) and are only slighlty more expensive, but in the long run much cheaper.
I used my old Samsung color laser from 2014 last month (June 2024) for the first time in 5 years (because I do almost all my printing at work now ) and after 1 test page that was a bit shabby the next pages were just as good as they were in 2018.
i would but to get a high quality color multifunction laser is much more expensive. i have a cheap b/w laser in addition to my color inkjet
The biggest downside I've encountered with old laser printers is that the scraper blade can degrade over time, leading to cloudiness and speckles all over the printout.
I got a Laserjet 3200 for free in like 2005. I had to fix the front panel because the circuit board was smashed in, but after that, it worked fine. I got a Brother B&W laser in 2012 because I wanted the printer to be on the network (and better print quality than the 3200).
I still have them both and they still work. I do not miss trying to unclog the EPSON inkjet I had, or spending exorbitant money on HP carts.
6:35 Thank you so much for showing how you manually cleaned the printing head. Just tried this on a decade-old Epson printer and you saved me from creating more e-waste and spending money on a new printer.
Love your channel. Keep up the great work.
10:37 Feed sheeter 😂
Lol, he did say that. Could have been worse though. He could have said feet sheeder.
Great video!!!!! USA has wonderful ideas as thrifts stores; they do not exist in Argentina where printers are amazingly expensive, a luxury. Cheers from frozen Patagonia.
You had much better luck than LGR lol
The problem is you have to do this every couple of months if you don't print very often. I just bought the cheapest WiFi Brother laserpri for about 100 dollars. After market toner for 1000 prints is 30 bucks. This will last for decades.
this is the way to go, unless you really need all those extra functions. but who needs that unless they are a business? And a business can afford a few hundred more for a laser printer with all those functions
This is why I have a B&W laser. I think it’s considerably older than this, though.
I would much rather have a black and white laser printer than one that prints in color. I don't need color if I need to print out important documents.
Enabling quiet mode on it will definitely help. 2 things why, 1. It doesn't feed the paper too fast potentially having paper jams. 2. It doesn't print too fast and won't have much potential missing lines.
Careful, some print heads (especially commercial printers like HD Printer inkjet heads) can be seriously damaged by isopropanol. At my factory, we use Windex instead. A few times is probably okay, but if used isopropanol everyday, it will micropit and we would always have to replace a print head that costs as much as a fully loaded class-A Winnebago.
I bought a Brother MFC-J680DW at Savers/Value Village for 10 dollars and it was basically brand new with the stock ink cartridges still in it and the plastic on the screen. It works flawlessly and is miles better than my old HP Printer. Not to mention third party Brother Ink is extremely cheap and just as good as OEM.
2 or 3 of the ink cartridges in the printer look like refillable 3rd party ones to me. I don't know about newer brother printers, but the mfp one i had, didn't have any chip on the cartridges, but a floater that would interupt an led light from reaching the sensor to detect if ink is low.
Edit: I just searched the cartidges number online and yes, they are refillable ones (hence the easy leak) and it does use the floater, so it's an economical printer to have. you can just buy 1 liter ink bottles and refill them, only the magenta seems to be an original, but you could either drill the a hole in the top, or get only that in refirable form.
Good, because printer manufacturers tend to abandon some old models of cartridges.
The newer Brother printers have chips now and they seem to have abandoned the physical ink level sensor, but from what I’m aware, the printer internally tracks how much ink is used and only remembers if the ink cartridge ID from the chip has been used or not. And if you install a different cartridge (can be a used one), it forgets the previous cartridge and will think it is new and full. Which makes refilling easy.
@@atomstarfireproductions8695 good to know, thank you
I wouldn't have been surprised if the print heads aren't all dry and grody and very difficult to recover from. Happens easily if you don't print frequently with an inkjet... Luckily for you that was fixable, you're that one in a million!
I picked up a Canon PIXMA last year for $10 while out thrifting and it was practically new in box. It had less than 100 prints on it and it's been wonderful to print high quality photos for practically free.
I've owned many printers in my life and almost all of the inkjet printers were binned because of irreparably clogged heads that ate more ink than the printer was worth in trying to get it cleared out (even after manual head cleaning). I still have my last inkjet because of the multifunction capabilities, but have a decent color laser printer. That inkjet is an Epson EcoTank ET-7700 that uses ink tanks instead of cartridges and came with 2 refills of each color. I used that printer for ~ 4 years and printed ~ 10000 pages with it before the heads were either worn out or clogged to the point where they just sprayed ink into the printer and all over the printed pages. I never did run out of that original ink and it's a real shame that the heads aren't treated as a consumable for those.
I do remember a point in the early-mid 2000s where inkjet printers used to come with full capacity ink cartridges and you could buy the printer for less than the set of cartridges.
Old HP Officejet for color and Laserjet 4+ for mono. With JetDirect they print fine from modern devices.
I just did the same reasoning and bought a scanjet 5590, and it works perfectly after a little cleaning
Cool. I used inkjet printers for 20+ years; the only one that didn't have any clogging issues was a Canon Pixma (RIP 2010-2016, it gave "low ink" warnings all the time, but I could still print about 30 pages before cartridges actually ran dry, LOL). I got a color laser printer a few years ago. It's a printer only, but it's so nice not to have to deal with ink cartridge issues.
Great video on how to fix these thrift shop printers, they are very underrated. I got lucky recently and scored an Epson Ecotank printer for $5 at the thrift shop. I was looking at getting the same model 3 years ago and it was $300 then. I had to settle on a Brother machine similar to this one because they were sold out. This was before I knew that nice printers got donated on a regular basis in my area (college town) but they usually have the same problem. I always fixed it by taking the print head out and soaking it in a 1:1 solution of rubbing alcohol/ammonia in an ultrasonic cleaner, use a syringe to unclog the ports, and let it completely dry out for a couple days. Thanks for sharing!
I'll definitely try that cleaning method next time the nozzle clogs up on my old HP Deskjet. Thanks for the handy hint! But we really need to bring back dot-matrix. I used to love the noise they made.
LGR had recently a different experience and he ended up wasting a lot of money on an inkjets (two actually) which would not work. I would generally stay away from a used inkjet printer, unless it's Hp where you changes the printing heads with the ink. Inkjet is a hit or miss, but mostly a miss ...
Those were very old printers from the early 2000s. This one is supposedly from 2016. Anything newer than 2010 should be fine.
Better get a younger one. Older ones don’t work!
My dad told me about how in 2000, he bought a color inkjet printer. The printer was $500. After printing a few photos, it was already out of ink. Each color cartridge was $30. 2 weeks later the print heads were already clogged, and cleaning used a lot of ink. It was a piece of garbage to begin with and made no financial sense to the user.
We replaced our older canon inkjet photo printer cause the ink would dry out between uses and it was getting expensive to replace. We replaced it with another canon photo inkjet that uses the refillable tanks that some companies seem to be going with. Which honestly seems like a smarter way to deal with the whole ink situation.
To be honest I am surprised that this project turned out so well. But then I have heard many positive things about Brother, so that probably helped too. Not sure if a model by Epson or HP would have yielded the same good result...
Great that you could shine a light on this Brother series of printers, having bought the current model last year it continues to impress with its performance and versatility.
Epson, HP and Canon among others have screwed their customers long enough with ridiculously priced micro ink vessels, particularly when you buy their product and they are supplied with only partially filled demo ink cartridges which will have you forking out for new ink at nearly the price of the actual printer in no time.
Not only is Brother introducing a far more courteous, full ink solution out of the box but the product is a class act that is fully featured, nicely styled and aggressively priced.
Your video shows not only are they backward compatible but future compatible with a reliable and serviceable platform.
I picked up a brother from about 2011 on the side of the road and after doing these same steps it works flawlessly and i was able to get 6 sets of black and 2 colour for about £60 only downside is that the print speed is abysmal but it was definitely worth taking it home
This is why I just broke down and bought a black/white laser printer. I can leave it alone for a year and it still works, no ink clogs, no having to buy $80 ink cartridges. I have been using it for years just to print out forms and I'm still on the same toner from 10 years ago.
I got a Canon Pixma printer from goodwill for around 20 bucks few years ago, it was loaded with features like SD memory card slot and direct photo printing from a digital camera, it also has CD/DVD printing which is cool. But I hate the multiple color ink cartridges which are expensive, I don’t print as much on that printer, only for photo printing particularly glossy photo paper! My HP deskjet printer from the mid 2000s still works and it’s more ink efficient.
CANON MAKES GREAT PRINTERS, AND THE HAVE A GREAT PRINT QUALITY, VERY LOW MAINTENANCE
@@23names make sure you don’t use the low end Canon printers, the good ones are upscale models, those are built like tanks! They do large photo printing for office projects, and they don’t need to connect online nor a mobile app for authentication!
As someone who's been lucky enough to use one of these for 10 years, I can say I'm very lucky. The only thing broken is the two sided printing. I remember trying 3 different printers 10 years ago and have stuck with brother since. It's wild to see this exact model lol.
A trick to use more ink is to duct tape over the liquid level in the cartridge as the printer uses a light to read the levels. The cartridges usually have a lot leftover from experience, so this helps squeeze out all the ink.
I managed to pick up a dirty EcoTank printer from the side of the road a couple years back. All it took was a good, thorough flush to get it back into working condition. Same with the Canon photo printer I scored from the thrift store for 40 bucks. With a set of tools and some repair chops, secondhand will rarely fail you
4 years ago I got two "broken" Epson printers from the scrapyard for free. They both had very low quality aftermarket inks in it, which caused the inkjets to become clogged. I bought some cheap aftermarket inks and did 5 cleaning cycles and since then both printers work fine to this day. No errors.
It's been many years since I had an inkjet printer, but back when I did, I ran in to that problem that a lot of user have, the heads dry out because I would only print once in a blue moon. What was crazy though, I would go to the big box store to buy a new set of ink cartridges, but one black and one color cartridge would cost more than a new printer that came with two new cartridges, so naturally I bought a new printer each time. I believe I did that three or four times before I eventually no longer had a need for a printer and throw the last one out.
I can only assume the ports being hidden is to prevent moving the printer around breaking the ports, or to make it easier to plug in quickly without pulling the printer out.
not something I would consider a design flaw per se but quirky nonetheless.
you're everywhere
My guess is there is one circuit board the size of a Raspberry Pi running the display and the USB.
I got one of the EcoTank printers which are great because the ink does last "forever" and I got it refurbished so it was 1/2 the price of a new one, but also just like any other printer, if it sits too long... yep.... cleaning cycles abound!
11:21 I wonder if they did that so the printer could fit in tighter spaces, without the USB plug getting push and possibly broken.
I reckon there is one Raspberry Pi sized board doing the USB and the display.
I got a free Epson printer 5 years ago that hadn't printed in several years and didn't work right anymore. It was also out of ink.
I bought some cheap ink carts and cleaned the heads using the syringe method - it's worked perfectly for the last 5 years. It was sold in 2016.
So I'm happy to see others fixing something that would otherwise maybe be trashed. I'd just say, instead of a thrift store I think a lot of these could be had for free...
And I had to pick up a waterlogged Epson L series from the side of the road to have a scanner, since the printhead is dead. Needed some hacking to make it think the printhead is there. Unfortunately the printhead costs $40, and for a low end, USB only printer it is a tough deal. Got a good scanner though!
Instead of buying a printer with the printhead in the printer you can also buy a printer with the printhead in the cartridge. They are more expensive but you never have several years old clogged printheads.
The problem with printheads in the cartridge is that the only way to get a fresh one is to buy it from the manufacturer for $60 or whatever they charge. Aftermarket cartridges are refilled OEM ones which will be clogged out of the box half the time.
I've bought a Dell (rebranded lexmark) from a thrift store a decade ago and it wasn't all too good - maybe I didn't try enough to properly restore it back then (although it was multifunction with an auto document feeder)
A couple months ago I got a 1996 HP deskjet 660cse from a maple shade goodwill for less than a Hamilton and with some reputable brand refurb ink cartridges it works very good. Old printers just work as long as you can find ink for them and you know how to get them back into working order.
I switched to lazer a couple of years ago and never wanted to go back. It does need a big clean right now since I'm getting some bad ghosting going on, but I just simply can't be arsed to take the rollers out and clean them.
I thought Brother printers made here in the Philippines are only for the Philippine domestic market. I wasn't expecting them exporting the printers abroad. Brother is the second brand in the Philippines that adapted ink-tank systems after Epson.
I have an HP 8600 multi-function printer I think older than your Brother model. I do not know about Brother printers, but my HP has a major design flaw. If a colour cartridge is low, it will not print or scan B&W. My printer is throwing an error, apparently this is common with the older models. The error is with the print head, but HP did not bother to allow the scan or fax functions to work if the printhead is not working. I should be able to scan to a memory card.
I will not purchase a new HP printer, since they require HP inks, and as you said, some require ink subscriptions.
Dave.
I got a borther laser printer in 2016 @ savers and it works great for $20. I just recently had to replace the toner. 😊
Amazing that you've given me some positive feelings towards Printers after years of fighting with them, using their hateful proprietary software (which constanly nags you to buy more ink), buying non-functioning 3rd party inks, returning them, buying obscenely priced OEM inks which last no time at all, of which even if you print in Black ONLY, they sneakily use small amounts of the CMY inks - when THOSE run out the Printer refuses to print entirely ... EPSON is to blame for my examples here. But thanks for your positivity at least!
$20 for a used inkjet at a thrift store? Come to alabama they have them at America's Best Thrift Stores for $6 or so dollars. I picked up a couple in the last few years and used them for a while till I got my color laser. I do not print that much.
My trick for buying new printers is to grab a low end business workgroup laser printer on sale. Their main downside is that they are large, and they cost a bit more, but last much longer, and the toner per-page is significantly cheaper than consumer models. I just replaced the color Xerox printer I bought for $300 after 12 years of use. It's replacement is another $350 Xerox that does scanning and copying as well, though the toner cartridges are much smaller.
Ive had a hand-me-down MFC J985DW and honestly, its been the best printer ive had.
These late 2010s brothers are solid printers.
I had several Brother MFCs over the years. Super reliable but I got sick of the hassle and expense and waste of ink cartridges. Changed to a Canon with permanent ink tanks that are refillable with cheap ink bottles from China. Very happy with it!
Many of us are not in an area where we will ever find used printers. You live in an area with lots of thrift stores so you have many opportunities to find the neat stuff you show on your channel. I do a lot of color printing for a hobby at high resolution so I have owned various printers. I bought a Epson Ecotank on sale a year ago and it has been the best printer yet. Laser printers are nice but now the toner is expensive. Unless I saw it working I would not buy a used laser printer. You were lucky with this Brother because the scanner might have been dead.
I found an old scanner from about 20ys ago and it still works.
Some great tips, but I'd still be a bit wary of buying used sold-as-seen. Besides, it's good exercise to cycle down to the local library to print for free! :)
Hey, I am following for some time now, and I especially like the videos about -old and/or new- cassette players. Well, I recently bought the Aurex model AX-T10, which is a boombox/cassette player, and I must say I'm pleased with the sound and quality of the device. It has also some light effects on it, which I don't like and have turned of. Maybe you could do also a review about this device. Love your videos
I have a similar brother model. It's been a solid printer. What I like about the brothers is the ink carts are slightly cheaper plus the colors have individual parts thus hold more than a HP or something. I don't manually anymore so the cartridge cost over a long period far exceeds the initial cost of a printer.
I also picked up a brother from goodwill about 4 years ago - MFC-J8250DW; ink is cheap and plentiful, and its worked perfectly... Only issue is the wifi printing, which uses iffy drivers and has hit or miss usage with some of my phones.
Still the most reliable printer I've owned!
I'd mention one great feature is the auto cleaning, especially for someone who doesn't print regularly; you can set the time and day, and once a week it'll run through a head cleaning to keep from dried ink clogging up the heads
A Kopaiku cleanence set will do wonders. This time also some toothbrushes included to show cleanance again.
Mine still has the Goodwill sticker on it for like $6.99 DeskJet 2640.
Older hp officejets with large ink cartridges have been useful for me. They were not the cheapest when they were new. In Hp and Epson multifunction printer it is quite easy to remove the printhead and make deep cleaning with syringe.
In my long experience working with anything that come across to me from PCs and VCRs to water heaters and lawnmowers. I work a lot with printers and it's an absolute nightmare. If you print a lot, the only thing that i recommend is a modern epson with built in ink tanks. There's models available, at least in my country (type L3xxx) and they are surprisingly reliable and you refill them with bottles that the original ones are cheaper than aftermarket ones.
Anything with cartridges in these days is a scam in terms of cost and reliability. You were very lucky with that printer. I serviced some similars in the past with tons of mechanical problems and print heads that absolutely refused to unclog. My general advice is, to print at least once a week to prevent massive ink clogging. And also keep the printer away from dust, keeping them covered when is unused.
Having had the ever so fun job of trying to revive stacks of cheap printers when I worked at a comptuer shop, getting covered in ink and mostly scrapping them anyway (this was in the era where you could get a cheap Epson for £20-30, which is mostly what I got put to working on!), I fully became a Laser fan, my laser printer cost me £36 used, with 2x mostly full toners, and I bought a second, less-featured similar printer for again £36 (different seller too!) which came with all full toners, and this was 8 or 9 years ago, not had to buy anything for it since given my infrequent need to print... :)
We have a very similar Brother printer at home, and it gets used about a dozen times a year now that no one is in school anymore. My only complaint is the wireless connection software is useless, to the point where I can send something from my phone no problem, but not a computer.
I have the same Brother printer, and it might be the most reliable and consistent printer I've owned.
I got a Brother DCP 7000 series laser printer last week for 20€ (came with some paper in the tray). Spent 15 more on a new toner and drum and now have a reliable and low printing cost per sheet printer.
On a side note, Brother inkjets are a no-no for me, had lots of issues with the remote ink cartridges drying up on the transport tubes and print head, like you had. More a fan of Epson or HP, as long as I can get cheap 3rd party ink cartridges.
I've always had really good experiences with Brother. To this day I have a Brother inkjet. Lightyears better than HP. Lots of dirt cheap clone cartridges but the real ones are reasonable and worth it in my opinion.
I recently had a problem with my Epson XP605, where it displayed a warning that the ink "well" (the pads where it dumps the excess ink during cleaning) was nearly full and the printer would soon stop working. I really didn't want to put in landfill as I still had spare ink and in all other respects it was working well. After a bit of browsing I found a conpany selling replacement foam pads for the ink well and an unlock code to reset the printer's level measurement. They also had a video showing the procedure, which was really simple. So for about £18 ($23) this one is hopefully good for a few more years - it is highly depressing to think perfectly functioning printers are chucked away just because of this issue.
I have some experience with a Canon Pixma multifunction model which started giving error messages on power up that, upon consulting the manual, indicated that the "sponge" was full. This was a bit of foam at the end of the track for the print head where it would drop its load in a fairly messy fashion. It was possible to silence the error with a button combination, which you had to do every time you switched on, but eventually it wasn't willing to print.
Canon's Web site suggested that to deal with the problem, you had to contact an official Canon service centre, which is a bit of a joke for a several-year-old consumer printer. Even if you can find such a centre, and even if they would do the work, you know it is going to cost a fair amount for "parts and labour". That's why most people end up throwing their broken printers away and buying another cheap one. In the end, this particular printer went to e-waste, too, minus the scanner for potential repurposing.
I guess these corporations are happy to see their products disposed of, all because an absurdly cheap bit of material gets saturated with ink, thanks to their negligent design. They all make yet more money on another sale, to be consigned to e-waste in due course, along with their proprietary ink cartridges. Then again, with the supply chain issues forcing Canon to tell people how to circumvent their own restrictions, I suppose karma did at least pay Canon a brief visit.
nice printer I only use mine to print out labels
I have the Brother 6350, can't do what I would call 'Hi-res' (I use my Epson for that) but it is a great printer for everyday use. And NO subscription.
I actually bought a used color laser printer for about $15. The supplies were full when I bought it, and are still full 3 years later. With 1000s of pages of yield I expect this to always be ready to go when I need to print something. Though I wish I had a decent inkjet for photos, but one that can take generic supplies.
Firstly, that is a printer/scanner combo and it really depends which model you use. Mainly they have onboard heads plugged and unusable, while scanner part depends on availability ofthe drivers for newer PCs. I use Epson SX115 as a scanner (printer is dead) since there is a win 10 driver for it. BTW, I use HP2200TN for the output.
Secondly, if you wish to present usable vintage inkjet printer, then get a PRINTER. Look for HP inkjet models 6xx-7xx (parallel port) or 8xx-9xx series with USB ports. Their heads are part of cartridges and as printers are really sturdy, despite appearance. We used them as office printers and had some spare black cardridges that we just rotated when they needed to be refilled, no quality drop.
I got a steal of a deal on a new Brother MC-L8690CDW, all-in-one with fax and duplexer (including double sided scanning with the ADF and an extra scanner head). With a £100 rebate and a 5%? off ebay voucher it cost me under £140, rrp now I believe is over £400.
Interestingly being the bottom of the range there are some things it supposedly doesn't support, like an NFC card reader and the larger cartridges but in fact it does (the physical cartridge size doesn't change for different capacities like some). Cartridges are surprisingly not chipped and use a mechanical method for toner life detection so there is no way of it stopping the use of non-genuine cartridges.
The only thing I can 100% recommend you steer clear of is any HP printer that takes the separate ink cartridges for each color those have print heads that fail and are impractically expensive to replace.
The nice thing about old printers is that the cartridges might have simpler or no tracking chip. This allows you to install a Continous Ink Supply System on your printer. Also to home your brother printer head I think you can hold the stop button
I had an old inkjet that didnt get much use for a few years because ink prices were insane and I ended up getting a laser printer. The print heads were absolutely dried and crusted over that no amount of self cleaning could get it to work. I wound up having to take the whole print head out and soak it overnight to let it clean out. Worked a treat and here I am printing photos with cheap amazon ink. Not too bad!
For me, the age of printing photos is more or less a thing of the past. For the past few years a monochromatic laser AIO has served me pretty well, since nowadays I mostly print forms, where color isn't important.
You lucked out with this one. I cringed when you got out the paper towel and cleaned the printhead. With the newest printers, the nozzles are many times smaller, and many times the quantity. I have destroyed print heads with paper towels. The lint gets caught in the nozzles, or it scratches the surface and causes ink to spray not very well. I have an HP and I have used the "forced cleaning solution" method. Nice choice of what to print for the test!
Used old printers is dependent on if the print head is in the cartridge or the printer. If in the printer, it can get horribly clogged & then burn out the jets. If in the cartridge, then better hope the electronics is still firing the jets. We used to refill the cartridges for an old HP printer which ran the risk of print heads going bad but it saved a lot of money. A BJC250 printer which I rather liked was very flexible with refilled ink.
My current multifunction Brother printer I absolutely love. Separately purchaseable inks, it maintains itself even when off. And I order authentic inks on Ebay. Cheaper than Amazon!
My printer has the added capability of printing on DVDs & CDs. 😊
I looked up this model on ebay. $250.00. Wow. I did find one or two for 70 dollars. Not going to lie, I really like this unit!
"Real camera", ay?
I got a Sony camera from this year that has a MemoryStick (Pro Duo) slot. I thought that format was still dead (to be fair, the slot is one of those double slots with the contacts on opposing sides of the slot, but still, it's 2024, I thought Sony abandoned that format and switched over to CFExpress type A on their high end cameras).
Now, more in line with the video, I can't find any printers which will take that new Sony format, but all of the ones I can find in the thrift store today have SD and MSPD slots (and clogged heads, but I might try that alcohol method for cleaning and see what shakes loose).
I bought a Canon G3600 series tank printer earlier this year, and I am extremely happy with it. I don't print much volume but I've done a couple dozen high quality A4 photos, a few dozen documents, god knows how many J cards for my cassettes (lots of tests that go in the bin) and other miscellania. I also make sure to print a test page at least once a week if I'm not printing anything else to keep the heads clear.
And from that the ink levels have yet to noticeably move from their full marks so I have no reason to doubt their ~7000 page claim before refill is required. And when it is required it'll cost me about $70 AUD total for genuine ink for all four tanks, which is significantly less than equivalent cartridges that have less than a tenth the ink capacity.
As a result in 2024 I would absolutely not recommend any cartridge injket to anyone, just save the money to afford the upfront cost for the tank printer. But not Brother's tank printer, because it's a complete lie and still uses cartridges. Even if you barely print at all, BS cartridge expiries and blocked heads means you'll break even in a couple years with the tank printer vs. the cartridge. And you can guarantee the heads on the tank printer always stay clear because it costs next to nothing to do test prints every week. If you print a lot you'll break even within months.
Edit: I also forgot to mention that even if the heads get irreversibly clogged on my machine, they are easily replaceable
You can also buy refillable cartridges with a chip which automatically resets the ink levels. Even cheaper to use
I ditched inkjet. Went full thermal. Portable thermal printers with thermal paper is less expensive for the rare occasion I need to print something. Works great, especially as a digital nomad.
On BPA-free thermal paper?
Fax
@@sub-vibes I don't live in 1984. The only time I need archives they're stored as PDFs or images in the digital world. Then printed again.
Beat you! Picked up an Epson XP-640 for £8 from a local charity shop, fully working!
At this moment in time, in the year 2024, I would probably only attempt this with Brother printers. They're one of the last companies at least vaguely trying to sell good printers, and seem to be the least evil printer company. Subject to change of course.
I bought a used Brother all-in-one laser printer last year and also had success. It did need a new drum but the knockoff has been working just fine. I also own yet another Brother laser printer from 2009, which I bought brand new, and that still works just fine with drivers supported through Windows 11. I only bought the other one because I needed a scanner.
Even if you didn’t go over refilling the ink cartridges, which is one of the bigger reasons of going with an older used model, considering that I had to spend a couple hundred on a laserjet that’s only capable of B&W that’s pretty bargain priced for a relatively newish printer that’s an AIO.
I gave up on inkjet printers years ago when I found I could get beautiful large color prints from places like costco very cheap. We've had a brother multifunction regular toner printer for years and works fine for household printing and copying.
This model has both distinctive pros and cons. For the pros, the mechanism is incredibly durable; I have a model based on the same mechanism since 2014 that is still used today and has never experienced any mechanical failure. Since this model has no chips on the ink cartridges, you can buy refillable cartridges and use genuine bottled ink for ink tank models, reducing costs and maintaining high-quality prints. But there is a huge con for this series: the well-known "ink absorber full." The absorber is a foam pad under the carriage resting position, and you dump ink on it when using the "clean" or "purge" function. That's why you consume so much ink but never get ink spilled inside the machine. Still, the foam has an upper limit, and the machine detects it and gives an "ink absorber full" error, which shuts down all the printer's functionality. Since no replacement parts are available, once the error is triggered, your printer is guaranteed to be doomed sooner or later.
Man now I want a fax machine. Only thing I have is a fax modem but I only have the one so I cant connect two together and test stuff out.
If only you could have posted this video in January. I needed to print out assignments for a college class, and I decided that it would be good to have my own printer for future use, rather than have to pay the campus $0.50 per page on inconvenient out of the way printers, especially after they removed the free one from the library. I purchased an MFC-j4335dw on Amazon. It seems fairly similar to this one from what I can tell, wonky Port placement and all, though mine does not have ethernet or memory card readers, though it does still have the fax machine function.
15:53
Didn’t know that HP’s Faxback service still puts their old “Invent” logo on the test pages even though they changed it a decade ago!
Speaking of printers, are you gonna use this Brother model from now on, because I saw that you’re very satisfied with it. 😊
LOL, yes and "YOU + HP" slogan as well. The other was "The computer is personal again". Probably the last time they made a big investment on advertising and got the people hocked. Away from corporate stuff, they suck so bad now.