3DPrinting

Brother laser printers are great.

Inkjet 2D printers are terrible because they are purposefully designed to milk their owners for money in the form of overpriced ink cartridges. Often the printer itself is sold at a loss and the manufacturer's single goal is to profit off of the sale of consumables. Inkjet itself is a technology that's inherently fraught, due to the possibility of ink drying out. It's the same reason most people don't use fountain pens anymore, because the principle and pitfalls are basically exactly the same. (Says the guy who owns like 427 fountain pens. So I like to be contrarian; do as I say, not as I do.)

The answer to your question on what to recommend is a laser printer. No contest.

A lot of people like Brother laser printers. I would avoid anything by HP (for pretty much everything, not just printers). I personally have a Canon color laser printer which has been pretty good to me so far.

At this point it might just be more reliable to print a 1 layer thick text document on my 3D printer.

First, avoid inkjets. They need to be used regularly to work reliably. If you don't print, they will periodically blast ink through, till they run out. If you leave them turned off, the ink dries, and they clog up.

For day to day. A colour laser is the best bet. More expensive, and they struggle with photos, but they just keep on going. 1 refill costs 5x the cost of an inkjet, but will do 50x the prints.

If you need photos, a dye sublimation printer is the way forward. They are expensive to run, but create professional grade photos. The consumables also keep indefinitely.

As for brands. Brother is the best bet. They quietly produce the battle tanks of printers. They do 1 job very well, no faffing, no unnecessary bells and whistles.

In short, a brother colour laser printer is exactly what you are asking for.

Brother laser printer ftw. I think I spent $40 on it years ago, it's never failed after hundreds of pages, and is still on the original toner. There's a good chance it will be the last paper printer I ever buy.

I have both a brother laser and a brother multifunction inkjet. Both have been solid for many years. However, with the inkjet, due to infrequent use, i found that the cartridges a/o print head would get clogged/dried after a while. I solved this by setting up a scheduled print job on one of my machines that fires off once a week. That document has 4 1” solid squares, their colors corresponding to the cartridge colors. Since starting this, i’ve had zero clogging issues, and i just recycle the weekly prints as scratch paper for notes, etc.

I've had good experience with Brother laser printers. They don't seem to mind being left unused for months at the time. I have a Brother color laser printer and a Brother B&W laser printer-scanner and I like them both a lot.

If you get a printer with a scanner, I recommend using the NAPS2 freeware for your scanning. It works great with a wide variety of scanners, is simple to use but highly configurable, and is a lot less of a nuisance than the proprietary scanning software that comes with most printers. Once your OS has the drivers it needs, you generally won't need the proprietary bloatware that comes with the printer in my experience.

As for leaving resin sitting in a vat for extended periods, I don't recommend it beyond a few days. Sure, you can get away with it like you did, but you can also develop various problems from it. The resin will separate (easily fixed by stirring) but it can also slowly leak out of the vat and make a mess (this happened to me).

I try to make a habit out of emptying my vat (through a filter back into the resin bottle) in order to inspect and/or clean the FEP semi-regularly. I also feel better about not having an open vat just sitting around to potentially get bumped and knocked around. If I am using the 3d printer heavily I don't bother with this, but I know if it's going to sit idle for a week or longer, I go ahead and empty & clean the vat.

I just strap a marker to the head of my 3D printer and then program it to write on some paper.

Not inkjet for sure.

Go buy a brother laser printer. I've personally never had any issues with them

The brother line of laser jet printers has served me well. I almost never need to print in color, so I have the black and white variety. The toner lasts for a long time and it doesn’t dry out between uses. You can find relatively inexpensive toner cartridges for them as well.

I've had two HP laserjets, and on each one I've printed thousands of pages sometimes years in between prints.

I got a Duplex Brother SW Laser with Copy and Scan function via Ethernet... Scans to a thumbdrive connected to my router via ftp.

Brother inkjets never disappointed me. You should, however, not disconnect them from power as they self clean from time to time to prevent the mess you described.

I had a Samsung SL-C430W (a laser color printer) and it still work really well after 7 years, but admitedly I don't print that much and only a really few time a photos. On the other hand I printed on a variety of types of paper, from the standard one to the decals paper to paper to print shirts and lastly to paper to print on wood and it never disappointed.

Cheap toners (from Amazon) and really robust. But I think it is no sold.

I currently have a Brother 3-in-1 that I've had for 5 years and it's great. Sometimes the print head needs a deep clean but generally it prints and has survived some paper jams. Before that I had an Epson which was DRM'd and I despised it. It used to reject cartridges, even Epson cartridges for no reason until I got sick of the money I was wasting and dumped it. Had a Canon before that which was not DRM'd and worked fine but it just got old and started misbehaving.

Moral of the story. Do not buy any brand or model which uses DRM cartridges.

I'm impressed. I've got a inkjet that Is about 18 years old. I have to occasionally wipe off the print head, but otherwise has never needed repairs. The ender 3 we have has needed replacement parts from heads to hot ends and feeders, and every print requires specific to it setting. I can print to my hp using generic drivers without a second thought. 3d printers are far from that level of ease of use/ reliability. I'm glad your stuff worked, but that's the minority.

Get a brother brand, it is the open source of printers, haven't had a single problem with mine, ever

I have a very old photo printer from Canon and it's amazing! Produces really high quality photos in A3. And I've never had any issues apart from two nuances: it can't print text documents and its ink is very very expensive. Not your average inkjet expensive, it's much more expensive and it lasts for like 20 full page prints or something.

On the other hand you're not getting full colour high quality A3 prints cheaper in a photo lab either. And your average photo lab can't print photos that good.