Given my username I'm sure you can imagine I've had plenty of fun fighting printers. For what little printing I personally need to do, I stick with laser printers because toner is cheap and lasts forever. True story, I once had a Laserjet II from the late 80s come in a couple years ago. Damn thing still had a cartridge from back then installed and it still printed an image.
A tip for anyone who just wants to print something and doesn't want to install the 2 gigabyte driver package: Check and see if your printer supports PCL 5 or 6. HP makes generic, no-nonsense PCL drivers that just work with nearly any PCL printer and comes with no bloat.
Enterprise Kiwis, if you need to scan a document from your printer and save it directly to a network share, do not buy a Laserjet if the little screen looks like the shitty little tiles from Windows 8, pic related. Why not? If your network share isn't set to world-writable by any anonymous user on your network, you cannot scan to that network share. Period. That's right, these printers don't support any form of network authentication so either you leave an open share anyone can read and write to or you rely on HP's cloud services, both of which are just bad from a security standpoint and even worse when you have federal regulators breathing down your neck any time you do anything. The older Laserjets with the "dark mode" screen, also pic related, are still cool, if you can find one of those get one. Fuck you HP, you used to be cool.
