Yeah +1 for Brother. Either they just permit third party cartridges or their protection is so minimal everyone can bypass it. Cheap toner cartridges work perfectly for me.
Only issue is that the printers themselves are really hard to get now. In particular the colour lasers. If I find them it's at a crazy price. So I bought a b/w again. Must be the supply chain thing.
PS the old one was not even broken after 10 years but I got sick of not having network printing :)
You should buy a Raspberry PI and have it act as a network print server for your printers without Ethernet. This is what I do in office environments with similar situations. It works surprisingly well.
I tried that but it was one of those "Win printers" without local processing, and there were no drivers for ARM.
Someone in Germany made some open source drivers but it didn't work properly for me. Eventually I found a networked one on sale and I gave the old one away.
I had the same experience with an old HP 1200n, which was an otherwise rock solid printer, but I couldn’t get it to play nicely with AirPrint for love or money. I tried every permutation of CUPS + strange, half-baked drivers I found somewhere. I bought a little commercial print server that listed it as compatible but printed everything in 1/2 size. It was worth the price of a new printer to have one that Just Worked with my family’s devices.
Tried that but it had too quirky drivers.. Just couldn't get it going properly. It was one of those $50 printers that renders everything on the client. Brother actually did provide Linux drivers (which is amazing compared to the likes of HP, Lexmark etc) but not for ARM, only intel.
Eventually someone made open source drivers but half the time the printer wouldn't respond.
It's now in the hackerspace where they use it for making overhead sheets for PCB printing. So it's still having a purpose in life, I didn't throw it away :)
Only issue is that the printers themselves are really hard to get now. In particular the colour lasers. If I find them it's at a crazy price. So I bought a b/w again. Must be the supply chain thing.
PS the old one was not even broken after 10 years but I got sick of not having network printing :)