I have a black and white laser printer — a Brother, FWIW — that works great. It sits there and when I print the occasional document, flips on and quietly and quickly does its thing. I remember printers in past decades. Paper jams. Continuous-tractor feed paper having the tractor feeds rip free in the printer. Slow printing. Loud printing. Prints that smeared. Clogging ink nozzles on inkjets.

It replaced a previous Apple black-and-white laser printer from…probably the early 1990s that I initially got used which also worked fine and worked until the day I threw it out — I just wanted more resolution, which current laser printers could do.

The only thing that I can really beat the Brother up for is maybe that, like many laser printers, to cut costs on the power supply, it has a huge power spike in what it consumes when it initially comes on; I’d rather just pay for a better power supply. But it’s not enough for me to care that much about it, and if I really want to, I can plug it into power regulation hardware.

It’s not a photo printer, and so if someone wants to print photos, I can appreciate that a laser printer isn’t ideal for that, but…I also never print photos, and if I did at some point, I’d probably just hit a print shop.