Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers
www.theverge.com
After a full year of not thinking about printers, the best printer is still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale.

The Verge published this spam article about the “best printers of 2024” to demonstrate how terrible Google’s search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search “best printer” on Google.

I love a good, informative troll.

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4710·
    1 year ago

    From the article…

    Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.

    I have to admit, it was an interesting read, not quite like anything I’ve ever read before, for a review.

    I honestly can’t tell if this is just some genius way of sliding in some AI generated content into a review and getting it to pass our review, or just an editor-in-chief really frustrated with Google’s search algorithm paying attention to manipulation by others, so trying to really get their stuff out there for us to see.

    Either way, it’s definitely worth the read.

    As far as Brother printers go, I own an all-in-one laser that’s over a decade old, and it’s still going strong. And it actually works with Linux to boot. I do hate though that they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early, but if you mask sensors and such, then an existing toner will work forever.

    Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early

      My Brother is newer than yours (the cheapest one I could get that prints on both sides of the paper), and has a setting to toggle how it behaves when toner is low.

      The default is to pause printing until you replace the toner - honestly that’s not entirely wrong. Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.

      The alternative mode is to just show a “low toner” warning badge whenever you print a document. That’s what I use, but I also check if it printed properly before closing the document which a lot of people don’t do. It looks like this:

      As far as I know it’s just a simple counter - how many pages have you printed since it was replaced. Obviously that’s never going to be particularly accurate.

      • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        1 year ago

        Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.

        What, like the printer would explode or something similar kind of disaster?

        Or the kind of where the printout doesn’t come out well, and you put a new cartridge in, and then you reprint and it looks fine, type of disaster?

        Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)