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Seriously, just Google it: brother toner cartridge recycling program

Also don't forget to put your contact info on there. I have one of these brother printers and I put my name and phone number on everything. Big things also get my address as well.

http://www.brother-usa.com/Pto...

Everything also has a piece of blue electrical tape on it for the most part. Makes it easy to pick out your gear from a distance.

I'm going to also put in a vote for Brother for laser printing. I have found that they are very durable, they work fine with the inexpensive third party toner, and they are inexpensive to buy. for the last 4 years, I have been using a Brother 7360N. It has been rock solid. It works with Windows/OSX/Linux. My wife was doing a lot of home loan document signings last year, so we went through a period where she was printing 300 to 400 pages a day with no problems. I get my toner at Supplies Outlet.

For color, unless you are printing photographs, I would recommend getting away from Inkjet. Even if you are, you might want to consider avoiding inkjet. Inkjet printers simply fail. They break if you use them too much. They break if you use them too little. They break if you use them just right. And, the ink is some of the most expensive stuff on the planet. Color laser doesn't bleed like inkjets, so you might see a bit more pixalization, but it is way cheaper to use laser, and the printers don't break as easy.

The final piece is the sheet fed scanner. If you are doing nothing but 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper, the Multi-function printers/scanners are fine. If you have odd sized paper, or you have a lot of scanning to do, so laber is more expensive than the scanner, I highly recommend the Fujitsu ScanSnap line of scanners. I scan every single receipt that I get. I used to try scanning them in my Brother MFC-7360n. It worked, but it was massively labor intensive. Long receipts would require cutting and pasting. The scans would either be all cockeyed, or even more labor was needed to line things up. I had to use the flatbed because the receipts would not run through the sheet feeder. I got the Fujitsu ScanSnap s1500 for ~$400 at Costco. It had a tough time convincing myself to spend that much money on a scanner, once I did I found it was well worth it. Scanning that used to take an hour, now took 10 minutes. It would take all different sized reciepts at the same time. It would automatically straighten the image, and it would auto-detect whether the scan needed to be b&w or color. There really is a difference between the scanner that comes in a $200 Multi-Function printer and the canner that costs ~400.

I bought a Brother 5250 with network and tumble (print on both sides of a page).
Works flawlessly with Linux/OSX/Win.

Though I know of an Kyocera BW Laser bought ~ 1990 which still works fine as long as you don't bust its RAM by printing images.

30 Watts is way too low.
Even battery operated inkjets like Brother PJ663 PocketJet 6 or HP Officejet 100 Mobile Printer suck up more than that.

They also tend to be rated for "up to 500 pages per month".
Which is sort of a perfect number in theory - it comes out to ~16 pages per day, or one page per patient every 30 minutes during an 8-hour shift.
In reality, it's probably (at least) either double the pages or patients or both.

There ARE very low power consumption printers out there like PIXMA iP100 (9 Watts operational) but those are still, like all mobile printers, first and foremost "first world" toys instead of "third world" work horses.

He's probably going to have to go with a dot matrix solution (durability, price, moderate power consumption) or with a dot matrix and mobile inkjet mix of some kind.
Real life solutions tend to be like that.
Many "acceptable" solutions for the problem instead of a single perfect answer to the question.

I recently found out Brother has an app for printing from Android and IOS. Maybe the other printer manufacturers do too?

Brother still makes an array of electric typewriters.

http://www.brother-usa.com/Typewriters/default.aspx?src=productIndex

Still useful for multipart forms (yes, they still exist, unfortunately), labels, and envelopes. Laser printers don't do so well on these. Laser printers have the unfortunate habit of heating the page of labels, so after a couple of passes, you throw away the rest of the page if you haven't used it (or you have a fun time digging out random labels from the laser printer).

--
BMO

I have a Brother DCP-7040

monochrome printer / copier / scanner. We got it after I got fed up with my crappy Cannon inkjet a couple of years ago for just a little over $100 from Best Buy. Haven't looked back since. Most of the printing we do is my wife printing papers for school which are all B&W anyway. The only other thing we might want to print are photos, but they are better done at the store than some crappy inkjet printer anyway.

http://www.brother-usa.com/Printer/ModelDetail.aspx?ProductID=hl2170W

It comes with wired AND wireless network support built in. It did ship with the lower capacity toner cartridge, but at 1500 pages, it should still last a couple of years at the expected use rate (home office + school kids). The high capacity (2500 page) replacement cartridges were $46 OEM or $27 for generics.

The ink-jet cartridges for the printer this one replaced cost ~$30 a pop and lasted only a couple of months before they 'dried out' (half full). Even at $46, a 2500 page toner cartridge should last 3 or 4 years.

Exactly, and make sure it's single function and black and white if you don't print in color often, less things to break that way. I picked up the Brother 2070N myself a few years ago. Works with or without drivers, works great in Linux, perfectly reliable for me (and others based on reviews), and cheap enough to not worry too much about it if it doesn't last more than a few years. Plus it has a toner drum available if you do a lot of printing. I'm still perfectly happy with this one, but there might be a better one available now, I'd still be looking for the same features and it would be what I compared everything else against.

1. http://cableorganizer.com/ This site is good for hours of fun.

2. Velcro cable ties are great.

3. Build your own custom-length Ethernet cables.

4. Label all your cables and transformers. See http://www.brother-usa.com/Ptouch/Ptouch_HandHeld/

The Brother Quattro is a good example. Brother makes printers, machine tools, and sewing machines. All three lines come together in their computer-controlled embroidery machine. This one even has a built-in LCD panel. There's embroidery software, too, for designing embroidery work. (I had to learn about this once when an artist friend sent me a "company logo" file she's been given for a web site, but couldn't read. It turned out to be an embroidery machine control file. I found a program that could render it (stitch by stitch) and got a picture out.)

Computer-controlled embroidery machines have been around for 25 years or so, and before that, ones controlled by cams and chains.

Personal printers are horribly unreliable and very expensive to maintain.

That's my experience with INK 'jet' printers, but I bought a $150 ( Brother HL-2070N Laser printer when I started graduate school three years ago and my experience has been the complete opposite of that. It also came with a $50 rebate that I actually received so the total cost was $100.
It's 2400x600 dpi, 22 pages/minute printing (of text only, graphics are about 5-10 pages/minute depending on content), and includes 10/100 ethernet Rendez-vous (auto discovery) networking, is noise-less when not printing (In fact, it cuts off automatically after 5 minutes) and I love it.

I have put at least 3 thousand pages through it and haven't had to change toner since I depleted and replaced the 'intro' cartridge more than two years ago. Just about every time I use it I remark that it is probably the best $100 I have ever spent.

A-double-plus would buy again in a heart beat.
Except for paper, it has been incredibly cheap to own and use and absolutely, rock solid reliable with absolutely no maintenance what-so-ever.
and before you ask about power, it might use a lot when it prints but when it is off it draws less than 7 watts. I have a kill-a-watt. I checked.

http://www.brother-usa.com/printer/modeldetail.aspx?PRODUCTID=HL2070N&tab=spec

MSRP, not sale price!: HL-5250DN for about $250

And I must say "simple economics" when it comes to duplexing.