Many years ago, I spotted an HP Color LaserJet Pro m254dw online at Costco and bought it. It's been a fantastic printer. The toner never dries out, "empty cartridges" don't prevent it from printing. It is modern enough that I can use AirPrint to print to it, but old-school enough that it has an ethernet port. The supplies status page basically says "Just because it's at 0% doesn't mean you can't print, but maybe buy a new toner cartridge and replace it when the output gets bad." It didn't require any special drivers, there's no need to link an HP account, and it has a usable web-based management interface.
So far I have the following complaints about the printer:
* After some large amount of uptime (3mo? 6mo? I'm not sure) it won't respond to print requests. Rebooting it fixes the issue.
* Toner cartridges are expensive. I priced out something like $450CAD for a set of the three colour cartridges. I'm still on the starter cartridges and, even though they're "empty", the output quality is fine.
* The word "Color" in the product name is not properly localized to the Canadian market.
Obviously I'm grasping at straws as far as complaints go!
Honestly, this thing feels like I found a unicorn. I've been looking for a similar printer for my parents, but I haven't found anything from HP that ticks all of the boxes. The next one for them will likely be a Brother.
https://www.amazon.com.au/DINGLONG-Cartridge-Laserjet-M281fd...
I have a 4050DTN for regular B&W and a 5000TN for anything wide format. These two are absolutely bulletproof, I can get cartridges for my 4050 that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage; a single cartridge got me through two degrees with zero problems. Currently on my third cartridge in almost a quarter century.
Will look into your M254DW as a colour option, per your experience with it.
One of my first tasks at my first job, like 25 years ago now, was to scrape crud off of a LaserJet 4 fuser. My boss explained that they tried using remanufactured toner cartridges to save money, but they found that these would deposit crud on the fusers. Thanks to tight budgets, we ended up scraping the crud off of the fusers using a screwdriver and only replacing the fusers if they were too far gone. They had switched back to HP cartridges before I started there, but the results of the remanufactured cartridges were still around for a few years.
We also used a product called Rubber Renue to rejuvenate the pickup rollers/pads as a bottle of that stuff (which lasted a LONG time!) was significantly less expensive than the maintenance kit that contained the new rollers.
The savings for that refill kit are significant, but I also don't want to potentially ruin my unicorn printer.
Am I being paranoid? Genuinely curious.
Where I landed is that it's simply not worth the risk given the relatively small amounts involved. IIRC I bought an off-brand toner once -- the smell when printing was definitely stronger. Replaced with a genuine toner quickly.