I owned a LaserJet 4L in about 1994 and, yes, it was amazing. It was also about $550 in 1994 dollars, or something like $900 now. That was the smallest LJ model, targeted at individuals and home offices, and one of the least expensive printers on the market other than dot matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slor0f3LJIU
I don’t think I’ve spent a total of $900 on printers since then.
If one is willing to use a laser instead of an ink jet, quality still exists. I have a Brother MFC-L2750DW now (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_m...). It’s wonderful and works flawlessly, including duplex scanning to macOS. It’s a far better price:quality mix than the LJ 4 was. It was $250, though, not $50, and as an inexpensive laser, it only prints in monochrome. If one is willing to spend $200+ and accept monochrome, good printers still exist. Today’s $900 printer will shine your shoes.
For what it's worth I waffled back and forth over this and ended up getting the cheaper Brother model that does everything else including duplex printing but that doesn't have duplex scanning. Seven months in so far and I haven't regretted the lack of duplex scanning. Of course that may vary for your use case, and if you have lots of documents or whatever that need digital archiving then obviously get it, but I haven't personally experienced that need.
I use my Brother MFC-2740DW more for scanning than I do for printing. It does a great job with Apple's Image Capture on my Mac either using the document feeder or the flatbed.
What I love about the document feeder is that it will scan both sides of the pages and combine them into one PDF. Really handy for dealing with real estate and other legal documents that are 20 pages long.
I have rarely had a page skip but then you can scan that page and use Preview to insert it in the proper place in the PDF. You could feed 10 pages, then flip them and feed them in again and combine manually. But it's very nice that the machine will do it for you.
We also have a Brother color laser printer, an HL-3170CDW. Its print quality is better and faster than my machine but it likes to go offline for no apparent reason after a couple of days. The easy fix is to power it off and on but it'd be nice if there was a better one.
I also recommend your version. Had it for years. Changed the toner once. It’s been in storage for a year in hot Houston, moved cross country three times in a uhaul and gone months between prints. Just used it the other day to print a pumpkin stencil, prior to that printed immigration docs, 100+ pages in March.
No colors, single side scan, does everything else on macOS.
I sent my first brother back after I realised I misread duplex printing/vs duplex everthing. It's so handy to just dump a pile of pages in the ADF and let it chew through it all (when I was at uni with handouts etc, book extracts)
I feel like in 2020 we should all be more scanners than printers, so for me anyway it pays to have the duplex scanning
I'm wary of multi-/omni-function printers (driver support for printers is bad enough and I don't want to spend a year's worth of PTO figuring out which particular unicorn multi-function will work with all the devices I currently have on hand), so I have a brother B&W laser (from a ~decade ago, still perfect, still works across all my platforms) and a fujitsu scansnap ix500.
the scansnap does (single-pass) duplex scanning, has a decent enough mobile app, and happily sits on my wifi.
the above combination was absolutely critical during remote learning last spring, my kids' teachers wanted a bunch of stuff printed and results scanned back in.
I don’t think I’ve spent a total of $900 on printers since then.
If one is willing to use a laser instead of an ink jet, quality still exists. I have a Brother MFC-L2750DW now (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_m...). It’s wonderful and works flawlessly, including duplex scanning to macOS. It’s a far better price:quality mix than the LJ 4 was. It was $250, though, not $50, and as an inexpensive laser, it only prints in monochrome. If one is willing to spend $200+ and accept monochrome, good printers still exist. Today’s $900 printer will shine your shoes.