Need a Printer Rec

Before the (brain-damaged) craze to get everything on wireless, a "Network" printer was one that could be connected to your Network via Ethernet and made available to every station on the network. These are still the only "real" printers suitable for a non-trivial office environment.

These printers support long-lived Network-based protocols and do their imaging in the Printer with Postscript or PCL page-description language. They used to be far more expensive, because of the software and because you needed a processor in the Printer. Both of those pinch-points have eased considerably.

These printers are still readily available, but seem relatively expensive unless you have the wisdom to look at life-cycle cost.

Here is a web site that sells almost only such laser Printers, including well-known brands like HP, Xerox, and Lexmark, and lesser known brands like Kyocera:

https://www.printershowcase.com

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What has changed for the worse is that disposable inkjet printers have become plentiful and cheap, reducing expectations of the cost of a Printer. Their life-cycle costs are still very high, because the ink is frighteningly expensive per impression. and the cartridges dry out in a very short time, requiring expensive replacements for no reason other than lack of frequent use.

I can't tolerate inkjet printers, because if I have not printed in a few weeks, they invariable has dried-up ink and will do nothing without new cartridge. "Feed the inkjet beast" a new cartridge whenever I need to print is something I refuse to do, regardless of where they come form.

The cartridges for black and color laser-toner printers cost more, but last far, far longer. When I want to print, it prints. I have never heard mention of laser-toner printers clogging and refusing print for any reason, except "ran out of toner after thousands of impressions".

That appears to be a very old printer since the Canon website only mentions the use of CUPS printer drivers only up to macOS 10.9 Mavericks. I checked with macOS 10.15 Catalina and it doesn't appear to be any supported Canon printers (possibly because the drivers were never updated to 64 bit version).

If you were happy with the MX700 for that many years (the Canon driver support appears to go back to OSX 10.2 -- that is a really long time), then why not choose a newer model Canon printer? Newer models support AirPrint which don't require installing any drivers to work so the printer should be supported indefinitely (in theory). I personally cannot stand today's inkjet printers, but the last inkjet printer I recommend for a family member was a Canon Pixma inkjet.

I personally cannot stand HP printers at all especially since HP routinely breaks their printers by updating the printer firmware to refuse to work with third party ink cartridges. I will never touch an Epson printer after all the difficulties we had with their old inkjets many years ago plus Epson support is terrible. I don't know about the other brands. To me a Canon inkjet is the best option out there.

For a black & white laser printer I definitely prefer Brother.

I personally will no longer recommend any HP printer whether it is inkjet or a laserjet because their quality these days is so poor, plus HP tends to issue firmware updates that will suddenly & secretly prevent the printer from working with third party ink cartridges. Our organization used to always use HP printers and back in the day (over 10 years ago), they were great printers, however, today the HP printers are made in China and quality has drastically declined. Even when the HP printers were good our organization frequently encountered firmware & driver issues where a print job would crash the printer requiring a power cycle of the printer. HP support was terrible as they employed only one Mac person in the back room which we had to be transferred to each time and they never were able to help us nor were they interested in any of the specific details I had to reliably reproduce the issue.

FYI, it is the inkjet printers that have their nozzles clogged up if the printer is not used for a while. In fact the inkjet printers now will go through a nozzle cleaning stage every so often (few days, once a week?) so you can actually run out of ink never using the printer. Laser printers do not have this issue (at least with the black & white laser printers). Color laser printers may vary depending on the technology they employ, but generally the same holds true for the color laser printers). Color laser printers though don't typically print in photo quality as color laser printers normally don't print in high resolution (maybe some really expensive high end ones do).

If you just want to print out photos, then a color thermal printer (such as the Canon Selphy) which uses a roll of colored film is an option (not perfect, but certainly avoids the inkjet issues if you don't use the printer for a while).

I have several printers that are really OLD. and they work fine, because.

they are "Network" printers, that interface by Ethernet, and use long-lived protocols like Postscript and HP PCL.

Printers that use only USB do the imaging in the computer, and that software is what gets old and they don't want to support it any longer.

I got an email update where you mentioned a driver issue with a scanner, but I don't see the post here which you may have edited. Did you try using the "Image Capture" app in macOS? Also, I believe there is a a third party app which can allow the use of some older scanners with newer versions of macOS. I don't recall the name of the software at the moment, but you may be able to find it if you search these forums or create a new thread about getting your scanner to work.

I can certainly understand your frustration in these matters as I also share them. I know longer like buying new hardware because the hardware I want and am willing to pay up for does not exist (or is very hard to find).