I find that basing quality judgments on the (nominal) manufacturer is fraught with problems.

It used to be that when you did that, the company was using one design team and one manufacturing facility, but that's no longer the case. Samsung (or HP or whoever) might have multiple printer departments that run in almost complete isolation from each other.

Of course, that assumes that they're doing the design themselves at all. They might have decided to farm out design of the cheap printer to some fly-by-night engineering company in a third world country somewhere.

Even if it is the same design unit, they might farm out one to the lowest bidding factory and make another in-house.

Of course, all of this assumes that it's even really their product at all, and not just some Chinese domestic-market piece of crap that they decided made more sense to rebadge than bother developing one of their own.

Anyway, I've gotten burned on this a few times in the recent past, and I'm not going to make that mistake again.