Printers were a product category that were expensive for what they offered and were always kind of finicky. I can still remember never knowing if my printer was going to work when I needed it to or not.
Since I purchased a Brother printer all of those concerns went away. It works well, requires minimal set up, is reliable, and represents great value for money over a period of years.
I'm on my second printer from them in the last 10 years and wouldn't even consider a competitor unless there's a serious decline in their quality.
Edit:
Since I saw someone ask below my model is MFC-9340CDW
Couldn’t be happier with it
If you want one that additionally has PCL 6 support for universal compatibility, get the slightly more expensive HL-L2375DW.
I have both, no regrets.
For a long time Monoprice sold very good Brother compatible toner for reasonable prices. Sadly, that time has long passed. Brother 1st party toner is not as cheap as I'd like but it's still decently affordable compared to other major brand 1st party toner. I've had horrible luck with non-Monoprice 3rd party Brother toner.
It's universally coupled with a lot discussion about how much of a scam inkjet printers are from any company.
> I don't print often, but when I do I want color so a BW laserjet isn't a good fit.
.....then....buy....a Brother COLOR laser?
The levels of arrogance in "well I can just throw out more than half the advice" is breathtaking...
...and then you have the nerve to blame the community?
It never gets in my way, always works when I need it, is happy about the default drivers and costs me around 20€ in ink every two to 3 years.
It makes me happy to hear it once a week when it cleans itself.
If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know, I want to love my printer as well.
If anything its connectivity works too well: I first connected it via USB, installed the Brother drivers (i386 only, but whatever, I don't need a 64-bit printer driver really!), and CUPS shared it over the network to all my computers. Then I added an Ethernet connection and it shared itself over the network. So now there are multiple ways to reach it.
Apple had no choice but to make CUPs support generic printing interfaces because printer companies at the time rarely made macOS drivers, and this has benefited Linux too.
Think about that before you email anything you want to keep private.
I print once a never, so the only answer I remember is to power cycle the little bastard.
And then I have to reboot my pc so windows 10 will find it.
There's probably a couple services I could restart instead, but reboot is fast enough I don't care.
Any of the printer companies that made high end professional printers used by print designers, photographers, etc usually had Mac drivers for their entire printer lineup because Macs had a huge presence in world of desktop publishing, graphics design, and photography from most of latter half of the 80s all the way up through the 2000s.
Apparently this can be fixed be reflashing its firmware but from what I can gather this requires some obscure utility that’s not generally available.
I dont see any way to register the sender's expected email on the printer. Back to fax spamming...?
Brother HL-3140CW. Color laser printer. If you'd have told me it'd still be working ten years later, I wouldn't have believed you. I print so sporadically, but when I do, it just works. Does AirPrint from smartphones, etc.
My only complaint with this model is that it actually has no Ethernet port, so it connects only via WiFi. Seems like a strange trade-off for something like a printer.
https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...
Brother Compact Monochrome Laser Printer, HLL2390DW, Flatbed Copy & Scan, Wireless Printing, Duplex Two-Sided Printing, https://a.co/d/8vMWJCK
Also look at the delicious Windows 2000 style settings interface:
All the cloud nonsense is there to enrich the manufacturers, it doesn't actually make these products better. KISS!
Further, I got mine as a refurb since I wanted it in the throes of the pandemic so I wasn't going to spend big bucks on a printer and needed something for the amazon returns labels primarily...
The HP laser that was replaced was finicky at the best of times.
I wasn't implying that you can't complain about it!
1) Buy a cheap inkjet printer
2) Discover it runs out of quick within ~50-100 pages
3) Learn about the distinction between laser and inkjet printing
4) Buy only Brother laser printers for the rest of your life
It's a rite of passage at this point.
Wifi is the only "innovation" that I cared about when buying a new printer. My old Brother just had USB, which was fine for 12 years. But my newer (10 years old) Brother has wifi and printing from the couch is great!
Inkjet is also typically more viable for non-commercial borderless and supertabloid printing, like large prints and posters.
"And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again."
(followed by chatgpt output)
They've made the best scanner by refusing to innovate in that area as well.
Observation: disconnecting the printer from the network avoided the un-wake-able "deep sleep" state. Re-connecting the network made it susceptible again. I suspect it's particular network traffic that causes the printer to wedge into a sleep it cannot leave; possibly a Debian box that I've since de-commissioned. The problem no longer occurs despite having the same firmware as before and being connected to the network.
