Loren Pechtel

I've been happy with every Brother device I've owned, although I've had some gripes with some of their software.

draver

Yesterday I bought a Brother MFC-L3770CDW Color Laser Printer from Office Depot for $399. It seems like a decent machine, with WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC and ethernet connectivity. There are 4 toner cartridges, one for each color and a set on Amazon runs about $70-$80 for off brands that have good reviews. 25 ppm, document feeder for fax & copying, double sided color printing, 250 sheet paper tray, etc. Seems to have all the bells & whistles, and so far it has been easy to set up and use.

Might be worth a look if you are in the market for a decent combo machine.

Edited: I could swear I saw bluetooth during the setup, but it's not listed and I have no need for that connectivity, so I have lined it out in my original posting.

UA Fan

How are the scanning features? Are they also double sided? Can one scan to mobile/email/cloud/computer remotely or via USB cable.

draver

It will scan double sided B&W and color from the 50 page auto document feeder. The website posts this in the specs listing for scanning:

"E-mail�, Image, OCR, File, FTP, USB, Network Folder (CIFS - Windows only), SharePoint, Cloud Services (Web Connect)".

It also has a bed type single sheet scanner with a lid for scanning ID's and smaller objects that the sheet feeder cannot.

BTW, the Airprint feature works well and easily from all my Apple devices. I've test printed pics, notes, emails, etc.

Here's a link to the device on the Brother USA website.

https://www.brother-usa.com/products/mfcl3770cdw#specification


B

pseudoswede

My Brother wireless MFC is just old enough that it's very finicky with printing from Chromebooks. I finally upgraded recently to a Canon MF642CDW (goes on sale at Best Buy regularly between $250-270) and purchased a refurbished Brother HL-L2370DW from Staples for $75 (should be here next month). Printing from Chromebooks to the Canon works, and Brother's website says the 2370 is compatible (people on SlickDeals call it "the printer that never dies").

KRSW

Which laserjet were you having trouble with? I guess I've been lucky. I exclusively use laser printers in all of my homes because I've thrown away so many inkjets which clogged from non-use. Some of my laserjets only get used once a year but still perform. Same goes for some of the spare laserjets we have at the office. They'll sit in storage for ages and tossed into service when we need an extra printer and they'll run fine, even after sitting for 2+ years.

FWIW, I "fixed" the broken Brother HL-L6400 B&W laser by removing the duplexer tray and replacing the Brother toner cartridge with a $13 generic one. It won't print double-sided anymore and runs at 1/2 speed, BUT no paper jams, no creased pages. Time for the first page to come out is the same as before. ...and what other printer can print 8,000 pages for $13 of toner ($0.0016/page)? Would I buy one of these again? With $13 toner, probably. Pulling the duplexer didn't require any tools. We do have an HL-L6200DW in the office which so far hasn't acted up, despite reviews on Amazon showing it has similar issues. If it does, I'll be yanking its duplexer out as well.

We've also bought a ton of the Brother HL-L8630CDW printers and they've been absolutely solid. Trying to get them over the past few months has been difficult, but we finally replaced all of the older HPs. Bonus: They log all prints to .CSV files on the server. With that we're able to bill clients accordingly. These printers have already paid for themselves in the first year. When some clients are requesting 10,000+ pages in a single month be printed, the printers have become a profit center.

pseudoswede That Brother is a darn good printer. Pain to connect to WiFi on the panel, but once that's done it just works. I bought one for my parents and no matter what they do to it, the thing still runs.

BigLar

OK - A little OT but here goes -

As I mentioned above, I have a Brother AIO (DCP-2540DW), and I also picked up another Brother, MFC-7440N (I don't use the fax function on the '7440).

I really use the scan and copy functions, especially since both have an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF).

Testing: When copying either from the glass or the ADF, both units perform flawlessly.
When scanning from the glass, both units perform perfectly.
However, when scanning from the ADF, both units show a black streak down the middle.

Since the same ADF is used for copying and scanning, I guess I'm assuming that, after the scan electronics, the output is directed either to the copy electronics or the scan electronics. I think that if I want to go through the trouble of disassembling it, I might find a bad/loose cable connector somewhere in there.

Anyone know if this is a common problem with Brothers and/or with ADFs in general?

PS - I also picked up a Fujitsu ScanSnap which I use on the job (it's quite small) and scans perfectly - uses their ADF for everything. So, I'm OK with volume scanning, but I'd sure like to get the Brothers fixed if possible, without having to ship it/pay an arm and a leg, etc.

KRSW

Unfortunately I don't have any Brother AIOs, just Canon MF269dw's which are great, so I can't help you on that other than to say reach out to Brother and see if they have a fix.

The Fujitsu ScanSnaps are truly best-in-class. I resisted buying them because of their high prices, but after inheriting one, we bought one for everyone in the office.

cardsqc

Hmm, normally when I see that, it's a sign of some dirt in that little separate area of the glass that's often there for the adf feeder, but then I'd expect that would still be there for when you do a copy from the adf if that was true. I doubt you'd find a loose cable in there, it likely all goes to the main board with the same cable, and anything beyond that would be on the main board. And for it to be on more than one unit? Really weird.

nkedel

For the ADF in each, are these single-pass with two image sensors, or mechanical duplex, or non-duplex? If it's single-pass, it's not at all uncommon for there to be damage to one side and not the other, and the "upper" side would never be used when flatbed scanning.

As cardsqc said, this can be a common problem if there's dirt or optical damage in the paper path, but it's implausible that it would be electronics - in any unit modern enough to be a scanner/copier*, there is unlikely that there are much in the way of "copy electronics" or "scan electronics" to be separate by a wire, and it's even more unlikely for a household all-in-one - there will be one PCB, and mainly just software and a CPU - in one case it scans it into memory and either then prints it, in the other it scans it into memory and then transcodes it to a desktop-PC-friendly format.

It's certainly possible that either the transcoding to printer raster values and/or transcoding to the desktop PC friendly format uses a separate ASIC function (rather than being done by the processor**) such that one could have gone bad but not the other, but it seems unlikely.

Two more likely possibilities, one that you can test for:
1) Does the line show up as pure black if you pull the scan into an image editor? If it's not, it's possible that for photocopying, it's using a pure monochrome scan and whatever the obstruction creating the line If you're scanning in color/greyscale doesn't make the threshold for a a pure black when copying. You can test this by doing a pure monochrome scan.
2) It's also possible that the cleanup algorithms or contrast curves are different for the photocopying. Not much to be done about that.
3) If it's two completely unrelated units, and only on scanning, what are you scanning to? If it's directly to a machine via a Twain or similar driver, maybe try scanning to a network share?

Also, are both up to the latest firmware?

If it's damage or dirty, the only "fix" I can think of that may help is carefully cleaning the paper path, and maybe inspecting for scratches although you'd basically have to replace one or both of the scanning

(* I'm sure someone back in the 90s built something that did direct optical photocopying, but also had a scanner, but it can't have been common.)
(** these days the processors are usually cheap, powerful general purpose processors, but especially on older models a lot of printers stuck to much older microcontrollers for a long time, where you'd have needed ASICs to do the transcoding quickly enough. Processors popular in old laser printers and office all-in-ones include some really interesting architectures that never made it to the desktop, like the i960 and NS32)

BigLar

Update:

I took the above information to heart, and decided not to disassemble the things.

Checking out a few videos of people having a similar problem, I attacked the 7440 first. A little elbow grease on the glass parts with some alcohol seemed to help a little, but not all that much. Then I lifted the cover on the ADF and saw a few rollers and a couple of unpowered plastic rollers which , being spring mounted. apparently are used to make sure of good contact with the actual feed rollers. They were filthy . I'm guessing whoever owned it last used to feed a lot of material he had just printed through the thing, and by now a lot of toner had flaked off onto the rollers.

So, I removed them and with hot water, Dawn, and a toothbrush, I soon had them like new. So back into the machine they went, and time for a test.

Perfect! Absolutely pristine scans!

The moral of the story - printers and scanners are electromechanical devices. The electronics couldn't care less about dust, insect droppings, and the like, but the mechanical parts do. I've always taken the time to go over my printers to make sure they were clean, but I hadn't thought of the scanner.

Anyhow - a success story, and one happy camper here.

Loren Pechtel

Which is why they are more problematic than most of the computer hardware.

KRSW

My biggest gripe about printers are the drivers. The mechanicals usually make sense, even if they are very cheaply-built these days.

nkedel

Not-quite-the-cheapest lasers tend to be happy with PCL or Postscript drivers, some of them all the way back to the 1980s. It's often preferable to use generic drivers to the manufacturers' more recent ones.

(Canon has their own system, UFR II, which isn't quite as standard but seems to work with almost all Canon large office printer/copiers which seem to be less likely to support PS/PCL)

Inkjets, custom photo printers, etc, are much less standard. The few surviving dot matrix printers all pretty much support the old Epson standard, but they're a very specialized piece of kit for multipart forms.

BigLar

Seriously? I find it hard to believe that they would not support PCL - PS, well, maybe, but geez; you'd have to have a very specialized and well-heeled market to make that a paying proposition.

Just my view as an ignorant outsider.