Sorta. My old MFP Brother apparently has a firmware update available that makes it aware of the toner brand and I just ignore it. It’s not as bad as HP where a low level of ink turns the machine into a brick.
I have a brother color laser from 2013 that’s still printing awesome. toner cartridges are $200 for all 4 colors, but I only replaced them in 2015, 2019, and at the beginning of this summer - getting a few thousand pages out of each, conservatively. it’s not a glossy photoprinter, but if you just need high res document prints, I cannot recommend it enough. wifi, cat5, driver is built in to windows 10/11, works fine with android and linux too.
I run a multifunction colour Brother as well. I’ve used it with Brother and various other brands of toner without issues. It will keep printing even if a cartridge is empty. Finding consumables is easy. It runs great from Linux (duplex scans and prints), Windows and mobiles through the LAN. It’s a great machine. You can even override the “low toner” alarm and basically double the life of your cartridges (maybe shake them a bit beforehand). You just swap them out when the quality visibly degrades.
I think I bought it for about 400€, it was well worth it.
yup. I never thought I’d feel evangelistic about a brand of printers but holy hell did everyone else race to the bottom of the shit barrel in this entire category. so here we are, praise brother lol, they’re COMPETENT.
My 5 year old brother color laser is awesome. Cheap to run and toner doesn’t dry out, and it doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night and clean (i.e. use up) the ink.
However having seem comments like this, I think I will hold off on any firmware updates.
Are brother printer still good? I thought they started doing the ink DRM thing and other bullshit too.
Sorta. My old MFP Brother apparently has a firmware update available that makes it aware of the toner brand and I just ignore it. It’s not as bad as HP where a low level of ink turns the machine into a brick.
I have a brother color laser from 2013 that’s still printing awesome. toner cartridges are $200 for all 4 colors, but I only replaced them in 2015, 2019, and at the beginning of this summer - getting a few thousand pages out of each, conservatively. it’s not a glossy photoprinter, but if you just need high res document prints, I cannot recommend it enough. wifi, cat5, driver is built in to windows 10/11, works fine with android and linux too.
I run a multifunction colour Brother as well. I’ve used it with Brother and various other brands of toner without issues. It will keep printing even if a cartridge is empty. Finding consumables is easy. It runs great from Linux (duplex scans and prints), Windows and mobiles through the LAN. It’s a great machine. You can even override the “low toner” alarm and basically double the life of your cartridges (maybe shake them a bit beforehand). You just swap them out when the quality visibly degrades. I think I bought it for about 400€, it was well worth it.
yup. I never thought I’d feel evangelistic about a brand of printers but holy hell did everyone else race to the bottom of the shit barrel in this entire category. so here we are, praise brother lol, they’re COMPETENT.
My 5 year old brother color laser is awesome. Cheap to run and toner doesn’t dry out, and it doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night and clean (i.e. use up) the ink.
However having seem comments like this, I think I will hold off on any firmware updates.