Brother MFC

Same for a Brother black-and-white laser. Not a Brother ink printer. Not a Brother color laser printer. A Brother black-and-white laser. Now maybe things have changed. But I bought my Brother MFC-8890DW back in April of 2011. It is still going strong. In that time period I have replaced the toner once. But I have only printed 3,768 pages in that time. So 314 pages per year. It is the best type of printer for my use case which is infrequent printing. Ink type printers aren't the best options if you might have 90+ days between printing jobs. I also really like having the scanning and photo copying features that mine has. And the Ethernet connection makes it so anyone in the house can easily print.

Anecdata about the same model: I have had a Brother MFC-L3750CDW for 3.5 years, and have printed over 5000 pages. Even though I always use third party toners, I haven't seen that color registration issue. Just now, I just went to the printer and let it do the 'calibration' and 'registration' steps. Then I printed a test image from the internet. None of the colours are offset.

I picked up a colour laser Brother MFC for $100 three years ago, with 600 DPI scanner / copier. Wifi printing from our phones works with no additional setup than having the printer connected to wifi. It needed new drums and toners, and continues to function like new to this day. Not quite $50, but $100 Australian, so not far off.

Scored a brother MFC-7340 from someone giving it away. Think it was 10 yrs old when we got it a couple years ago, it does a wonderful job.

I print to my Brother MFC-L8900CDW from my iphone all the time, works flawlessly. Not a cheap printer, though, as you point out.

(not OP, but another Brother fan) I've bought two Brother multifunction monochrome lasers, both are still running fine. I have the Brother MFC-L5800DW and it's predecessor (~$450). Both are amazing. I stepped up to this price range because models at this price point have a USB slot in front so you can directly scan to a thumb drive, or print from a thumb drive. Both have an extremely powerful scanning function e.g., scan to an SMTP server, local FTP server etc etc. These are the Dewalt of printers e.g., full native Postscript, native LPR daemon the device etc. Works excellently with iOS's CUPS too.

I’ve only have two printers in the past 13 years, a Brother MFC-7840w, which worked perfectly and I only gave away because my family wanted a color printer. The upgrade was an HL-2170CDW. I have no complaints with either. I’ve even gone through my starter toners on the color laser and bought a knockoff set for 70$ which included two black toners with all the colors, and have been quite surprised at the quality. Both have had wireless support and print from phones without issues.

I have a Brother MFC-L3750CDW after getting annoyed with cheap inkjets. Great printer with scanner. I regret not getting a Brother MFC-L3770CDW instead though. The 3750 has no automatic two-sided scanning, unlike the 3770.

I have been using black and white Brother MFC printers since mid 2000s and I have never had an issue other than replacing toner and drum units, which I buy from Staples.

I have the simplest set up you could imagine. I just use a Brother MFC-J4440DW printer, the same printer I’ve used for years to just print text documents and some glossy Kodak sticker paper. The printer was a couple hundred bucks and the paper is $10 for 10 sheets. I charge anywhere from $15 to $25 per sticker and usually get 4 stickers per sheet of paper. I then cut them out by hand using an xact-o knife. I’ve looked into automating the cutting process using something like. Brother Scan’n’Cut or a Cricut but I honestly enjoy the manual process of cutting stickers so I’m sticking to it (pun intended!) There was a little bit of trial and error to get the level of printing quality I finally ended up with but now that the settings are dialed in it’s a very easy process. Drawing the art is the hardest bit. I just use an iPad Pro with the pencil and Procreate for that