Color laser all-in-one advice?

I too have always had very good experience with b/w laser printers from HP. Both on campus as well as those I bought myself for home use.

Never been an AIO guy myself though. The last HP Laserjet I got for home was very barebones and inexpensive, but it’s quiet, fast, and works out of the box just fine over wifi. Toner — even the ‘official’ bona fide HP sauce — is $50 and lasts forever. :slight_smile:

But I’m getting the impression when it comes to color lasers that Brother seems quite popular in Mac land. Good to know if I eventually feel the urge to get a color laser at home. Are you Brother fans firmly rooted in AIO territory? Or does Brother have good color lasers even when it comes to just a simple barebones printer?

And are Brother drivers good? Are they well made, simple to install, and no fuss? Does Brother keep them well updated so you can still use a say 7-year old printer with the latest macOS after it drops support for this or that? Do you need any at all or does the generic built-in PS driver do the trick? (again assuming you just want to print)

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AIO and plain printers are the same mechanism for putting toner on paper. And given that the price different isn’t all that much and a scanner / copier can be very useful at times I just tell people to get the AIO units.

So far scanning is working well up to macOS 12. I just installed 13 and have yet to go there. As there are 4 other non Ventrua Macs in the home. And I’m happy with scanning via Preview.

To be honest, scanning on Mac (and Windows) has always been a total mess. Brother was made it work well for many years now. But Ventura can be a game changer. We’ll see. There is always Vuescan which is just fantasic in keeping older scanners working.

HP LaserJet 1320nw purchased in 2006. Flawless.

If yours is a “4870”, I guess that means my Epson Perfection 2480 scanner is even older? It’s ancient, and still works, although the buttons on the device (other than the power button) no longer work. So I have to launch the driver software manually from the Mac side, which partially works. Maybe I should cough up the money for a third-party driver as you have…

In terms of the general topic here… I’ve always disliked all-in-ones. If one function breaks, it might affect the other functions; if you wanted to send in your printer for servicing, you’ve just lost your scanner too.

As far as Brother printers… my very old Brother HL-2270DW (black-and-white laser) has been somewhat screwing up lately, but still more-or-less works. The drum probably needs to be replaced, but that sounds very expensive and I doubt it makes sense for such an old printer.

I’ve used many printers in my life, starting with Apple’s original dot-matrix, then various inkjets and lasers and even a melted-wax printer at one place I worked… and my general impression is, all printers suck.

No guarantee about that. The model numbers encode things like the series, internal technology, product placement and other things. Looking at the copyright message at the bottom of the product brochures for the 2480 and the 4870, the 2480 is actually one year newer (2004 vs 2003).

I chose this printer for my Mac at the time (which was a QuickSilver-2002 PowerMac G4), because of a few key features:

  • FireWire scanning in addition to USB 2.0. (Remember that Macs that the time only supported USB 1.x, which is super slow for scanning.)
  • A good quality transmissive light source for scanning transparencies and negatives
  • Support for Digital ICE (scanning with an infrared light which, when used with Digital ICE or other similar software, can detect and remove dust and scratches from scans.)
  • A power switch. I am bothered by models that power-on whenever the software asks for them, and remain powered on until sitting idle for a long time. Which seems to be a surprisingly common “feature”.

It was also, unfortunately, a very expensive model, aimed at the prosumer market. I think it cost around $500 at the time.

WRT the software, Epson stopped supporting the 4870 with EpsonScan software at macOS 10.14. I assume they didn’t want to spend the money to upgrade it to 64-bit. They ship ICA drivers for recent versions of macOS, but that of course limits you to what Apple’s Image Capture app can do (unless you have some other app that uses ICA).

When I bought my scanner, it included a CD with SilverFast. This is a much more powerful app than Image Capture or EpsonScan and includes several things I really like including batch scan (so I can scan a tray full of negatives at once) and built-in color profiles for most popular kinds of negative film (eliminating the blue color cast you get if you just invert the result of scanning negative film). I’ve kept it up to date over the years, paying for the major revisions, even though it is not a cheap package. But I like it and they have (so far, at least) kept on supporting the 4870 (I assume it is sitll used professionally by lots of customers).

My Lexmark is with the service guy. In chatting with him, he also had good things to say about Brother. He said “Lexmark is a pretty good brand, but I don’t see that many of them here. Some banks have them.” And then he said lots of bad things about HP overall. We agreed that quality for HP was a huge issue, some were great while others sucked. And of course, the price of toner sucks…

Ooh, I win! Epson Perfection 2400 Photo: Model year 2002. :rofl:

(And it still works perfectly.)

I got the HL-L3290CDW color laser printer/scanner and am very happy with it. They are hard to find due to supply chain issues. Don’t pay outrageous markups. Just keep checking your local office supply dealers.
The printer is setup as an AirPrint device. The Apple macOS built-in AirPrint driver seems to access all required settings on the printer and works flawless. Printer wakes up fast on a Wifi connection after a print command is issued.
For scanning you can use Image Capture or, better, install the Brother iPrint&Scan software (Intel only but works fine on my M1 Mac) and use this for scanning (not printing). This app has access to the 1200 dpi setting, scans OCR PDFs but has no HEIC option.

3 posts were split to a new topic: Random thoughts about HP

I got my Lexmark back, and one toner cartridge is quite low. Plus there’s a recurring set of ‘marks’ (kinda like unwanted watermarks), so the print quality isn’t really what I want. It has a new black toner cartridge. So I’ll keep it and use it for B&W copies until that toner runs out. But for color printing, I bought a Brother MFC-L3750CDW Digital Color All-in-One, due to arrive next week.

If you measure the distance between the repeated marks, that will be the circumference of the damaged roller responsible for the marks.

If you do some web searches (e.g. looking at the dimensions of replacement parts), you may be able to identify which roller is damaged, and then you can determine if it’s worth the cost to replace it.

Of course, since you’re getting a new printer anyway, it may not be worth the effort to do anything about it.

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Yeah, the repair guy did that calculation, and demonstrated using a paper tube of the approximate same diameter (about 1"). A new set of the likely rollers is $200 plus installation, and he’s not 100% sure that would fix it. (He said, “not the easiest printer to work on, but I’ve seen worse.”) The Magenta cartridge it needs (less than 200 images remaining) is another $79. My new Brother printer is $450 (about the same cost as the Lexmark.)

Kyocera annoyingly does not provide FW for self-install, even with known vulnerabilities in their FW. Plus, I’ve this LaTeX Workflow whose PDF reliably crashes the Kyocera engine.

Will be avoiding Kyocera in future.

I would join the chorus of satisfied Brother users, In addition, I’d point out that periodically Brother has a “sale” on refurbished equipment, including their color AIWs. We’ve had a Brother MFC 9130 CW, which we bought refurbished, now for several years. It sits on our wireless network to print, copy, and scan from the family Macs and iPhones. My wife prints the local paper’s crossword puzzle from her iPhone every morning, If you look here: https://www.brother-usa.com/promotions/refurbished#sort=relevancy they currently have a [RMFC-L3710CW] for $320 and a [RHL-L3210CW] for $199.99.

Thank for an interesting link. Unfortunately, that website to me is near unusable. Both Safari and Firefox lag a tremendous amount. I can’t even set a filter it’s so bad.

Curious, since the site works fine in Safari, Firefox, and Brave here—perhaps something in your network settings or upstream network.

Too bad, because you’re missing out on some great sewing machine sales! (Who knew Brother made sewing machines?)

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(I actually knew that!)

:)

Diane

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I got the Brother (3770 all-in-one) today, and I’m -very impressed- by the print quality, even on mediocre paper.

One question: On Ventura, it seems like there are not many printer options. The drivers on the CD & Website are for earlier versions of Mac OS. Am I missing anything in terms of print options (such as color quality, matching, etc?)

Thank you! Yes, apparently Cal is doing some shenanigans on their Ethernet. I tried it at home again and here zero issues.

I’m starting to think this isn’t the only stunt they’re pulling. For some reason at work my iPhone takes forever to load the App Store, and sometimes fails entirely. At home or on 5G no trouble. :confused: /OT

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Simon, our campus is similar, I’ve actually unhooked my iPhone from the Wi-Fi. We can’t access any services unless it’s one of their managed devices now. And those are locked down so tight I just… can’t. I’ve kept one of my issued Macs ‘off the grid’, and have a ridiculous workflow as a result. Endless hacking strikes apparently. We had our state healthcare system held to ransom during the pandemic, a nightmare and all public bodies have locked down since. I run Tripmode on my Macs and a huge amount of data was flowing back to the College until I managed to cut it off, taking that Mac off the grid.

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