Experience with recent Brother laser printers?

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I’ve gone many years without having much call for printing, but recent circumstances find me in the market for a new laser printer. Specifically, I’m think the Brother HL-L6210DW is the closest match to what I’m looking for.

I’d love to hear anyone’s experiences with recent Brother lasers, positive or negative. I’m primarily interested in general operation – print job options, paper handling, toner replacement, etc – and reliability.

Personally, my printing will be done from a newish MacBook running the latest macOS. I haven’t decided yet whether I’d connect a printer with USB, or via ethernet. I don’t need color, functions other than printing, or printing from non-Mac devices.

Thanks for sharing any thoughts!

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Looks like a nice unit. Only monochrome but at 50ppm, it’s pretty fast. And it’s an actual laser (not LED) printer sporting 1200dpi resolution.

As for supplies, Brother’s MSRP prices for toner are:

  • $82.50 for standard yield (3000 pages - 2.75 cents per page)
  • $110.50 for high yield (6000 pages - 1.84 cents per page)
  • $176.50 for super-high-yield (11,000 pages - 1.6 cents per page)
  • $209 for ultra-high-yield (18,000 pages - 1.16 cents per page)

It looks like Amazon doesn’t sell these at a discount, but even so, these look like very good prices.

My personal experience with Brother printers are with their lower-end color-LED printers. I’m currently using an HL-L3270CDW (color, duplexer, Wi-Fi), and before I got it (a few years ago), I was using its predecessor, the HL-3170CDW. Both have worked very well for a long time.

After many years of use, the fuser roller in the HL-3170CDW failed and needed replacement. After seeing that a new fuser unit (the roller isn’t sold separately) cost almost as much as a new printer, I decided to replace the printer. And I got another Brother (the HL-L3270CDW I’m using now) as its replacement.

I have found that full MSRP for its toner cartridges are a bit high, and that’s the price I end up paying at retail stores like Staples and Office Depot, but I can usually find genuine cartridges discounted on Amazon, so that’s where I end up buying mine.

WRT connectivity, modern Brother printers tend to not have any special Mac device drivers, but you don’t need them. The printers are AirPrint compatible, and macOS will see this and install an AirPrint driver, even if you connect it via USB or Ethernet.

For my home LAN, I connect my printer to an Ethernet switch and disable its on-board Wi-Fi. The printer is still Wi-Fi accessible via the LAN’s Wi-Fi mesh nodes. I manually configured the printer to have a static IP address for easier management and can log in to it via a web browser. From the web interface, I can fully configure/manage it, including installation of firmware updates from Brother’s update server.

For your other questions, the Brother web site seems to answer them:

  • It can handle letter and legal size paper, along with many sizes smaller than them. But it can’t handle any large-format paper like 11x17.
  • You can install optional high capacity paper trays, should you find a need for them. Otherwise, the default tray holds about 100 sheets.
  • It supports PostScript and PCL6, so generic device drivers should always be available. Apple’s generic PostScript driver these days doesn’t support color, but that doesn’t matter here, because its a monochrome printer.

One question for you: You say you only need basic printing. Do you also need high speed and/or high resolution? I ask because Brother makes less expensive models that might also meet your needs. The HL-2460DW is also a monochrome laser printer with 1200 dpi resolution, networking and a duplexer. But its top speed is 36 ppm (vs. 50). But it only costs $160.

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Thanks for the input, much appreciated!

I considered the HL-2460DW, and I may yet go with it for the savings. The main things that draw me to the higher-end model are bigger paper trays, ability to put in much higher-yield toner cartridges, and longer-lived components (e.g. the drum unit). I’m not too impatient about the print speed, but I do expect to be printing a fair volume of pages.

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I’ve been using a MFC-L2713DW (Mono Laser A4 Multi-Function Printer) since 2018 (model discontinued).

A variety of Apple devices connect via ethernet, Airprint, etc. No problems, happy user.

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Never had a Brother I didn’t like.

Not any recent lasers though.

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You need to meet my youngest …

I’ve suggested / installed 20 to 30 Brother LASER printers over the last 10+ years. The last 4 were color all in ones. 1 pure personal, 1 for WFH use, 1 for a home business, and 1 for an office. As far as I know all of the 20 to 30 are still in use and the users not MAD at their printer.

My home printer is a DCP-L2540DW that just keeps on going. Around 10 years old. Maybe more. We buy a high capacity toner cart for it every 1 to 3 years.

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I’ve been using and recommending Brother Laser and Ink Jet Printers and All-In-Ones for over 25 years. Have only had 1 problematic unit, which Brother replaced. I don’t even consider alternatives.

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I have a Brother HL-L2395DW that I’m happy with. Solid, basic printer. The only issue I ever had with it was really about the ASUS router and a very deep setting there that made several things not work well. Brother support went above and beyond to help me resolve it. It was clear that they had seen the issue many, many times before.

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This review is a bit flippant and superficial, but the bottom line is mostly on target:

“The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model.”

That said, it is useful to keep asking about experience with recent models. Brother is basically what HP used to be: the safe choice for a good/high quality printer at a reasonable price. HP used to be at the top of my recommendation list, and I have no doubt that there are quite a few twenty year old HP printers still in service, but now HPs are at the bottom of my list. Today, Brother is on top, and I hope they will stay that way.

(As an aside, I’m finally going to retire my 20+ year old Brother HL-1470N printer. I bought it new, and I think I’m only on my third toner cartridge. Unfortunately, the rubber rollers are decomposing, resulting in some surprisingly severe paper jams. Print quality also has declined a bit, so the printer likely also needs disassembly, a deep cleaning and/or a new drum. At this point, the cost of replacement parts and the time needed to perform a refurbishment significantly exceed the cost of a new printer.)

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I don’t currently have a Brother printer. I had one years ago and it was OK.

-BUT- be sure to read the 1 star reviews on Amazon about Brother’s extremely aggressive stance about toner cartridges. At least for the printer only (i.e. no scanning etc.) the short story is that it counts pages, whether or not any or how much color toner was used. Once an unalterable page count is reached you -must- replace the cartridges to continue printing. No replacement = no printing regardles of how much toner is actually left. And the cartridges cost almost as much as a new printer.

I’m sure the printers are great but this policy guarantees I won’t be buying one.

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Do you have a citation for that?

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I was quoting the 1 star Amazon reviews.
David

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I have had a number of Brother laser printers (they’re what I equipped my office with, and I have used them at home and recommended them to clients). Once you get past the starter cartridge that comes with the printers, I found cartridge life to meet my expectations. Some of the printers used a window in the cartridge to sense the level of toner. A piece of black tape over the window would give a few dozen more pages of output while I waited for a new cartridge to arrive. (Honestly, I bought so few cartridges over the years that I didn’t record the number.)

Other versions had no discernible mechanism for detecting low toner. These could well be using the page-count method. One time, I got caught short with one of those but was able to find an incantation online that gave me a few days’ more cartridge use until a replacement arrived.

I don’t think the page-count method is so odious. I don’t think that the window method is likely to be much more reliable or accurate.

Keep in mind that it’s been at least three years since I replaced a Brother toner cartridge and over five years since I bought a new printer (I’ve been retired for three years now), so the newer printers might no longer support the bypass mechanisms.

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There are plenty of references on how to override the requirement to replace a Brother laser printer cartridge, including this article:

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Could this be referring to the Brother Eco toner program? AFAIK not obligatory, unlike HP who call it euphemistically “Dynamic Cartridge Security” and “introduce” it via a firmware update. My arm… (the keys s and e were temporarily not available, I had to use an m instead )

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Agreed. I’ve found that the two I’ve owned both have a not-so-secret maintenance mode on the printer’s console that can be used to reset the page-count for any of the replaceable components (not just toner, but drums, waste-toner cartridge, belt unit, fuser unit, etc.). It’s not documented (unless maybe in a service manual somewhere), but some web searching was able to find the mechanism.

Of course, you reset these at your own risk. If you exceed the life of a toner cartridge, you’ll just end up with bad/blank prints. But if you exceed the life of other parts, you run the risk of paper jams and (in the case of the waste-toner cartridge) making an ugly mess in the guts of the printer.

But, as you wrote, this only applies to those systems where there is no toner-level sensor. For those that have a sensor, it will print until it reports a low level. For these systems, you can often rock the cartridge back and forth a few times, in case there is toner in the cartridge that is not near the sensor. Or you can tape-over the sensor window (which will let you print even after it all gets used up).

It’s been my experience (when I played these games in the past), that printing beyond where the sensor trips usually only lets you print another 20-30 pages before color components start dropping out.

It’s also important to note that many people (including reviewers) confuse the “low” and “replace” indications. When you get a report of “low toner”, you can just dismiss the warning and keep printing. This is your alert to buy a new cartridge (if you don’t already have one) so you’ll be ready to replace it when it does run out.

When you can an indication that the toner is empty or needs to be replaced, that’s when the sensor (or page counter) thinks there’s not enough left to provide a quality print. I just replace the cartridge at this point - since a full set lasts me more than a year anyway, I see no need to play games in order to scrape out every last page.

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My husband bought our first Mac in 1984, along with the original 1984 HP Laser Writer, which was the only computer that could handle Apple’s high end typography, design, and not long later…color.

And at the same time the LaserWriter was, really and truly, the very, very first and only desktop printer that could manage Apple Talks, as well as the brilliant, beautiful and exceptional PostScript language. This truly made Macs able to handle typography, graphics, pages, folders and printers for groups as well as for individuals.

But a few years later Apple backed off development of their own printer hardware. The biggest reason was that prices of printers and ink have lower prices and very significantly lower profit margins.

Since that time, we have have been using HP printers exclusively.

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Sadly, this came out yesterday:

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But Brother denies this:

So its not clear…

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