Their inkjet printers used to be spectacularly awful; I held on to my bad opinion of them for a long time, but for (at least) the past five years or so they’ve been really decent machines.
I always liked their black-and-white laser printers (except, as I said in far too many words above, their non-PCL models), but the only time I tried one of their color lasers - about ten years ago - it was a hunk o’ junk. Mind you, I’ve not run across very many color lasers from any manufacturer that I’d actually recommend…
I’v been using Brother printers ever since my HP printer became too slow to print postage before the website would time out, c.2008. They work great! Only had one wear out, but it printed many years worth of business records. But I’ve never tried the aftermarket toner. I suppose it may work by now.
I always do the Ethernet thing because that’s the only sane way to deal with a networked printer. Tried setting up the WiFi on my big printer, it never would talk.
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Bah, the URL I use for a cheetsheet page died. Maybe I should print it out or something?
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My father was a Brother dealer in the early 70s. I have office equipment from the era that still works well. I think maybe you just had bad luck with whatever it is that gave you the bad opinion of them.
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They were still really bad in the mid-2000’s. Plenty of times I told clients to ditch problem Brother printers for HP models. They’ve vastly improved over the last decade and I’m glad I gave them another look.
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Couldn’t agree more. I have the 2270 Brother, about 4 or 5 years now, it’s wireless, and it doesn’t have ink to run out every time I go to use it.
Cons: I bought 3rd party toner from Linkyo, which had great prices and great reviews, but it hasn’t been able to use the paper feed since I did. Of course, the Low Toner comes up, but who cares. But having to manually feed everything through the sheet feeder is annoying if it’s more than a page or two, and it’s more likely to come out crooked.
I will look through some of these other links to check out toner out messages, and my toner doesn’t claim to have a compatible chip, either.
I’m sure one of the forced updates has something to do with my compatibility issues.
Meanwhile, I can deal with all of that for the tiny bit of printing I do, and I laugh at my friends and family who spend a king’s ransom on ink cartridges. Hell, my Dad recently noticed that a new printer was cheaper than the cartridges, so he traded up just for the ink. What a world!
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I bought one of these a couple of years ago on your recommendation, Mark - and it’s been a total workhorse ever since. My partner’s a barrister here in the UK and often needs to print last minute bundles of client documents from home and this machine sits on our desk and just laughs in the face of occasional, high volume use. We’ve had about four or five cartridges (all third party) in that time and it’s worked splendidly. My only gripe is that you usually have to reboot it before printing as our Macs can never connect to it unless it’s been recently turned on. But that’s a minor niggle compared to the endless PITA that is an inkjet machine.
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My wife needed color, so we got a Canon? inkjet that lasted a while and sucked down ink, then ingloriously died - probably from all the knock off ink I kept trying to feed it. Anyhow, I recycled it at Best Buy and since she no longer needs color, I’ve pulled my Brother HL-2040 that is still kicking along with a bunch of toner I got at a steep discount online sale. Maybe I’ll get off my but and set up a raspberry pi as a print server for it. Pretty great considering it has got to be close to 15 years old. Weird realizing that it’s one of the oldest electronic devices I got new that is still useful. I guess there’s an electronic piano and a zojirushi EJ-PC50 steamer that are older…
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parallel ports seem to attract smileys and italics 
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Google a little bit and you’ll find a key sequence you can use to tell it to reset the toner page count.
For your other issue, I’d suggest taking the drum/toner tray our–if yours is built like mine–and checking for any paper debris or packaging tape that you may have missed removing. Because that’s a very odd thing to fail when replacing a toner cart. Good luck!
Old school letter writing… with a printer?
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My hp-4p died last year, I paid fifteen dollars in 2003 at the Rotary Club garage salek.
So I needed a new printer. Weeks of checking the flyers,i ndecision. Then I realised that Brother had printers nominally more expensive, but they strategist cartridges rather than truncated ones. Then I found that Brother says “refurbished” printers at a better price. I forget which model I bought, but two days before Christmas I got one for around $120 Canadian, some discount on top of the refurbish price. So that’s something to watch for. It was free shipping locally, and came the next day.
I’ve barely used it yet, but it seems fine with Linux. Does wireless too, but I’ve yet to configure that.
Old-school, not paleo.
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I would have to agree. I bought My brother mfc-L2700DW from Amazon about 3 years ago because 1, I was tried of ink jet printer’s because of the quality and not able to find ink, and 2 needed to be able to fax from home and I’ve replaced my toner 1 time and yes the duplex feature is a real bonus along with the adf tray. It’s got great scanning quality as well. So it’s worth it!!
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Yesi did but 3rd party ink and the drum when you need it.
I’ve done both of these many times, but thanks!
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I don’t purchase wireless due to electronic burglars aka hackers here in Little White Sh**hole. My old $40 bottom of the line Samsung laser is still going strong after nearly 10 years but you all have given me some great ideas for the next one.
My suggestion: don’t live in a state where dumpster diving is illegal. Businesses where departments try to spend out their budgets before the end of the hear probably have some great dumpster deals.
Have used these old HPs exclusively on Un*x (now:Raspi/Loonix, before: SUN-Blade/Solaris, SGI-Indigo/IRIX, HP-A400/HP-Sux) boxes, too. They’ll run basically on everything as long as it will output postscript.
The messiest point of your setup is probably the USB/parport converter. Tried a few and they all sucked. Finally choked up € 25.- for a “new” one. Without wireless on purpose. Never trust embedded network management if you can do the same with a Raspi and a USB cable 
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Same here. Most of my clients for my HL-2140 (USB only) are unix and brother actually supplies drivers that mostly still work. While I like the idea of a printer that has a network connection of its own, I’m not sure I would ever let one be its own ‘front end’. I’d put a small SBC or something in front of it. Mostly for stability and because CUPS is much easier to maintain than some random vendor UI running on the spare capacity of an already underspec’ed processor on the printer.
I don’t have a better solution for the parallel port problem, though.
