[motti]

The Brother color lasers also are happy to print without color toner cartridges present.

By contrast, HP's cheaper color lasers require the cartridges to be present, and if they run out and are left in the machine, they cause banding over your printouts. This is due to their integrated drums wearing out, so you have to replace the color toners even if they're not being used (or hack around with transferring chips onto less-used old cartridges, even black ones so they're seen as colour ones).

[seanjensengrey]

This is not true, I owned a 700$ multifunction printer scanner, copier, everythinger and it required me to hack the cartridges to print black, it always put shitty yellow tracking dots on all printouts. Don't send more business to Brother.

They have the worst software (on printer and in driver) of any printer company I have come across. Their driver installers download random bits from IP addresses in Japan with zero encryption. The hardware is stellar, the software is cringe worthy.

[tomschlick]

I'm assuming this is on Windows? Because I've never had to install anything on a Mac for it to work with a brother printer...

[seanjensengrey]

This is on a Mac. I wanted to see if the firmware bugs would be fixed by using their firmware update tool. The printer itself times out when attempting an on-device firmware upgrade. The downloaded update utility just attempts to grab a new firmware image from an IP which is non-responsive.

It can't scan over AirPrint if it has gone to sleep, it only can accept print jobs via IPP if you want it to WOL. So I have two printers configured, one via AirPrint for scanning and another via IPP for printing. There are so many low hanging firmware bugs that it makes me think the same folks wrote healthcare.gov

This is par for the course in brother firmware, https://gist.github.com/seanjensengrey/4223dc23d1f7cc95a157