Replacing a Canon printer with a Brother Laser?

I am thinking of replacing My Canon printer with a Brother Laser printer, need black only. Experience or advice wanted. Better brand? Comments?

Good evening,

I replaced my HP laser with a Brother BW laser because the HP was always losing the wifi connection, since then I have been very happy with the Brother, no lost connections, good print and fairly priced consumables,

Best wishes, Mark

Twenty years ago I was actively involved in purchasing and servicing networked and personal printers. At that time (not sure about nowadays) HP were generally more reliable than Canon and Epson.

About 3 years ago I bought an HP LaserJet P2055DN laser printer at a car boot sale. I paid just one pound for the printer, including a part-used toner cartridge. This is a duplex capable printer (it can print both sides), has a wired network interface (easily connected to your wifi-enabled home router) and cheap refilled toner cartridges are widely available. It took me about a year or two and several reams of paper to exhaust the "free" toner cartridge. A refilled cartridge purchased from Amazon was smudgy for the first dozen pages but has been perfect since. I've printed several more reams of paper but the toner keeps going. The printer has never jammed.

HP workgroup-sized printers such as mine are generally easy to service and all parts including feed rollers and new fuser units are available at reasonable prices. If mine irreparably failed tomorrow I would have no hesitation buying another used one, even if I had to pay £30 - 80.

I use a Samsung colour laser at the moment and had an Epson before that, both have performed as expected. My daughter has a mono Brother laser with Wi-fi that I bought for £85 from Curry’s the Christmas before last, now priced around £130, she finds it ideal for her use as a school teacher. Recently found a good supplier of remanufactured cartridges, a cloud set for mine around £50, mono for daughter £12. At the price they beat inkjet hands down.

I used to support 100s of various Brother printers where I worked, and generally they were OK, didn't give too much trouble and consumables reasonable £.

As a consequence, when I retired, bought a modesly priced one (cobined scanner, printer etc) for home use, and it's been pants.Assume they're built to a low price for home users hoping to get the £ back with the 'proper' branded consumables.

Regrads

Consider your computer operating system. I had to dump a Brother Laser printer because it was not well supported for use with Linux - it did work, but much of the functionality was lost. Brother did not provide a LInux driver, only for Windows and Apple

I recently changed my failing HP all in one inkjet.

I bought a Brother dcpl 3550, all in one laser, which is fully supported in Linux, (with drivers from Brother), so far I'm happy with it.

I replaced a Canon Colour printer with a Brother Laser because the Canon used more ink cleaning nozzles than printing on paper, and because most of my printing is text, not photographs!

Domestic Inkjets work best printing several colour photographs at a time, and the way I used mine to print occasional one-offs is highly wasteful, even if it didn't gum up entirely. Although they print black text, the way it's done isn't ideal. Whilst too high-tech precision to be made in a home-workshop the printing mechanism is designed down to a price, isn't repairable, and the profit is all in the ink. Much of the printer functionality may be in the software driver, not the hardware, making installing the right driver essential. Ink cartridges are often brainy too, making them difficult to refill, and capable of ignoring the owner! Inkjets are fussy about paper weight and porosity. I suspect all this makes them a poor match to most ordinary user requirements, apart from the purchase price!

Office and print-shop printers are robustly designed the other way round. Their goal is reliable low-cost high-volume printing. Purchase price is high, but the price per page is low. Again, these are a poor match to ordinary user requirements because few of us print enough to justify the initial purchase price. Approach second-hand printers of this type with caution because they have a hard-life and may be beyond economic repair or in need of unobtainable spare-parts.

Apart from not doing colour, black and white laser printers are excellent for home use. They don't waste ink, don't mind occasional low-volume use, usually work with a standard interface rather than needing proprietary drivers, they're not fussy about paper, and consumables (per page) are cheap. They also print much faster than Inkjets.

My Brother Laser is a HL1212-W. No problems whatever with it, and, once authenticated by the router (press two buttons), Wifi printing worked out of the box with Windows 7, Windows 10, 3 different Linux distributions, Apple and Android. It's for moderate domestic or Small Office use; I wouldn't recommend it for anything more strenuous because it's too lightly built. (At work, equivalent A4 laser printers supporting 10 to 20 users each, were at least twice the size...)

Can I remind chaps it's best not to leap to conclusions based on brand-names? Brand-names don't guarantee good or bad. Here, Canon, Brother, Epsom, HP, and the others are pretty much in the same game, each making a range of printers from cheap and cheerful to professional grade. That Brother makes disappointing Inkjets doesn't mean their entire range is rubbish, and be aware the Hewlett Packard of 20 years ago was a different firm. In the 1990s HP only made high-end kit (really good stuff). Today, under new ownership, HP sell everything from low-end domestic to high-grade industrial printers, and major in services, not manufacturing. The model and technology used by a printer, coupled with its software support and price-point, are more important than the brand.

Dave

When I stated my present job nearly 11 years ago there were two Brother printers in my room, a mono and a colour both two or three years old and they would still be in use now if it were not for the fact that while Win 10 drivers for both to run connected to a computer are still available, the Win 10 .bin files needed to connect them to a dedicated printer server on a network have not been produced for these old models.

I can't really blame Brother for this as I doubt that many commercial enterprises would be still trying to run 12 or more year old printers in a networked environment!

I cannot comment on today's Brother printers, but comparing those I have seen there is a conceptual difference between them and comparable HP models. A HP toner contains the drum and so is a more expensive replacement than the Brother system of separate drums and toners (and belts in colour models.)

The Brother cartridge for the mon printer is about £80 (genuine - recycled are cheaper) and the drum about £150(ditto) while the equivalent HP for a similar specced machine we have at work is £120. You get a new drum each time but you don't need to change this every time you run out of toner on the Brother. I a nutshell running costs would be cheaper for the Brother but for one thing - You can shake up an HP cartridge until there is no toner left after the message to replace it has appeared and it will continue to produce prints until nothing is printed - long enough to order a replacement. The Brothers have page counters and will stop printing when it thinks the toner has printed enough - or the drum has printed enough or waste toner bottle has collected enough or a belt (in a colour printer) has printed enough. While some of these can be reset you cannot reset the toners cartridge(s) and when recycling them they are clearly not empty.

For work I would use Brothers again, but my mono printer at home is HP running genuine cartridges as I get a new drum every time that way. If I wanted a colour Laser I might go for a Brother at home as well - we'll see.

All laser printers are cheaper to run than the alternatives, but the individual cost of toners is higher at each replacement than for an inkjet printer - so when it runs out you have to find £100 or so which may be harder than finding £5 more often

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 05/04/2021 10:27:32

My Brother HL-2250DN duplex mono laser replaced a HP LaserJet 4. The LaserJet was a serious bit of kit, but its power supply failed, and it was slow, and probably didn't have enough internal memory. It was, however, free...

The Bro feels like a disposable plastic toy in comparison, but it works perfectly, and talks Linux. It cost about as much as one of its toner cartridges, so you can see where the manufacturers make their money. Two-sided printing is a valuable feature, and didn't add much to the cost.

Agreed - duplex printing is a very handy feature - especially when printing multi page documents. Many secondhand workgroup laser printers like mine will have that feature (D), plus a network (N) interface too.

I bought a Brother mono laser printer (not 3-in-1) when it was on a Bank Holiday offer from PC World (less than £60 with a newspaper coupon IIRC ).

It was fast to start up, fast to print & decent quality. The "starter" toner cartridge didn't last long & a replacement was almost as much as the printer. This didn't get used up, as another part that the toner cartridge mounted on died, giving longitudinal lines down the page & this part cost more than the printer did, so it went for recyling and was not replaced. I don't think I had much over 2 years use out of it, so not really a bargain.

So back to an inexpensive Canon 3-in-1 inkjet for me - Canon because the print head is built in to the cartridge & they don't seem to be plagued by the terminal print head blockages that afflict Epson printers. Yes genuine cartridges are pricier as you buy the print head every time, but I use less than a pair a year & it always prints fine regardless of how long it is left between prints.

Work tried moving from a Brother 3-in-1 A3 inket to a Brother colour laser printer as business increased & the initial inket unit died - again great while it lasted, but then the main pcb failed just after it had had a full set of cartridges fitted (over £100 + Vat there) &as it was out of warranty it was scrapped. We run 2 of the Brother A3 inkjets now, using pattern cartridges, they last over 5 years in a busy office environment before dying and are a lot cheaper to buy than the laser. Duplex printing machines, with auto document feed on the scanner & two paper trays that we keep set as one on A3 and the other on A4. Better photo reproduction from the inkjets than from the colour laser, if that matters to you.

Nigel B.

My Brother MFC-L2700 printer/scanner/copier is about 7 years old. It has duplex printing, scanning and WIFI. I use 3rd party toner cartridges which are reasonably priced. Lost count of the number of pages printed but estimate about 20 - 30 thousand.

Just to point out that this isn't "either-or". You can have more than one printer. Perhaps ridiculously, I have:

-HP B/W laser all-in-one (the main workhorse)

- HP inkjet large format all-in-one. Great for making 17 or 18 inch prints for the shop ... perhaps more importantly it has a scanner size to match which has been unbelievably useful at times.

- Canon basic inkjet with refillable tanks. (purchased a bit hastily when the Canon  below died).

- A now resurrected WiFi Canon all-in-one inkjet with refillable tanks. Repaired after the waste ink counter triggered (see other thread).

This collection sort of "grew like Topsey" over the years - I don't suggest it for everyone - but for decades I've had both inkjet and laser machines.

Edited By Peter Greene on 05/04/2021 16:21:34

i got a second hand brother 5240L so I could do the 'Shaun Hughes laser printer hack' to disable the heat element so you can make laser printed transfers for layouts - good for engraving but maybe it would work on a larger scale? Unfortunately I've found having a laser printer so useful I haven't got around to hakking.

Edited By jaCK Hobson on 05/04/2021 16:29:50

Re blocked print heads, I have had great success (on an Epson) using one of the cleaning kits available on Ebay - you basically squirt cleaning liquid through the heads, one at a time, via a syringe and a bit of rubber tube (after putting a carefully folded bit of kitchen roll beneath the head to catch the resulting horrible mess).

And the aftermarket ink cartridges seem to work well enough for my purposes - although they throw up an error message stating non-genuine cartridges have been installed, this can be dismissed.

Rob

My printer stopped working so I tried to replace it with a mono laser.

I contacted various purveyors of printers asking what would work with an Apple Mac running OS 10.6.8

None could be bothered to help - and consequently lost my business.

Any suggestions please?

MC

I'd have assumed that all major laser printer manufacturers would have Mac drivers.

Couldn't you just go to their support sites and look for the drivers to check?

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

If a firm wants to sell me a printer, I would want the salesman (who will be getting commission on the sale) to do the research and tell me which models will work with my computer.

When I have risked looking, every model on which I checked required an Operating System much later than the one that I have.

Both my GP and a Consultant orthopaedic surgeon have strongly advised me to minimise computer use as a response to a physiological problem about which I have consulted them.

I can just about cope (by using specialist software) with brief communications such as this; anything more than that - like badly designed web sites - has unpredictable consequences.

MCB