Brother is better known for typewriters. At least that's where I first heard of this company. Perhaps that dates me. Regardless, the Brother company has been making printers for a while now.
Has anyone ever gotten an Epson printer to last more than a few years? My old Apple Stylewriters still work, and those were based on Canon printers. But the folks selling computers switched to Epson as the printer-of-choice for Mac users some time back and I think this was a big mistake. I've had three Epsons now, and all of them have gone kaput in varying time frames, some as quickly as one year, (just past the warranty, naturally) and others have hung in there until I had to do something simple, such as move them ten miles. Even packed up nicely, they never recovered.
It's a far cry from the days of the Applewriter and other dot matrix printers, which I think could handle being dragged down a gravel driveway on a string. Noisy as heck, slow as government, but they were the workhorses of the Mac printing world. Heck, my old Laserwriter 360 will fire right up, and it did the Alaska Highway!
Finally becoming disgusted as I tried to rotate between the variously functioning and semi-functioning Epsons (and one Canon, too) I went to Orofice Max to roll the dice and make an educated guess as to what to purchase.
Hewlet-Packard (known to us Irish musicians as Planxty Hewlett-Packard), Epson, Lexmark and Canon all had various models offered, but all were made of thin, bendy plastic that just didn't bode well. If they don't feel their miraculous computerized guts don't warrant a decently solid case, then I just have to wonder if they build them to fail. Standing out above the crowd was a Brother printer that was built like a little tank, and did everything but take the garbage out. Somewhere on the numerous explanatory labels it had a happy Mac face. Hmmmm, interesting, I thought.
So let me tell you what this baby does:
Faxes
Prints
Copies
Scans
works on a network
More stuff that I haven't even needed or tried
Since I'm a music teacher I find it annoying to go to the local copy shop all the time to print out my handwritten music. With this printer I can scan in my music, and then print it out whenever I need it. I have begun digitizing most of my sheet music and this is wonderful for both me and my students.
It has a document feeder so that I can put five or six sheets that I need copied, tell the printer how many dupes to make, push the button and walk away. I LOVE this.
The scanner gets good use with my old photos, too. I haven't set the fax up but once. I don't have a separate line and faxing is not a big priority, though sending a fax out is something I occasionally do.
The print quality is good, not super excellent. It's far better than my blotchy Epsons, though! Those were forever getting some kind of microscopic detritus in them and then smearing ink everywhere. You can choose the quality level, naturally, and the Brother puts out some very nice color. I make Christmas cards and various projects, and it hasn't failed me yet.
I also like very much that you can buy the ink tanks separately, and replace them separately. It will keep printing until that last moment when all the ink runs out. Instead of having to replace the entire unit when, say, magenta is all out, you just replace what is empty and keep going.
The downside of Brother is that they really don't know much about Macintosh. Their software is only partly-built! Every time I turn on the computer with the Brother printer on, I have to type in "mac-boot" to finish booting up. It's not my computer, because this happens whether I'm on the portable or the desktop.
If you start up with the printer off, and then turn it on, you get a window that says the printer didn't connect, with an OKAY button that doesn't work! First of all, it's a lie, the printer did connect and will work fine, and second of all, you can't dismiss the window! Very stupid! So you just drag it away so most of it is off the screen.
I called Brother about these things. They tried to tell me that my ROMS were going bad because I had to type in "mac-boot" but of course that is nonsense. The Mac tech told me that she just drags the annoying window aside and continues working. Which is what I do, too. I haven't checked lately with Brother, I suppose it is time to do that again.
Those two things can be annoying, but they don't make the printer unusable in my book. I'm going to keep bothering them to fix their software, but for now I am very, very happy with the performance of the machine.
Oh, and the price was right! Around $100, even up in Alaska! You can't beat it with a stick!
