Same for a Brother black-and-white laser. Not a Brother ink printer. Not a Brother color laser printer. A Brother black-and-white laser.
Now maybe things have changed. But I bought my Brother MFC-8890DW back in April of 2011. It is still going strong. In that time period I have replaced the toner once. But I have only printed 3,768 pages in that time. So 314 pages per year.
It is the best type of printer for my use case which is infrequent printing. Ink type printers aren't the best options if you might have 90+ days between printing jobs. I also really like having the scanning and photo copying features that mine has. And the Ethernet connection makes it so anyone in the house can easily print.
Brother printers have went this way too. Mine incessantly complains about low toner even when I use brand new ones because they aren't brother branded.
1. Make sure that the printer is on while changing the toner or it will not know that a change was done.
2. Speaking from experience doing support for a lot of them, brother* printers are notorious for not realizing the toner (even with originals) was changed. There are ways to reset the counter though(Holding two buttons while powering on). It's usually mentioned in the manual.
After a recent firmware update my Brother inkjet refuses to print b&w (yes it has a full black cartridge and this was never a problem previously) because one of the color inks is empty. Brother the Good is a thing of the past.
Sure, but previously this printer explicitly supported black only modes with no regard for the other inks. Brother decided it was easy money acting like the other makers, and this is likely to percolate to their other products.
> I was thinking maybe I moved the printer and it is not level?
Unlike the inkjet where it shines a little LED through the cartridge (covering with black electrical tape makes it think it's always full), laser toner I think has an id chip on the cartridge and the printer just maintains an internal counter as to guess when it'll run out. Reset that, and make sure the option is turned off that stops it continuing to print once low (networked models have a webpage you can go to to turn these from stop to just warn).
That's actually great information because it has been driving me crazy. I put in a brand new cartridge and it still complains. I assumed it was non-OEM BS.
There appears to be a thriving secondary market for pre-enshittification Brother laser printers. I wonder if anybody maintains a list of the "good models?"
Other people are commenting that Brothers are getting kind of enshittified like these HPs have been know to do forcing people to use "HP+" and subscribing to ink on their discounted models.
Print them at your local pharmacy or somewhere else that will do color photo prints. Not worth the hassle, in my opinion, to have a color printer (ink or laser).
Canon. A whole range from 'enthusiast' to 'professional' (I love my Image Pro 1000, but I make a sideline hustle from photography - it's entirely overkill for most - but there are more budget friendly models).
Although Epson doesn't quite have a stellar reputation wrt user friendliness, my WP4515 has worked great for like 7-8 years so far. It's also perfectly supported by Linux.
Not sure if the above can be still relevant as that model has been superseded by newer ones.
