I got a copy of the service manual and some little-known tips on useful service codes (like overrides) found in online forums. I've made a handful of repairs on it myself, and do my own calibration. It's not on a UPS (most of them explicitly state not to use with laser printers) and survived power outages that occasionally knocked out other equipment. It's been reliable despite the fact it got pretty beat up in shipping (guess you get what you pay for - company offered to send a second unit but I didn't have the space). Toner lasts ages (40k-100k pages), paper handling is adequate, performance and quality are great. It was sold by a company that liquidates old office equipment (this one came from Honda) and, as far as I can tell, makes money on the logistics (i.e. I bought a used Ricoh Aficio SP C821DN about 8 years ago for little more than the price of shipping, and have been very happy with it. I don't have a laser printer now, don't need one.Īnd I know 99% of people will never get close to printing that much, but I'm just saying that I put those printers through their paces and never had a problem. I've been through about 5 of the printers.

I guess it is just the mechanical nature of the beast, where it costs a lot more to increase the ppm rate. It seems to have stalled out at 25-30 ppm, for a long time now. So I'd buy a new one when the drum died and upgrade to 8 ppm, then 15 ppm. And by upgrades, when I first started using them, I first started buying them when they printed out 3 pages per minute, which was still way better than dot matrix printers. So at that point, I'd always buy another printer, as the new printer is only a little bit more, plus you get any new upgrades. So you can only use 5 toner cartridges before your drum gets blasted out. But you will see that the drum is good for 12,000 pages. Maybe there's remanufactured/refilled toner, but I don't know about that. Except when I used to buy them a lot, they would always come on sale at some point or another and I could pick it up for $100. They had different model numbers over time, but that is the one. The $120 one - HL-L2305W - is the one I always bought. So I would use up the drum life after 2 or 3 years. I've looked, but nothing comes close to the value. I've used Brother printers since he 1990s. They way the thing is working, I figure there's a solid chance I could be good until 2030. I wasn't printing much color nothing that really needed it. I rarely need to do more than a few pages. If I really needed an MFC, I could get one later. I made the choice to just get the cheapest, simplest laser printer I could find. Supply chain shortages and pandemic printer buying sprees meant that I had few options. I cleaned the rollers over and over, it helped a little.

Then it would fail to pick up any pages at all unless you adjusted the paper tray just right, then it just stopped being able to feed paper 4 times out of 5. It started failing to pick up random sheets of paper mid print job. But that notwithstanding, it was a pretty great printer. And you couldn't print black and white if the magenta tank was empty. It seemed like you'd print 3 pages before it would need yet another tank. But man the tanks were tiny and expensive. It even had separate tanks for each color of ink. It had a sheet feeder for the scanner, it did duplex printing, and the print quality was excellent. In the time between the Brothers I had a long period of no printer and two different Epson MFCs. Before the latest in a series of Epson inkjets, I had a Brother laser that lasted from 2000 to 2010, when it died in flood-if it hadn't gotten soaked, it would probably still be kicking. The Brother is reliable, simple, and was cheap, even when printers were thin on the ground. I got a similar Brother in 2020 after my Epson inkjet MFC became unusable.

The print shop for mac version 2