New Printer, Again (2025)
-
Last time I bought a printer was mid-2014. I get a Dell C2665dnf.
All-in-one, color laser, duplex printing, duplex scanning, got Mac support, can network via Ethernet, can scan to email, scan to (S)FTP, can print to "odd sizes" like an envelope via multipurpose paper feeding tray, etc.Today, that printer broke - some plastic part broke and now I cannot reinsert the paper tray.
(And it broke soon after I bought new toner$ too. 
)Tried to look for a replacement at Dell, and learnt that Dell got out of the printer business in 2016.
For the new printer, I basically want all the same functionalities that the old one had. (New concern is whether the printer has stringent requirement to force you to use only OEM toner cartridges ... but hard to find a reliable answer for that.)
Settled on a Brothers MFCL3780CDW and placed the order.
Brief research on Amazon.com shows that people are relatively unhappy with their all-in-one printers these days (comparing their satisfaction with other products). Using the 1-to-5 star scale, the MFCL3780CDW appears relatively "very highly rated" at 4.2 stars, with another contender with 4.3 stars that's a monochrome printer. Most other all-in-one printers got 4.0 or fewer stars. The two highest rated brands appear to be Brothers and Cannon. I went with a Brothers because reviews seem to indicate that Brothers supports the macOS better than Canon does.
Wish me luck.
-
Got the new printer, took a while to set up and work out the kinks.
- After things are set up right, it works beautifully. (It's only the first days, so fingers crossed.)
- On my Macs, I install only the driver, none of the printing and scanning software also promoted by the manufacturer. But this being a newer printer, the driver works only with macOS 11 onwards. My older Macs that run OS X 10.x don't get native drivers. But ...
- AirPrint works pretty well with this new printer. The old Dell C2665dnf from 2014 always printed AirPrint jobs half-toned. But this new Brother printer (released 2023) appears to print AirPrint jobs about as well as those using its native driver.
- FTP/SFTP support. The Dell machines from 2007 and 2014 could scan to FTP or SMB, but not SFTP. This new Brother MFCL3780CDW supports FTP and SFTP; not only that, when using SFTP it insists on verifying the SFTP server's public key certificate. It insists on having the SFTP server's public cert preloaded into the printer/scanner, suggesting that its public key implementation maybe incomplete; but that's an easy way to support privately generated certificates, an important enterprise use case. Having SFTP support is is good because macOS does not support FTP anymore; FTP is insecure anyway.
- The new printer/scanner supports other things like scan to email, scan to networked drive (using SMB/CIFS), scan to SharePoint, etc. It can even accept print jobs from email. Other than scan-to-email, I don't expect to use these other features.
The rest comes down to stability, reliability, longevity. The Dell 3115cn printer from 2007 lasted well over 8 years. The Dell C2665dnf from 2014 lasted 11 years. Fingers crossed, I hope this one will last 10+ years.
-
Funny story ...
As I tried to dismantle the old Dell C2665dnf for recycling, I fixed it.
Good because I bought new toners for it not that long ago; so I can still recoup that "investment."
I don't regret getting the new Brother MFCL3780CDW.
Having a printer/scanner on each floor has its convenience, it's good to have a backup, and it's just a matter of time until FTP becomes totally unsupportable and I have to move all scanning function to SFTP anyway.
