Canon or Brother

[HRMaddie]

I'm trying decide between a Canon or Brother color laser multifunction printer. Quite honestly we don't do a lot of color printing, but I'm so tired of clogged inkjets (can you say Epson) that I'm trying to stay clear of them. A multifunction inkjet would seem appropriate for our situation, but I don't want to have clean printheads once a month. Even if we do get a mutlfunctional laser I still need a a small photoprinter for quick photos prints. My other option is a multifunctional inkjet and then a B&W laser printer.

I'm down to Canon and Brother based on the fact both seem to work well with Macs and don't have the bloated software that comes with HP. I can't find any reviews on the Canon lasers since they are relatively new. The Brother machines seem to get good reviews, but quite a few complain about the color prints.

 

[dborja]

My printer setup is a Brother HL-2070N and a Canon IP6600. The Brother is connected via Ethernet to my Apple Extreme Base Station (AEBS) for everyday B&W printing. The Canon is connected via USB to my AEBS for photos, greeting cards, etc. Both can be reached by any of our PCs/Macs in our household and they meet our needs just fine...

 

[kwhitenton]

brother not very mac friendly

I just bought --and returned- a brother 7840W wireless black and white multifunction printer/scanner/copier/fax.

Setting up the wireless wasn't too difficult with the help of a wizard but I found that the claims of mac compatibility were exaggerated.
From my PC, I could easily scan multipage documents with the software provided by brother. but for my macbook there was no scanning management software provided, just advice to try photoshop. unfortunately I have photoshop cs4 and after much pain discovered that they removed their scanning utility after cs3, so had to go dig that up and reinstall it.

basically it was a lot of hunting through convoluted, very unhelpful documents and forums to try to get only the basic functionality with the scanner on my mac, and advanced functionality like scanning multiple pages, scanning to FTP, scan to email etc. I never did figure out.

however basic printing to the machine was pretty much plug and play, and the scanner worked really well with my PC.

Silver lining: when I finally got desperate enough to call Brother, they actually transferred me to their 'Mac Department' and I talked to a guy who actually knew what he was talking about. amazing. he was about to walk me through restarting and reinstalling the drivers etc. when I decided to give up and return it-- too much work, and I realized I really need one with a duplexer.

 

[nanofrog]

I'm using a Brother MFC-9450CDN, which comes with software for both Windows and OS X. You may end up having to get newer anyway, as it may not be compatible with the newer versions of the OS (I ran into this with Win7), but the software's not expensive; ~$40USD.

Color wise, it's not meant for photo quality, but documents. It's fine for printing maps, graphs, color web pages,... You might also be able to use a calibration software package to make it spec compliant if you're going to try making photos or color proofs. I don't have the need, and haven't bought software to try it.

It's easy to use, easy to set up, and inexpensive for consumables. Way better than HP's consumables (HP chips the toners to expire, whether the toners' are used or not when it reaches it's date). Not easily fooled any longer by removing/re-installing, as it won't reset that way now.

 

[J&JPolangin]

I just bought --and returned- a brother 7840W wireless black and white multifunction printer/scanner/copier/fax. .. I realized I really need one with a duplexer.

...I have this same brother printer 7840W and its a fantastic machine to run = I've had it for ~1.5 yrs now working on my home network of the 2 Macs in my signature and 4 winXP machines.

I wish it had a duplexer but models that did usually put them over the USPS shipping weight limits going to an US military FPO address...

For the random color I need to print, I picked up an HP7260 on close out for $89... the nice thing about this model HP unit is the H02 ink tanks as they have used that model ink tank for 8+ years now unlike Canon who changes the style of the ink tank almost with each new printer model