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370zulu

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 4, 2014
364
341
Looking for advice on color multifunction laser printer for Mac/iPhone/iPad home business. I am looking for the best supported device. I am not interested in HP products at any cost since I refuse to give my money to a company that treats its employees that way they do. All other brands will be considered.
 
Brother color laser works fine in our home office. :)

I always use a separate scanner and have US Robotics fax/modem on a USB port that works just fine.
 

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I have a Samsung CLX-3175Fn multifunction color laser that I picked up about 5.5 years ago I got it on sale from Staples for about $200. This particular model is no longer sold, but I will give you my impression of it so you can get an idea of how Samsung color lasers are in general. The current model which replaced mine is the SL-C446-FW/XAA.

It isn't particularly fast but it was quick enough. Scanning is very slow but produces good results, however, the automatic document feeder is pretty useless because it always fed documents in crooked. Printing text documents produced crisp and clear prints but printing pictures produced muddy images that didn't look very good at all. One thing to note is that there is only one paper tray. I can't comment on the fax capabilities because I never used it.

One of the reasons why I chose this model was because of its small physical footprint when compared to its competitors. Another thing that I appreciated was the fact that i never had to install any drivers or additional software. I just worked with OS X from the moment I plugged it in.

Recently, though, it has started to produce prints that have toner in places that shouldn't have it. So the prints look "dirty". I'm hoping a new cartridge will rectify the problem, but even if it doesn't I feel I've gotten good value from it and would purchase the newer model to replace this one.
 
I have a Canon MF-8280Cw which works just fine with no issues. The puny starter toner cartridges that it ships with are something of an annoyance, budget for an early toner replacement, but the replacements last much longer. There's a fancier version with duplexing if you want that.

The monochrome Brother units we've had were great values. The only possible downside for a color Brother is color rendering that is supposedly not as nice as other makes, so you might want to look at the output from a current model in a store before deciding.
 
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