Brother printers are great. Probably the only decent printer brand for home usage. My university has free printing, and those are Canon printers. They seem to work fine, so I guess the commercial market is a little different.
Weirdly, my parents have this Samsung M2020W printer, and I gotta say, it's pretty neat. Takes any off-brand toner cartridge. They only need a cartridge every year or so. It's been 3+ years, but no problem so far. That might be an exceptional case, though.
I used to have a Samsung laser for quite a few years. Went through maybe three toner cartridges. Eventually it started slipping and I didn't bother finding out if there's a repair available and bought a brother laser instead. Worked pretty great otherwise.
Haven't tried toner transfer on this, but regular printouts are fine and it's much faster.
If you still have the printer (you may not but I'm going to put this out there for others too) that sounds like a simple roller replacement, and rollers/pickup pads are usually considered "consumables" instead of "parts" because they all wear out over time. This is true for most if not all consumer printers, ink and laser alike.
Replacements should be pretty easy to find for even old printers, and the installation is usually pretty straightforward. Last year I was still able to buy a roller replacement set for a 19 year old HP, and it took me ten minutes and one Phillips head screwdriver to replace them all.
You can also just take out and clean the hell out of anything rubber with isopropyl alcohol, letting it dry thoroughly and then putting it back in, or if possible rotate the rubber on it to present an unused side, I've done all that a few times too.
For pretty much any model printer, search on the printer model number and "maintenance kit" to find available roller/pickup pad replacements for sale, and printer model number plus "service manual" to get replacement instructions if you need them.
Maybe a regional market quality thing, but mine fucked up it's cartridge pretty soon and has a long procedure of changing them, not plug and print like in older models. Sometimes it happens. Jusging by youtube videos it seems some models are just rare unlucky picks.
Unfortunately, I don't think it is. I used to use knock-off toner, but after a firmware update, the printer would no longer recognize those cartridges. Luckily, I had bought them on Amazon, so I just explained the problem to customer service and got a full refund. I still love the printer though.
They kind of already did, at least they did in the past.
They fought pretty hard to make you only use their toners, and they would warn you to change your toner cartridges way earlier than it was necessary to do so, disabling the printer if you didn't. I remember having to put tape over the optical device in the printer that looks at the toner cartridge, just so I can keep using my toner cartridge.
Don't get me wrong, I love my brother mfc7840w printer, but it's so weird to hear so much praise for Brother, it's like there is group amnesia about how they used to be on some of this stuff themselves.
My (German) roomie's father called us a while back to excitedly tell us that his doctor has digitalised. By digitalised he meant that the doctor will fax any prescription he issues to whatever chemist the patient requests.
Here in Sweden, I log on to 1177.se to refill my prescription, usually a nurse will call me with some general questions, then I can log on to any chemist's website (both systems are tied to your national identity), and have the prescription delivered to my door the next day. I live in a small town of like 20k inhabitants too, so it's not like it's a big city only type thing.
We clearly have very perspectives on the term "digitalisation."
I've used tons of dot matrix, inkjets and lasers since the 80s. I've used them in MSDOS, ProDOS, Linux, BSD, Windows, MacOS, OSX, and BeOS. I don't know how many I've owned or how many different OS versions but I know I've had exactly 1 printer that wasn't constantly a problem and its a Brother laser printer.
Interestingly a Lemmy user in another thread has a very negative view of Brother because he only uses Brother cutting machines (for craft projects) and it's filled with DRM and HP style lock in.
There need to be open source "smart" devices. Like, I've read and edited the source code running on my 3D printer. I was able to do that in my own home because it's got an Arduino Mega for a motherboard.
I honestly don't remember my printer brand. And that's a good sign. I bought it years ago, and it now lives under my basement stairs on a static IP via wifi, accepting the on average bimonthly print job that I need from it. Then I walk down, fetch the print, and close the door on it again. I should name it Harry Potter.
Nah, it's been running since '11 and because of a critical network vulnerability that op never patched, it's been a bitcoin slave since '15. But the paper is always nice and toasty.
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Heiß