Brother HL-L8360CDW Wireless Color Laser Printer

**EDIT ** UPDATE ** KEY TAKEWAY ** IF YOU READ ONE THING READ THIS **
Since writing this review, I found the following brother printer hack, which I have now been wonderfully putting to use.
In the full review below, I mention a bug where the printer does not recognize brand new toner cartridges.
Well, there’s another related bug, and I have figured out a hack to fix both issues. This could very well save you hundreds or thousands of dollars over the lifetime of this printer. it has already saved me hundreds.

*BUT FIRST* *UPDATE: October 19, 2020*
One more useful tip! If you end up buying this machine, make sure to either A) save, or B) photograph
the original Brother printer toner cartridges in your machine for future reference. Just now, I had an experience with their tech support which I will describe at the end of this review. Please see below for more information.
*RESUME*

The bug is that the printer will tell you it is out of toner once it has hit its internal toner counter, without actually checking the cartridges somehow internally to decide whether it is actually out.

Here is the hack:
When your printer is out of toner, don’t believe what it is telling you!
look at the last few pages it printed.
Are they faded? as if printed by a printer which is low on toner? or are they still sharp and crisp, with your desired level of clarity and readability?
if the pages are sharp and crisp, guess what, you don’t actually need to replace the toner!
what you actually need to do is the following:

1) cancel any ongoing print jobs until you get to the main screen.
2) push the button on the top right front part of the unit to open it, as if you were about to replace the toner
3) the main screen should say something like “cover is open” (note that the hack seems to only work from this “cover is open” screen)
4) *the next step is the hack* I reminds me of the old days of N64 video game cheat codes. game shark for the win!
5) press the following button sequence: (to the left of the LCD screen we have three buttons: “back”, “home” and “cancel”, listed from top to bottom) the button combo is:
– “back” + “cancel” together in unison push down and then release evenly (the whole move lasts less than a second)
– now press the “back” button once (with about the same cadence as you pressed the previous two together)
6) you should land on a screen which allows you to completely reset the “toner counters” in the machine
7) you can reset any toner level to standard, high, or super high levels of toner. this will trick the machine into thinking you have actually installed new toner
8) after this is done, you can continue printing
9) you will have to manually decide when you are actually out of toner. there will come a point when the pages get thin, or start omitting words or phrases, washed out white spots, etc.
10) once this behavior makes your toner *actually* unusable, you can manually replace the toner, reset the counters, whatever
11) my experience is that this trick saves me 2000 pages on each cartridge, effectively extending the life of a toner replacement up to 150% of what it was before. This trick works with all 3rd party toner manufacturers I have tried, and has, so far, led to no sort of instability. There have been a few times where I have accidentally printed 20 or 30 pages which didn’t have enough toner, but this costs me far less money than if I replace the toner when the printer says it is out. It seems the printer only says it is out once its internal “toner counter” has reached a certain number, 4000 pages, or whatever.
12) I hope this helps you! if you are stuck with this printer, good luck!!! my printing strategy has been to print everything I think I will ever need to print for my entire life up front! in another week or so, I will be done! then I can get back to my life and stop this human brother printer-monkey side business I have been running for the last month. good luck!!

** back to the original review, below **
here are the bullet points, in no particular order:

#1 printer makes numerous long pauses during printing jobs, often for 5-10 minutes at a time.
it simply says “waiting for a while,” in the middle of your print job, and then waits for ten minutes.
this has never been a deal-breaker for me. from what I understand it is cooling down to prevent overheating.
however, it happens consistently enough, to the point where it seriously decreases their advertised pages per minute

#2 printer comes with multiple components that seemingly need to be replaced every few tens of thousands of pages of printing (laser, drum, etc). I have had the printer for about a month in a small home office, and had to replace the drum already. this cost me about 150$. Not to mention, in the final 10,000 pages of the previous drum, the left side of every single page was streaked with black. it looked like every page was toner-burned.
this has been highly annoying. it is not worth it to me to buy more toner and paper to replace these pages, so now I will have these burnt out documents forever. we live in the year 2020. we can make airplanes hit mach three and put a man on the moon. you’re telling me we can’t engineer an office printer that doesn’t need its whole insides replaced every few weeks? I don’t buy it. I get it that toner is a resource these brother printers consume like a paintball course burns through paintballs. they have no incentive to engineer systems that don’t chew through toner because it is their primary revenue stream. but the fact that the core printer components have a an expected lifetime of weeks not years or even months under heavy load is embarrassing. I know they’re getting money for the replacements. in my opinion, only second rate businessmen and below average engineers run a business this way. they are not willing to design a product that is worth the money and bears the load it should have been designed for. they push their engineering bugs and inadequacy onto you, their customers, making you shell out hundreds more dollars for toner and parts replacements, essentially giving you the new job of “brother printer technician” in addition to whatever else it was that you were already doing. this printer will eat your time. and then later, you will need to send brother more money to replace the parts of the machine they designed in the first place….

which brings me to my third point: toner.
#3 the toner market for brother printers is an interesting one to observe. let’s break this down.

if you want to buy the brother brand toner, here is what they are offering on amazon:
Brother HL-L8360CDW (TN-433) High Yield Toner Cartridge Set

and the product description:
Brother TN-433 High Yield Toner Cartridge Set contains Four(4) color compatible cartridges (Black TN433BK, Cyan TN433C, Magenta TN433M, Yellow TN433Y) that has been designed to work with a range of Brother printer(s). The black cartridge can print up to 4,500 pages and each color cartridge up to 4,000 pages. Compatible with Brother Printer(s): • Brother HL-L8360CDW

the price for this item:
Price: $438.00 & FREE Shipping

Here are a few of the compatible competitors:
1) MxVol Compatible Brother TN-433 TN-431 TN433 Toner Cartridge 4-Pack (TN433BK, TN433C, TN433M, TN433Y), High Yield use for Brother MFC-L8900CDW HL-L8360CDW HL-L8360CDWT MFC-L8610CDW HL-L8260CDW Printer

price: 47.99

2) E-Z Ink (TM) Compatible Toner Cartridge Replacement for Brother TN-433 TN433 TN433bk TN431 to use with HL-L8260CDW HL-L8360CDW MFC-L8900CDW MFC-L8610CDW (1 Black, 1 Cyan, 1 Magenta, 1 Yellow, 4 Pack)

price: 48.99 Amazon’s Choice!

3) myCartridge Compatible Toner Cartridge Replacement for Brother TN433 TN-433 TN431 Fit for Mfc-L8900Cdw Hl-L8360Cdw HL-L8360CDWT HL-L8260CDW MFCL8610CDW MFCL9570CDW (Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow)

price: 48.99

4) ONLYU Compatible Toner Cartridge Replacement for Brother TN431 TN-431 TN433 TN-433 for HL-L8360CDW MFC-L8900CDW HL-L8360CDWT HL-L8260CDW MFCL8610CDW MFCL9570CDW Color Laser TN433 TN431 Printer (4PK)

price: 47.79

and the list goes on.

Brother: the market is telling you something! toner is not worth that much! it is ink! your competitors are eagerly demonstrating that not only is toner not worth that much, but *high-quality, highly-rated working* toner is not worth that much! it seems to be pretty easy for them to do! on several places on the internet, we (your customers) can see statements such as (paraphrasing from memory) “warning: only use brother official toners. using third party toners is not supported and could damage your printer or void your warranty”

but brother, the price of the whole printer is $342.99! why would we buy your printer, and then buy your 438 dollar toner every few thousand pages? I could buy the highly-rated $50 variety, play it on the wild side for an evening, cross my fingers that nothing terrible happens ,and then if the printer catches on fire I could just buy a whole new unit! I would have saved money over buying the brother variety of toner! but I would have wasted my: time, energy, not to mention the whole hunk of burning plastic, emitting who knows what into the atmosphere. does any of that make sense on any level?

and so I can say: I have been buying the third party toner, and the prints have been flawless! other than the problem with the *brother* drum. once I replaced the drum (buying the $150 replacement piece of plastic, unfortunately, from brother), the streaks went away while still using the third party toner. But there is larger problem, leading me to point #4

#4 here is the behavior I encounter:
some of you are likely programmers or engineers. let’s see if we can diagnose this bug.

brother printer says *need toner, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow”
user says “ok! I have a brand new pack!”
user removes old toner, installs new toner, closes unit
brother printer shows same error
user says “hmm that’s odd, this is a brand new set of toner cartridges. these have been working fine up until now
user opens another new box of toner and pulls out a new set. “let’s try these!”
new toner registers as working!
wow, the user says. that’s a shame that now I have to waste these new toners! I guess brother was right, that the 3rd party toners are unreliable…
but wait! the user gets an idea
user opens printer again, removes new working replacement toners and reinstalls the first set he tried previously
voila! upon closing the machine, the printer still has the updated supply levels from the second *working* set of toner!
now, the printer is able to print 4,000 flawless color pages using the toner it had, moments previously, ruled out as a third party dud cartridge.
okay wait a second.

what’s wrong with this picture? is this a software bug? hardware bug? is this a problem with the third party toner or brother’s systems?

I have been experiencing this behavior consistently. somehow, my toners became “out of phase” with the machine, and I needed a surrogate to trick the brother printer into recognizing them, only swapping them back out later so as not to waste the brand new cartridges! why am I doing this??? oh yeah, it is because brother literally has a mechanism built-in to their machine to brick non-brother toner cartridges that have been removed once previously from their machine. you plug the toner in, brother printer “whirs” for a few moments, and then that toner cartridge, full of ink, will no longer recognize as *new* to the brother machine (unless you get lucky). now, the surrogate toner cartridges won’t work later when you try to use them as replacements once out of ink (unless you have surrogates for these) and the cycle continues!

there are so many other small design flaws with this machine and its advertising. discovering and troubleshooting them has been a major headache. I am writing this here so that hopefully one of you is saved from buying brother and buys a different brand!

final notes:
-direct print from USB stick is an order of magnitude slower than the advertised pages per minute

-the software interface to the direct print usb stick is MEGA slow, and always returns you to the top of the whole tree after clicking *forward* and then *back*. in other words, you better not hit the wrong key on the touch screen! or you might be scrolling back through your alphabetized USB stick contents for 5 minutes back to the letter “M”

-PDF pages with any transparency take orders of magnitude longer to print on this machine

-if you fill up the whole tray with paper, and then leave the printer printing with a long job, going to make lunch in the meantime, the printer, (if is has enough time to print the whole tray before you come back) will start spilling over the edge of the landing zone after about 1/3 of the tray has gone by, leaving your pages out of order strewn all over the floor. there is a little plastic flap you can use to mitigate some of this, but it barely works, making is so that 2/3 of the tray can be printed without major spillage. I duct taped a piece of cardboard to the plastic flap. now the pages won’t spill, but the printer will literally JAM after too many pages have been printed.

that is all I can think of for now… but wow. I feel like I accidentally took on a part time printer technician job after buying this thing. BUYER BEWARE

*UPDATE, October 19, 2020*
Make sure to save or photograph your original brother toner cartridges!
Brother tech support will lock you out if you have a problem with your machine and they determine you are not using genuine brother cartridges. It doesn’t matter what your technical problem is, or whether or not it is solvable without the genuine cartridges. It is in their tech support playbook to deny access to all users who can’t read them a barcode. It does not matter whether or not your problem is actually related to the toner cartridges or the machine itself. If you can’t read them the barcode on the top of their genuine toner cartridges, the brother tech support assistant will put up a wall, responding to everything: “the rest of my technical steps do not apply to you until you use genuine brother cartridges.” I say: “okay, well, I don’t have any of those. Would you please read me the steps so that we could try them? I know there is a chance they won’t work, but if there is any chance at all they do, I would be so grateful! I would be able to get back to doing what I was doing before the machine made that loud buzzing sound and broke!” Brother support in a robotic monotone: “I am sorry for your inconvenience. the rest of my technical steps do not apply to you until you use genuine brother cartridges” in a loop about ten times.

If I had one of the original cartridges (that came with the machine) or a photograph, I could have simply read them the barcode. I am almost positive that the subsequent steps could have at least *diagnosed* the issue, but the whole tech support staff refused to indicate what those might be. This occurred after waiting on hold on the phone for well over an hour! So rude! The color printing stopped working after the printer made a loud buzzing sound. I tried two new sets of cartridges and bought a whole new brother drum! nothing worked! If the new drum, and two sets of toner cartridges didn’t work, my experience debugging tells me they are not the problem! Instead, there is something wrong with the machine! But I will never figure out what it is, since Brother won’t help me! I think they need a new name for their brand. My real brother would never do that.

BUYER BEWARE

After 6 months I still love this printer! My previous Brother printers were always reliable and so is this one. When I need it to print a certain way it just does it. Manual feed, easy. Envelopes, easy (with envelope levers down). Thick stock. Lots of paper capacity.

Color reproduction is excellent! I was expecting only color documents but poor photo quality but NO…to my surprise this prints better than my 4-color photo optimized inkjet and I just got frustrated and tired of all the inkjet maintenance issues. Occasionally there are some minor color reproduction errors on some photos but I wont dock any marks because (1) I have a “printer’s eye” – so I’m naturally picky…my parents owned a print shop, (2) color lasers are not intended as photo printers (3) It is very minor and much less than I anticipated as a color laser.

The printer comes with four standard toner cartridges that they are practically giving to you for free. The Super High-Yield color cartridges cost $173.48 per cartridge. The Super High-Yield Black cartridge costs $82.48. A full set would set you back $602.92. Third party cartridges are hundreds of dollars cheaper, but the build quality of the cartridges is worse and the quality of the toner is not very good. You risk damaging the printer or the toner can leak into the printer when using third party cartridges. You won’t run out of toner for a couple years. The toner will outlive the printer most likely. Laser Printers use toner and Inkjet Printers use ink. Toner lasts much longer than ink. Make sure you maintain the printer and avoid paper jams as much as possible. You can order the printer with one paper tray or two paper trays. You can buy additional trays later, but they cost more individually. The paper trays are not for thick paper, glossy paper and envelopes, but the multipurpose tray is for thick paper, glossy paper and envelopes. It has an easy to use interface on the touch screen with access to a couple of applications. You can print from Google Drive and what not. This printer can’t scan, copy or fax documents, it only prints. It has Ethernet and Wireless connectivity. I chose to connect it via Ethernet to the router because a direct connection will always be more reliable than a wireless connection. I don’t know if the wireless connection is good, but I assume that it doesn’t disconnect as much as the HP Photosmart 7520 I have. It doesn’t support Gigabit speeds over a wireless network as it isn’t 802.11ac ready and it can’t connect to the 5 GHz band if your network broadcasts on the band. I am not able to install the utility on macOS 10.13.2, but I’m able to install the utility on Windows 10. Drivers for the printer are great, but they don’t offer any additional features that can be used for print jobs. I almost forgot to tell you that you can print from your iPhone or any modern mobile device. If your mobile device supports the NFC technology, then you can print without being on the same network as the printer, but you have to be near the printer. I have had no issues thus far. It’s a business printer and I’m using it for home and personal usage, so it should perform very well. This is my first color laser printer and thus far I’m happy.

The short version is that my wife & I are really liking this printer so far. As the headline reads, the color prints look great (including photo prints) and it prints fast (even from startup).

So I chuckled reading some of the reviews (which I carefully did for several models). People talk about this printer being hefty (aprox 40lbs). This printer replaced an old HP 4550N Color LaserJet I had. THAT printer was hefty (113lbs!). So, the approx 40lbs was a JOY! 🙂 I was very pleased with the HP but it was just getting old and was well beyond end of life. So I’ve been an HP fan for many years and felt I was really taking a risk trying out the Brother. My wife is a teacher and prints a lot of “stuff”. So far we (especially my wife) have been just very impressed by this printer. I even printed my first double sided print (full duplex) today and it worked great. We’ve probably printed 30+ color pages and the toner and other perishables don’t even show a dent in utilization (still 100% across the board). So thank you Brother for sending decent starter toner cartridges!

I appreciated the one reviewer providing the password “initpass” for the built in web server on the printer. The information and configuration options on the printers web page are impressive.

The pictures above are of the unboxing process. There are about nine pieces of tape that have to be removed and there are these orange clips that keep the toner cartridges in place during shipping. They are fairly easy to remove. You will need to pull down the main front door and pull out the cartridge drawer to get to them.

Last, it has been great getting this printer. It immediately prompted me to download and install updates (twice). My WIN10 PCs immediately see the new printer and it worked flawlessly. We own iPhones and we can print very easily from them straight to the printer. On the iPhones, if the photo is large it takes a little longer to print which I assume is because it’s going over WiFi to get to the printer. Speaking of which, I have this printer plugged into my network and am NOT using the built-in WiFi.

APPROX. 1 YR UPDATE
——————–
So we purchased this in August of ’19… now July ’20. So far this printer has been VERY impressive. We’ve gone through the starter toner… got approx. 2k prints from those alone!!! I purchased the high yield toner cartridges… that’s pricey but not when you compare number of prints to traditional toner. We’ve been so pleased I recommended this to my mother (and she purchased it). I’ll occasionally log into the printer and upgrade the firmware (if a new one is available) and check the stats. So far we have 2,650 color & 151 b&w prints. Excluding toner, all the perishables (drum unit, fuser unit, laser unit, etc are above 90% with most being just under 100%.

OVER 2 YR UPDATE
——————–
Printer is still going strong! My wife is a teacher and prints tons of stuff… I have three teens cranking out reports, you name it. I’m on my second FULL toner cartridge set (four). That is to say, I’ve gone through the starter, a regular full set and on another. So far I have 6,690 color pages & 548 B&W pages. As I mentioned… I have my second FULL / extended toner set in and they are almost 100% each. Sad to hear anyone has issues with this model… I can just tell you my experience. I DID however have one issue where I purchased a full (black, yellow, cyan, magenta) Brother toner replacement. ONE of the toner cartridges didn’t work… it was brand new out of the package and the printer showed empty. I tend to purchase this stuff some months before they run out so I don’t get caught empty. The bad thing about that is that it was past the seller’s return date. I was disappointed with the seller for that. Unfortunately Brother wouldn’t help me out either BUT… to Amazon’s credit they gave me some credit for the single toner. I ended up purchasing a stand alone toner cartridge to replace the “defective” one and it worked great.

I purchased this printer based on my research and the fact that this printer is an PC Magazine 2017 Editors Choice Award winner. Brother printers have been very reliable at work and having one at home just made sense. I was originally going to get monochrome only, but my Epson Artisan 835 ink cartridges were not lasting very long, so I found this printer was color. I Also purchased a high capacity toner cartridge and now print black and white 90% of the time and color only when I need it. This is a heavy printer and build quality is very high. The output is superb. I printed pictures of a white board from a meeting and the pictures were crisp, clean, and clear and color was accurate. Printing is FAST! Setup was relatively simple, once you setup the wireless LAN connection to your router, installing the software is a breeze on your computer! The touch screen is superb and works very well. I highly recommend this printer. It is a good value for a color printer and I am very happy with the purchase.

Works great in most respects. Very good print quality, quick printing. BUT – it has a lot of problems working over WiFi with both our iOS devices or windows devices. Sometimes we have to remove the printer from our airprint list, and refind. Sometimes we need to turn the printer off, unplug, and re-turn-on to make it visible again. One or the other of these is required every few days. (Funny note – bought a Belkin surge protector just to avoid having to unplug and replug repeatedly, and it doesn’t work. Which is odd for a Belkin device.).

Update: Spent an hour on the line with Brother technical support. Afterwards it was significantly better, but still not terribly reliable (often had to be unplugged to reset it) – but then, miraculously, several weeks later is started working completely reliably. I literally could not make it fail (I was trying to make it fail in order to troubleshoot it). Works perfectly with Airprint, with Windows 8 and 10.

I was excited to see this HIGHLY RECOMMENDED on sale for PRIME DAY as I was in the market for a printer. Tons of research and AMAZON ranked this as the one to own. Everything works fine until last Tuesday, 10.22.2019.

The printer display said that the Black Toner needed to be replaced. The good news was when I purchased the printer I bought a back up black toner. The bad news is when I put in the black toner it only showed one bar full instead of full like it should have and then the toner screen showed that I was now out of Magenta Toner as well. I do no color printing so I thought that was strange.

I reached out to Amazon Customer Support and received a prompt call. Loved that! The lady walked me through some trouble shooting steps and we cannot get a remedy so Amazon gets me on a 3-way call with a Brother Representative. We go through the same trouble shooting to no avail. The Amazon representative said she was sorry for the inconvenience and because the call had already been 45 minutes she would see what else she could do and then call me back. She asked if there was a best time for a call back for that day and I said anytime day or night would work for me but I needed to get the printer going.

There was no call back… so I reached out to Amazon Support the next day and again there was a very fast call back… Still love that.

I went over the issue again and ended up with a 3-way conversation with Amazon and Brother. The Brother representative explained that the problem with the black toner not showing full levels was probably not from the printer but because of the black toner that was purchased. He stated that there is a 90 day warranty on toner from when it is sold and since I was at 92 days there was nothing that could be done. When I explained that I purchased both items at the same time not knowing that the toner has no warranty he had me read off the serial numbers off of what I purchased. He said it did prove to be authentic (thank god, I bought it from Amazon) but it had passed the 90 days so there was nothing he could do.

I am making the argument that the problem is not the toner but is the printer itself. How does changing the Black Toner make it so the Magenta Toner is showing it is now out and the Yellow toner is very low. He says that it is the toner and that I have to buy a Magenta toner and then the printer will work and if it does not then they can work on replacing the printer. I express my concern on having to spend another $80 on a toner when I have already spent $400 on a printer that is not working after 3 months.

The Amazon Representative jumps into the call and asks if there is anyway that they could send out a Magenta toner and after 5 minutes with the Brother Representative talking to his supervisor he informs me that he can offer a one time “Courtesy” Magenta toner to hopefully resolve the issues we are having with the printer and if there are any further problems to just contact them.

This call was about an hour long but it seemed like Amazon came in to make sure things were done right…

So I can get a printer and back up toner in one day shipping from Amazon, I still cannot believe how good their shipping is… but to send out a Magenta Toner from Brother to fix the printer must come on a covered wagon as I just received it today. Not fun to be down a printer with a small business for over a week, dang it sucks how much you miss a printer…

I place the Magenta Toner in and full bar, Yeah… but wait now the Yellow Toner is out, I have not been able to print but somehow we ran thru that. I make the mistake of giving up and racing to Office Depot/Office Max and purchasing the Yellow Toner. I NEED TO PRINT!

$70 later I put in the Yellow Toner and it still reads that it is empty. I reach out to Amazon support now VERY convinced that there is a problem with the printer. I was on the phone with Amazon and Brother for 1 hour and 24 minutes. I went over the previous reasons why I thought the printer was malfunctioning, first with Amazon and then on a 3-way with Brother. I did restarts, took out and wiped, reset again to no avail. The Brother Representative has has me read all the serial numbers to insure that they are authentic. They are. He talks in circles about how they will need to send me a Yellow Toner to replace the one that I purchased 2 hours ago. I am as calmly as possible explaining my frustration and that the problem has to be the printer.

Now I am speaking with SYKANA, the supervisor for Brother, and he asks for the serial numbers again…if you are going to need them so often please increase the font! He explains that all he can do is send the Yellow Toner and he will throw in a Black Toner next day shipping. I ask if that means I will receive it tomorrow and he tells me that it might show up on Monday, today is Thursday… THAT IS NOT NEXT DAY. I say no thanks. I am buying another printer.

I never write reviews but this was crazy and hopefully I help someone from making the same mistakes I did.

I have had MANY FANTASTIC PURCHASES from Amazon. Truly the only time were I feel like I got jobbed on a purchase… sucks to be the $450 variety. If you sell it and have your representative keep telling you that they understand and would be upset too but there is nothing that can be done after 30 days then maybe they should not sell it.

Brother- SHAME ON YOU!!! I have toner all over my fingers and keyboard, wasted $450 and still cannot print. I cannot believe the amount of time wasted.

I am hoping I have some protection with purchasing it with my Amazon Prime Card.

My mistake was following Amazon’s recommendation

After reading all the negative reviews AND living in an area where UPS delivery consists of kicking the package from one end of town to the other (after it is been opened to see if there is anything to steal) I was expecting the worst. That I would have to return it. Sure enough the box was badly mauled and dented as is every package I get from UPS. But I opened it up anyway. No damage to the printer and nothing missing. Yea!!

The printer was very heavy. A good sign! And when I plugged it in it worked. The WPS did not work. But not being a novice, I had no difficulty setting it up on WiFi. Really its completely straightforward with no surprises. Once I had an IP address for it I downloaded the Brother Linux driver and it installed perfectly. Zero knowledge needed, the driver works by itself. And it prints beautiful full color pictures that look like photographs (because they were). My hat is off to Brother for supporting Linux just as well as HP does. They had better if they want to sell printers in China!

Some people complained about a delay before printing. Yes,,, but the delay is no different from the HP laser jets I have and all the laser jets at work. In fact the longest delay is only after the printer has not been used for a while, lasts for about 30 seconds and then subsequent prints are much quicker. THATS A GOOD THING PEOPLE!! It means that Brother is not burning your electricity keeping the drums warm! In an office environment it would never be an issue because the printer would be constantly in use and the electricity saver would never kick in.

The noise is no worse than any Laserjet I have had for the last 20 years and it is a lot quieter than most. The Laserjets at work make much more noise (but at an acceptable level – (the noise is useful because the printer is 20 feet away and thats how you can tell it worked). This printer could sit on your desk without a problem.

The color on this printer is every bit as good as my old HP K80 office inkjet and the 2000 dollar commercial HP color laserjet at work.

I am deducting one star because the instructions are not adequate for a beginner. There are plastic pieces and tape to be removed deep within the bowels of this beast that are nowhere in the instructions. And the instructions gives no hint that they are incomplete. I suspect the negative reviews are because people had no way to know they needed to take the thing apart to get all the tape and orange plastic gizmos out. Also while it may be Centurylink’s and not Brother’s fault, the WPS doesn’t work at all even for an experienced person.

If I run into any problems I will update but I am a very happy camper right now and recommend this printer.

I did forget to mention that the printer does slightly curl the paper. My guess is that the drum is too hot. I will contact Brother to see if that can be adjusted. In the meantime the curl is not very bad so I can live wth it.

EDIT: A year later still works perfectly. Zero problems. I have been printing almost every day and still have not had to replace the starter toner. Which is annoying because I bought new toner so I would have it on hand and its in the way! I keep hoping the starter toner will run out but it just keeps going. Also works perfectly with the Windows 10 I installed. Works perfectly in LINUX and Windows 10.

I was a bit uncertain about ordering this printer because of the very vocal minority complaining about Wi-Fi issues. I’m happy to report that no such problems exists for me, and I suspect user error. To assure success from the get go, here’s what I did:

– Turn on printer, dismiss setup wizard
– Find network settings and turn on WLAN
– Show info, and jot down the MAC address of the WLAN interface
– Configure DHCP on router to assign a fixed IP to the jotted down MAC
– Connect to Wi-Fi from printer
– Confirm fixed IP was assigned

After above, I opened a browser and navigated to the fixed IP, which brings up the printer’s admin page (default password was initpass). I was delighted by the myriad of supported protocols, and configured AirPrint, Google Cloud, and IPP.

All of my devices (Mac, iPhone, Android, Chromebook, and Windows) were a cinch to configure. I only installed software on the Windows machine – all the rest required no drivers. Not surprisingly, the Mac with AirPrint was the simplest.

Printer itself is fantastic. Great quality prints and very fast. It warms up in seconds from sleep and prints quietly. Changing paper type, etc. is very easy.

No regrets!

Note: my wireless access point is in a closet about 20 feet from the printer. Two walls in between.

It took me a very long time to decide on which printer to get! After setting up many formulas to figure out the CPP (Cost Per Page) to print, and this is not just after 1 month, this is to determine over a period of 6 years. Also the ROI (Return On Investment) of this printer. After running this formula on over 30 different printers by Brother, Xerox, HP, Canon, and Epson, I decided that this was the best printer to go with.

1. For the entirety of the 6 years, the CPP ends up being lower or the same as most other color laser printers in this class. Over that time if you figure in not just the paper, but the toner, drums, and all other replacement parts. This Brother printer came in above when also including print quality and auto-duplex.

2. The price for this quality makes this perfect! I have had a Xerox Phaser (large format) in the past and thought that I would never find another that could create that quality without the $5,000 price tag. (Keep in mind that this Xerox printer purchase was also around 12 years ago.) For photos, business cards, postcards and so much more, this Brother printer performed at the same level as others in its class.

3. As for the Return On Investment, not only does the 6-year Cost Per Page but also the power consumption and the number of pages per month (Work Load) that this printer can perform makes it so that over time your ROI is the best with this printer.

*Notes: The only thing that I really did not calculate into this is to how much I would eventually use the 2nd tray. There have been many times that I have found myself wishing for the second tray. So if you think that you might need it, go for the HL-L8360CDWT instead. But if you will not be needing it except for only once-in-a-while, then stick with the 1 tray.

Also, many people look at the DPI only, or the Speed of Print and ignore some of what really matters. The human eye has a hard time seeing the difference once the DPI hits a certain level when printing on 8 1/2″ x 11″ or smaller. So don’t be fooled by just that!

1 more note! Sometimes the replacement toner cartridges may be higher or lower, but make sure that you take into account your Average Page Coverage (how much ink/toner that you use per page) into account. Toner and Ink does not last forever. Plus some of the more expensive replacements did not actually provide as much toner. So take the time to do a little math.

Good luck and happy printing!
(I have not been compensated in ANY WAY by Brother or Amazon for this review!)