We’ve got three of these or in our office for just that reason. I can say by way of largely meaningless observation that there was at least one design revision of these things in recent years, because the current ones have been cheapified by removing the little one line LCD display and replacing it with a couple of blinkenlights. I much prefer the older ones with the display, because the readout can at least in theory give you a clue as to what the damned thing has its knickers in a twist about this time.

Two of our units turn into print job motels on a regular basis, as in print jobs go in but they don’t come out (usually with no error thrown). Unplugging the printer and plugging it back in causes it to spit out all of the print jobs that were stuck in it, which typically total in the dozens because our (l)users’ only method of troubleshooting if something did not print the first time is to try to print it again seven or eight more times. The third one we have doesn’t do this, but it’s in a location where it is used a lot less which may be a contributing factor. I wonder if this is some kind of variable overflow issue or something.

We have a couple of their multifunction machines around, too. Whatever implementation Brother uses to link the client software on the PC and the machine itself is also hot garbage. In particular, ours constantly lose association with their PC’s for the “scan from console” feature, for no readily identifiable reason, and there’s evidently no way to force it to reassociate other than uninstalling and reinstalling the PC software suite which is a monumental pain in the taint to be doing on a regular basis.

The dinky Canon ImageClass I have squatting in my personal office, however, has never given me any issues.