Choosing a Color Laser Printer – Brother MFC‑L3780CDW

Back in 2015, Steven Goetz wrote a review for the show entitled Have You Considered a Brother Laser Printer? He gave compelling reasons why a laser printer was superior to an inkjet printer, specifically for those who don’t need color.

As a home user, I knew I needed color. Steve and I were firmly entrenched in the HP color inkjet world. I had an elaborate inventory scheme to ensure I always had at least one black and one color ink cartridge in stock. We each had our own printer so that meant four cartridges in stock at all times. At around $65 for the black ink and $85 for the color (both in XL size) that meant I was keeping over $300 worth of ink in stock at any given moment.

And then one day a few years ago Pat Dengler asked me if I wanted a black and white Brother laser printer … for free. It seemed obvious to say yes to this generous offer. We could decommission one color printer, replace it with the Brother laser printer, and still have a color printer for when we needed it.

She explained that the cartridge in the printer was already saying it was almost out of ink. People always said that the cartridges cost a grip but they lasted forever so I was prepared for sticker shock. However, when I went to buy a spare cartridge, I found a set of two Brother-compatible black cartridges were only $27 for both! I immediately bought the two-pack.

I didn’t put one of them in place right away because I wanted to see how long the one would last that was complaining it was almost out. Would you believe it was a full year before I actually had to replace that cartridge?

Steve and I both fell in love with that lovely Brother laser printer. We realized that more than 90% of the time we really only need black and white. Even most color things are fine for us in greyscale. The laser printer was wicked fast, it had such clear, crisp text, and it was an actual joy to print. And this comes from the woman who penned the article, The Printer is a Lie, and the sequel, Printers are Jerks.

I’m not joking about enjoying printing. I still find it easier to check my taxes by printing out every form and cross-checking against the previous year and the records I’ve submitted to my accountant. When it came time to print, I didn’t stress at all because I knew that it would actually print! I never felt that fearless with an inkjet. I also didn’t feel bad about wasting ink because I knew it was super inexpensive. With the inkjet I’d check the balance in our bank account before printing that much!

On a few rare occasions over the past year or so, I’ve wanted to print something in color. I remember I wanted to print a one-off photo to stick in a thank-you note, so I sent the photo to the color inkjet we kept in Steve’s den. I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but it didn’t work. Nothing at all came out. I messed around with it a bit, but after 3 tries I sent the photo file to my local drugstore, hopped in the car, and drove over to pick it up. I had no regrets, in fact, I was rather proud of how calm and stressless this path was v.s. fighting with the printer.

Fast forward to about a month ago, when Steve needed to print something in color. The inkjet failed him too. He kept working on it and finally did some searching online to figure out why the printer simply did nothing at all when he sent print jobs to it. He discovered that our color inkjet printer from HP wasn’t supported under Sonoma. Now that’s not such earth-shattering news, but I found it really interesting that we didn’t notice for 7 months!

This was literally only the second time in 7 months that we’d needed to print in color. As seldom as this requirement was, we still did need to/want to print in color from time to time. We had been compromising and printing in greyscale where color would have been preferable. And so, we decided to look at color laser printers.

Research

Our current free Brother laser printer was the HL L2360D, and it was pretty tiny as printers go. It was 14×14″ square and only 7″ tall. It didn’t do any scanning or copying which contributed to its diminutive size. It printed at 24 pages per minute. My goal was to get a color laser that printed at least as fast and wasn’t a giant monstrosity.

I decided to stick with Brother, not just because Steven had recommended it but because everyone I know who has a laser printer recommends Brother. Wirecutter recommends Brother. It’s basically the fan favorite.

As Steve and I started researching available options, we created a spreadsheet (of course we did) where we started recording model numbers and specs. We started with dimensions and pages per minute but quickly expanded our criteria. One thing we didn’t want to do was to buy a printer model that had been introduced a long time ago which would make it more likely to be abandoned sooner. It looked like there was a big model push in August of last year because we found a handful of good candidates all introduced at the same time.

Price	Model	Released	Width	Depth	Height	PPM	DPI	print/copy/scan	Color or BW	double-sided	Ethernet	touch screen
free	HL L2360D	3/2017	14.0 in	14.0 in	7.0 in	24	2400 x 600	Print	BW	yes	100BASE-T & WiFi	1-line mono LCD
$500	MFC L3780 CDW	8/2023	18.2 in	16.1 in	15.8 in	31	2400×600	P/C/S	color		gigabit & WiFi	3.5″ color touchscreen
$400	MFC L3720 CDW	8/2023	17.5 in	16.1 in	15.8 in	19	2400×600	P/C/S	color	yes	WiFi only	3.5″ color touchscreen
$300	HL-L3280CDW	8/2023	15.7 in	15.7 in	10.8 in	27	2400×600	Print	color	yes	gigabit & WiFi	2.7 inch touchscreen
Eliminated because of tiny mono LCDs
$249	HLL3220CDW	?				19			color		WiFi only	1-line mono LCD
$370	HL-L3300CDW	8/2023	16 in	18 in	14 in	19	2400×601	P/C/S	color		WiFi only	2-line mono backlit LCD

Before I start talking about models and criteria, I want to explain some nomenclature from Brother. All of the models we considered have CDW at the end, and that’s because it stands for Color printing Duplex Wireless. I won’t keep repeating CDW as I talk about the options because it would get repetitive. Brother laser models either start with HL or MFC. MFC means Multi-Function Center, that is they are a fax, printer, scanner, copier in one. HL doesn’t appear to be an acronym that I can find, but it means a regular printer that doesn’t fax, scan, or copy.

I didn’t catch this distinction right away, so I was leaning heavily towards the HL models because they were wee tiny like our beloved HL-L2360D that Pat gave us. They were small because they didn’t have all of the functionality we really needed.

A few of the models I briefly considered, like the HL-L3220 and HL-L3300 both had only monochrome LCDs of only one or two lines. They were on the less expensive end at $250 and $370 respectively. I know that sounds like a lot of money compared to an inkjet printer, but remember having to keep spares at $150 for a pair of color and black and white cartridges?

There was another printer-only option I favored – the L3280. It has a 2.7″ color touch screen and prints at 27 pages per minute (which is a smidge faster than the 24 PPM our black and white laser could do). It was $300 and had both gigabit Ethernet and WiFi. It was also just a bit bigger square than our black and white at 15.7″ on a side, but was even shorter at 10.8″ high.

I pushed hard on Steve to go for this one, but he was all reasonable and logical and stuff and pointed out that we do need to copy from time to time, and having a flatbed scanner does come in handy too. I do a lot of scanning with my iPhone directly to our Synology of receipts and such, and Steve has a swanky Epson photo scanner but there are always those times you need a flatbed.

That left us with two options, and they were higher priced and huge. The L3720 at $400 and the L3780 at $500. The $400 L3720 was slightly smaller than the L3780, but it only printed at 19 PPM, whereas our existing laser printed at 24 PPM. It was WiFi only which isn’t terrible, but it was going to be sitting right next to a gigabit switch into the router so it seemed a shame to make a compromise.

In the end, the $500 L3780 won our hearts. At 31 PPM it’s crazy fast, it’s got gigabit Ethernet and WiFi, and a 3.5″ color touchscreen. It’s a beast though – it’s 17.5 x 16.1 inches square, and 15.8″ tall!

We have it sitting on a credenza that has a 27″ Apple Cinema Display (still kicking!) on it and it’s almost as tall as the display. At first, I thought it looked atrocious but I’ve gotten used to the size.

One of the reasons I was able to swallow the $500 price tag is that the MFC L3780 came with a full set of toner cartridges. I don’t mean 1/4 full fake ones, they included DR229CL cartridges are supposed to print up to 20,000 pages that only cost $163 to replace! That’s a lot of taxes we could print. We didn’t even bother to buy spares because I’m not sure we’ll live long enough to print that many pages!

Toner cartridges like these come as four separate units – black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. I was intimidated at first when I opened the top of the printer. Each cartridge had a very obvious cap on each end warning me to remove each cartridge, take the caps off, and put them back in. It took less than five minutes and only that long because I was being cautious and didn’t want to wreck anything. Don’t worry, I didn’t read the instructions or anything.

After plugging it into Ethernet, running a firmware update, changing the default admin password, adding paper, then reloading the paper because we’d actually done it wrong, we were ready to print.

Holy canole are the prints gorgeous. I mean positively stunning. We thought our previous Brother laser had crisp text, but it’s nothing like this. We are astonished at the quality.

For grins and giggles, I tried putting a piece of glossy paper into it to print a photo and it was a huge mistake. The toner just sort of smeared off the paper! Luckily I didn’t do any long-term damage to the printer and at least it settled my curiosity. I’ll be going to the local drug store every 8 months when I need to print a photo.

We love how fast it is, after a warmup time that’s listed as 12.5 seconds. It copies quickly, scans quickly, and prints double-sided on command. You know what else it does? It prints every single time I ask it to. No belly aching, no jammed paper, no realignment of cartridges problems. It just works. It works from our phones too.

Now you know I like to do a deep dive on how things work, so I downloaded the PDF manual … and it’s 680 pages long. And I’m not talking about 8 languages. That’s 680 pages all in English. And that doesn’t count the 7-page table of contents. Technically it does talk about Windows so I guess that’s a different language.

In scanning through the manual, and connecting to the web interface to manage the printer, it’s pretty obvious that we’ve put a small-business printer in our home. For example, there’s an NFC card scanner on the front so if you want to restrict access to only worthy employees you can. Maybe I should make Steve use an NFC card to be allowed to use my new precious.

If the 680-page PDF is overwhelming for you, there’s an online user guide at support.brother.com/… that makes it a lot less overwhelming. The design of the interface is circa 1982, including a link to the PDF that tells you that Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view it. Functional, but as my daddy would have said, “Ugly as sin.”

The only thing not to like about the Brother line of laser printers is their hard sell for their toner subscription. Lindsay the Daughter has an ink subscription for her inkjet printer, but it’s literally a dollar a month for 10 pages so it’s a terrific deal. She can add a dollar to it if she runs out too. But for a color laser printer, the cheapest plan I can get is $10/month for 75 pages. I don’t mind them offering this “deal” to me, but it keeps asking me when I open the app on my phone, so it’s a little bit much.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that we did spend a large sum on a new color laser printer. But to replace our current color inkjet to get a model that worked with Sonoma would have been $150 or so, and I’d have to keep $150 in spare cartridges around, so I’m not really that far behind.

Our housekeeper’s husband is a geek and he loves it when we give him tech, so imagine his delight when he not only got a perfectly functional color inkjet with $150 worth of spare cartridges and our black and white Brother laser printer (with a whole spare toner cartridge)?

I was glad to give them to him, but I was also fascinated that none of my friends or family wanted the monochrome laser printer. They either already have one, or they didn’t want monochrome because they were convinced they needed color.

And one more thing …

In the 680-page User Manual of Doom (™Donald Burr) it says that the MFC‑L3780CDW can print photos on glossy paper. So I guess the printer is still a lie.