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Would there be any advantage to going just black and white?
The advantage is that you can get a cheap laser printer.
They'll happily print every day for years and cost next to nothing to run.
They'll also happily print after you didn't use them for a long time.
Ink printers are generally less durable, cost much more to run and their heads dry out if you don't use them regularly.
Color laser printers are expensive, big, and the color isn't good enough for photos, only colored documents.
I own two (identical) color laser printers, can confirm two out of three. They're gigantic and the color isn't very vibrant.
However, they weren't all that expensive because I got them used. Still not quite dirt-cheap like a black & white laser is, but affordable.
My brother color laser is decent, but the toner is expensive. So expensive that i buy knockoff toner. Which 95% of the time is solid. Until every once in a while a kid needs something printed that's a photo. Not sure why, but it is absolute garbage at photos. Like not even close. Streaks and bands of color everywhere. I'm not even trying fancy photo paper, just trying to get details. A caffeinated adhd toddler with fistful of crayons could do better.
But if you want to print a worksheet in color? Does fantastic.
Advantage being you only have to buy one toner cartridge and drum.
Could be this.
Depending on the age, you may need a new drum unit, but I think that may also just be a deficit of laser.
Laser printers are usually lower resolution than ink printers and half toning is usually more difficult for laser printers. However, the results shouldn't be THAT bad.
Agreed, i'm not expecting good. But I've had pictures come out that look like an inkjet with the worst case of dirty print head you've ever seen.
I'm not sure which technology Brother uses but it kind of sounds like a damaged OPC to me. The printer might have multiple of them for the different colors. I think in consumer printers the OPC is often replaced together with the toner as a single unit but again, I'm not sure what brother uses.
Yea, someone else mentioned my drum might be dying, which could explain it.
It's not inkjet but you can get passible color on laser. You need to go into settings and tell it it's a photo and you want max quality. I have a Brother color laser.
Yep, tried that. Made no difference. Tried linux and windows in case it was a drivers thing. No difference. Though on linux if I use a generic driver instead of the model specific one it's marginally better and will win against the aforementioned toddler. If it took another similar jump in quality it would be in the realm of what I'd expect to come out of a laser printer for a photo. My google results only showed people complaining on brother's forum and they responded with "use genuine brother toner". And someone replied saying that fixed it for them.
I use fake toner in my brother.
Toner is cheaper if you have a laser black only, lots of pages per refill.
At work I've installed 10 color inkjet epson L6460 printers 2-3 years ago and most of them I still haven't refilled.
They come with 2 bottles of black ink and one of everything else, last forever, will print after 4 months unused if you do a print head cleaning (a few times in a row) and the Epson brand bottles are 8 - 12 bucks each.
For home use a cheaper Ecotank would probably serve you just as well.
Cost is like 100 times less per page.
Black and white is more common in laser printers, less complex, cheaper and it takes up less room.
Laser printers don't just shoot color particles on the paper like ink jet / piezo printers.
They "magnetize" a photo conductor so the toner particles stick to it and then usually transfer it to the paper using pressure and then fix it using heat. You can't really do the first part for multiple colors at the same time so color lasers can get pretty complex to repeat this process for each color (CMKY, sometimes more).
So why not an ink printer instead?
Some laser printers can do color (the Brother HL-L series can't), they're just not great at hi-res color images.
Laser printers are faster, more reliable, and are generally cheaper to operate in the long run, espesially if you are only printing once in a blue moon. Inkjet printers like the Epson Pommes_fur_dein_Balg recommended are better at hi-res images and are often cheaper up front, but are more expensive in the long run.