Reddit reviews Brother MFCL2700DW All-In One Laser Printer with Wireless Networking and Duplex Printing, Amazon Dash Replenishment Enabled

Now that prices are coming down with laserjets the same way LCD screens did a decade ago, don't get an inkjet, especially if you're in the 'prosumer' market of small office / home office or personal user who wants a quality product.

Get the laserjet with as good or better print quality, and that doesn't clog or dry out your ink cartridges if you don't print anything for a month.

Decide if you want high speed black and white, or lower speed color. This one has duplex Wi-Fi printing, scanning, copy and even fax if you need that. Other models for well under $100 are incredibly fast, simple black and white single sided printers, often with Ethernet or USB printing. OEM monochrome printer cartridges can last over 2500 pages, at a price of around 1 cent per page in ink.

I used to sell printers. For pure black and white printing, brother is the best. Their machines look like they were designed decades ago, probably because they were and still work (you don't need to change something that works). I got a used brother on amazon including a 4 year extended warranty for less than the price of a new one. I've printed around a thousand pages so far and not a single issue. Brand new toner cartridges from brother are like $40 and print over 1500 pages. You can get knockoffs on amazon with great reviews for less than $20 each.

The only reason to go with an HP is if you need the fancy features like printing from a USB flash drive or iPhone plugged directly into the printer.

Edit: the printer

Brother MFCL2700DW All-In One Laser Printer with Wireless Networking and Duplex Printing, Amazon Dash Replenishment Enabled https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MFG58N6

If you don't need the copy/scan/fax features, you can get it without the top section for about $25 less

I currently use this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MFG58N6

Toner is cheap, it works well. It's an all in one too.

23 Hours later edit: It's $300 from a third party seller, congrats! Their all gone haha.

Whatever you do, get a laser printer, not an inkjet. How many times did you go to print with your old inkjet printer and it wouldn't print because it said it was out of ink? Likely a lot of times, I would bet. Since you print so rarely the ink would dry out and clog the spray nozzles. And it would infuriate me when I had inkjets printers that if one color was "out" then it would refuse to print, even in black and white.

I got a Brother monochrome laser printer a few years ago and have loved it. Since laser printers use dry toner and not liquid ink then it can't dry out. The free starter toner cartridge lasted me over a year and now I am kinda sad I bought a standard toner cartridge because I would like to upgrade to a color laser all-in-one but can't really justify it as I don't really need it. I haven't really researched the subject since getting my Brother but I believe the company still has a good reputation for decent build quality, no non-sense features, etc.

Ow my! This is going to be awesome. Let me first answer your questions.

If something may sound "Chinese" to you, don't worry I will provide a lot of videos that probably explain what I type here (tomorrow).

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> The one I'm replacing is a Dell Dimension 8200 that's about 15 years old.
>> I've tried out hundreds of applications and have more than a dozen that I consider important enough that I'll have to figure out a way to transfer them and their data over to the new machine.

Okay, you're very likely still using IDE hard drives. These are old and we've by now replace those with much smaller SATA hard drives. SATA cables are much smaller and easier to manage and the SATA bus is also faster.
I can be sure that your oldie is taking a couple minutes to start up Windows, right?

Anyway, luckily you can buy devices these days that make transferring files over to a new PC or laptop very easy.
Sabrent USB 2.0 TO SATA/IDE. You plug the HDD with the data on into this device, then connect the USB cable to the system where you want to transfer the files too and tada! Depending on the size, it may take some time to write it all, but you can just let it sit and do it's thing no problem.

> Do you think I should wait for after Christmas sales or buy now?

Hard to tell, from what I've seen the last 2 years that I've been around. I never really noticed huge sales during any of the "sales" times. Of course there are exceptions and it's possible to find some very solid deals to save $50-200 on a $1000+ system. But I personally am not that convinced that it's "worth the wait". It's really hit or miss to find a product that you need on these sales.

The best thing to wait for is most often big shows or conventions. Such as CES (5th till 8th of January 2017), Computex (May 30th till 3rd of June 2017) and other smaller ones.
Because big companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Asus, Corsair, EVGA, Samsung, etc. are often showing off new products or prototypes that come to the market right away or very quickly after those shows are done.

So with CES in less than a month, new products are very likely going to hit the market in about a month time. If you can wait for this, then it's certainly something to consider. However, I have no idea what comes out of it, most of these products are under NDA so we can mostly speculate and that's it.
Nvidia is going to very likely release their new flag ship gaming video card, the GTX1080Ti. But this is probably not worth buying for your use. It's going to be very expensive and almost half of your budget, which is just not worth it.
AMD is hopefully going to tell us more about their new CPUs codename Zen. They've given us some performance comparisons and a bit more specifications of their new 8 core CPUs, last Tuesday. But most of that was just confirming the most likely rumours that were floating around. No release date or prices yet, aside from "Q1'2017". Soo.. I hope that they'll tell us more on CES!

> California, USA

MicroCenter access? This one is in Tustin / Orange County. If it's within ~30/60 minutes drive it's certainly worth it to go there to save a good amount of money, especially the CPU and motherboards.

> I'll worry about the monitor, keyboard, and mouse later.

What kind of budget do you have in mind for this? We can help with suggestions here as well!

> If you could recommend a good all in one printer that would be nice too.

This is certainly not something we've got asked here often. But I have some experience with Printers. I am no expert tho!

In terms of my overal experience; Canon printers work just about fine enough, they're cheap and do their job.. most of the time. They do eat inkt like candy tho, but this is something most printers do.
HP is a brand I will avoid for Printers forever, bought a fairly expensive one that just would give me more problems than actually printing. The reviews on it where good enough to give it a shot, but I guess I got unlucky, support was terrible as well. It was all our fault! It was loud, sometimes "ate" the paper for no freaking reason and don't let me start about the inkt.
Replaced that one with a cheap Canon that's been working just about fine for more than a year.
However, the one brand that I trust and love, has been Brother. They're certainly capable of just doing it right! I've had a Brother printer at my previous job and it wasn't too cheap, but certainly worth the money. I am sure that that beast is still kicking and printing, faxing around like it's nobodies business!
So that's why I can recommend a Brother printer without much doubt: Brother MFC-L2700DW. It can also fax! As well as scan, copy & print even from your WiFi. You can connect the printer via WiFi to your router, which allows you to print with anything that the router can connect to, so you can print from PCs, laptops, tablets and even smartphones without needing to plug in any cable! Aside from the power cable of course.

> I want a RAID for backup

I am just going to say that RAID is redundancy, not backup! It's in the name: "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks".
While I understand that you call it backup, if your PC/PSU dies for some very odd reason, it could potentially kill both the HDDs that are in RAID at the same time and then you still lose all the files.
If you want to backup files, you should invest in a NAS (Network Arranged Storage) or a Cloud Storage. I personally don't feel comfortable putting sensitive data in a Cloud data center. But if it's nothing major, then feel free to use it. This means that when your house sets on fire and burns your PC & NAS, you'll still have files in the Cloud that you can access with any device.
But when you backup files to a NAS & cloud. It's very hard to lose data. RAIDs are good, but I don't recommend this often. Because once you start adding more than 2 HDDs, it's not going to be very valuable to RAID1 your HDDs (mirror). Thus then you should better look at RAID5/6 which is extremely straining on the motherboard it's storage chip and thus it's recommended to buy a RAID card. But those get expensive quickly, which is why I recommend a NAS!

I recommend to backup to a NAS (you can and most do use RAID here!) or a Cloud. It's the safest way to keep your digital valuable information alive.

> I have found that video on the motherboard is a nice feature to have when the graphics card decides to stop working the night before a deadline.

This is a shame, because for your use case. I would recommend a CPU that does not have on-board graphics. The whole platform does not have this.
But you can consider to buy a cheap $35 card and keep it out of the system in a box somewhere. In worst case scenario, you can use that when a video card suddenly dies.. However, video cards most often don't die suddenly, they'll start to show signs of "death" in terms of bad performance, overheating or just the screen getting artifacts.

> Ventilation matters more than color and I don't need any LED's or color coordinating.

Very true that ventilation is important, but even more importantly are dust filters and that you blow out any dust that does manages to get through with some compressed air every 3-6 months. This will keep a PC alive for much longer compared to.. this scary stuff.
Luckily most modern cases of today have good filters that prevent this from happening!

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Stop talking already and give me a suggestion!

Sorry, I'll work on this tomorrow. I have to get some more sleep first.

An inkjet uses nozzles to fire the ink directly onto the page.

A laser printer applies a charge to the paper so it will attract toner (a fine powder) onto the page where it is then fused to the paper with heat.

Toner is much more cost effective than ink.

If you print more than 10-20 pages a week. Get a laser.

If you don't print a lot AND need color get a inkjet.

Color multi-functions (scanner/fax/printer) are expensive for a laser both in initial investment and maintenance. Inkjet multifunctions can be bought on sale for 50 bucks then tossed when it breaks.

Rule of thumb, get a mono brother laser like this if you just need to print black and white. And a shitty multifunction inkjet as a backup printer/scanner with color.

I have a bunch of clients with this brother multifunction and it serves them quite well. Compatible toner/drums work well and they're quite durable

http://www.amazon.com/Brother-MFCL2700DW-Wireless-Networking-Printing/dp/B00MFG58N6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462201428&sr=8-1&keywords=multifunction+laser+printers

Brother laser printer if you want B&W plus scan. Heres a good model, http://www.amazon.com/Brother-MFCL2700DW-Wireless-Networking-Printing/dp/B00MFG58N6/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1426372103&sr=8-5&keywords=brother+laser.

I wouldnt get an inkjet unless you wanted to print pictures, then splurge on something nice.

That device is not worth anywhere near $350. No Ethernet; No Wifi. Compare the features with my linked model which has been out for 2-3 years and retails at $149

This is what you want: https://www.amazon.com/Brother-MFCL2700DW-Wireless-Networking-Replenishment/dp/B00MFG58N6/ref=sr_1_6?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1512072249&sr=1-6&keywords=brother+laser+printer. Keep an eye out - sometimes you can get this for $100 on sale.

Color is unfortunately not within a $100 budget.

Amazon has the MFCL2700DW for 129.99 free-shipping. It takes the TN-660
http://www.amazon.com/Brother-MFCL2700DW-Wireless-Networking-Printing/dp/B00MFG58N6

I've been using this brother all-in-one printer for a little over 2 years now for my own small business and it's still going strong. Scanning is simple once you install the software/drivers. After about a minute of setup just load the paper and click a button.

Albeit I didn't do much research going into it but at least it's affordable and it can even be used as a fax machine! Great for the older generation who still prefer that paper fax over efax or email.

Thanks for the suggestions. Duplex printing didn't seem to exist for the Cannon or HP m130fw. I don't want an inkjet I think, and after talking to the wife, I'm leaning towards an all-in-one. I don't need a spectacular quality scanner int terms of fidelity. I'd just be scanning for documenting purposes. Do you know anything about the Brother MFCL2700DW? Other than the crap screen it seems to have all the basics I need. I've read some issues regarding the "deep sleep" mode it has (power saving mode I assume), and some people have had problems with wireless printing issues from mobile devices.

I loved the template. It was super easy to use. It reminded me of the one over at r/buildmeapc.