4 ms·

I have recently bought an office class Brother printer. It works flawlessly on Linux; but it doesn’t work flawlessly on Macs, and I’ve found bug reports for the

I have recently bought an office class Brother printer. It works flawlessly on Linux; but it doesn’t work flawlessly on Macs, and I’ve found bug reports for the same thing going back to 2015. When you use the Mac OS built in “scanner” app to scan to PDF, it will scan in color even when you ask it to scan in B&W; unfortunately, this will confuse the app and the pdf will be corrupted. The recommended workaround is “scan in color” (which I do, and then use Ghostscript to convert to b&w), but it’s ridiculous. That said, as far as quality, speed, robustness and reliability, this is the best printer/scanner/fax machine I ever used. And it works perfectly well on Linux.

dreamcompiler 6y ago
By "scanner" app do you mean Preview? My several-year-old Brother laser printer works fine in B&W mode on Catalina. Maybe this is just a thing with newer models.
- beagle3 6y ago
  TIL: Preview can import from the scanner. I was using the scanner window available from the printer icon associated with the multifunction printer. Another comment mentioned the standalone "Image Capture.app" which was also news to me. However, all three are using the same underlying implementation. Scanning in color works. Scanning to JPEG works. However my preferred scanning mode (300dpi, A4, to PDF) produces the garbled image seen here[0], and apparently has been doing so since at least 2012 ... My impression is that preview/scanner/imagecapture all trust the printer to do the conversion to PostScript/PDF, but somehow don't manage to tell it to use B&W instead of color -- it seems like r/g/b pixels are treated as individual gray pixels. [0] https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&prod=ads2100_eu_as_cn&faqid=faq00002976_000 https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro...
dxf 6y ago
What is the "office class" printer you have trouble with? I've never seen this issue with my Brother MFC-2740DW using "Image Capture" on my Mac (which I assume you are referring to as the built-in scanner app). It's worked flawlessly for me (as did my previous Brother laser printer/scanner).
- beagle3 6y ago
  An MFC-L3730CDN . I am still using Mojave; I was unaware of the "Image Capture" app - I opened the printer icon, which has a "Scanner" button on the right when you have a multifunction printer - but it appears to be the same underlying implementation, and it has the same bug, described here: https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&prod=ads2100_eu_as_cn&faqid=faq00002976_000 https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro... perhaps it was fixed in Catalina; the page I linked (with the exact kind of corruption I just tested through Image Capture) is from 2012...
aidenn0 6y ago
My wife has a mac and it just has a terrible experience with our brother laser. The print queue just says "cannot connect to printer" but I can open up the printer's web server, use the printer setting to check toner level &c. Then a few hours or days later it prints spontaneously. I thought it might be bonjour not working well over wifi, but the problem persists even when I assign the printer an IP address manually. I'm stumped.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

dreamcompiler 6y ago

By "scanner" app do you mean Preview? My several-year-old Brother laser printer works fine in B&W mode on Catalina. Maybe this is just a thing with newer models.

beagle3 6y ago
TIL: Preview can import from the scanner. I was using the scanner window available from the printer icon associated with the multifunction printer. Another comment mentioned the standalone "Image Capture.app" which was also news to me. However, all three are using the same underlying implementation. Scanning in color works. Scanning to JPEG works. However my preferred scanning mode (300dpi, A4, to PDF) produces the garbled image seen here[0], and apparently has been doing so since at least 2012 ... My impression is that preview/scanner/imagecapture all trust the printer to do the conversion to PostScript/PDF, but somehow don't manage to tell it to use B&W instead of color -- it seems like r/g/b pixels are treated as individual gray pixels. [0] https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&prod=ads2100_eu_as_cn&faqid=faq00002976_000 https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro...

dxf 6y ago

What is the "office class" printer you have trouble with? I've never seen this issue with my Brother MFC-2740DW using "Image Capture" on my Mac (which I assume you are referring to as the built-in scanner app). It's worked flawlessly for me (as did my previous Brother laser printer/scanner).

beagle3 6y ago
An MFC-L3730CDN . I am still using Mojave; I was unaware of the "Image Capture" app - I opened the printer icon, which has a "Scanner" button on the right when you have a multifunction printer - but it appears to be the same underlying implementation, and it has the same bug, described here: https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&prod=ads2100_eu_as_cn&faqid=faq00002976_000 https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro... perhaps it was fixed in Catalina; the page I linked (with the exact kind of corruption I just tested through Image Capture) is from 2012...

aidenn0 6y ago

My wife has a mac and it just has a terrible experience with our brother laser. The print queue just says "cannot connect to printer" but I can open up the printer's web server, use the printer setting to check toner level &c. Then a few hours or days later it prints spontaneously. I thought it might be bonjour not working well over wifi, but the problem persists even when I assign the printer an IP address manually. I'm stumped.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]