Brother MFC L3780DCW works well

S

scottro

My trusty old Samsung died (the printing part anyway) and I had to buy a printer. I wanted Brother over HP because I don't like the various things I've been reading about HP vendor lock in with cartridges and the like. Anyway, I wound up with a Brother MFC L3780DCW to find that both printing and scanning worked out of the box. I can either print with netcat (nc <ip of printer> 9100 filename or cups, with the ipp universal driver.

So, it works quite well with FreeBSD. Print protocol is PCL rather than postscript.
I should add that my printing needs are quite simple but this does apparently do duplex if I wanted it to.
 
Alain De Vos said:
I have another brother MFC. But drivers don't work. Only on Debian ...
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Have you tried with using netcat for printing? nc <PRINTERIP> 9100 < filename ? In addition, I used cups and chose generic ipp anywhere. I had originally chosen generic PCL, but that didn't do color or double sided--not that I've ever needed to print doublesided, but it's nice to have the option.

For scanning, I did install sane-airscan. However, the package message says that you have to have avahi_daemon running, and I didn't do that, but still when I ran scanimage -L it mentioned something it read
device `airscan:w0:Brother MFC-L3780CDW series' is a WSD Brother MFC-L3780CDW series ip=192.168.1.50

So, I'm not sure if that means it needed airscan or would have worked without it. I installed sane-airscan before I got the printer, as I'd seen this thread on the forums where it solved someone's problem scanning with Brother.
forums.freebsd.org

Solved - Brother printer scanner

I recently set up a MFC-J470DW Brother printer. I had trouble setting up the scanner (network) using the official bother drivers. I am currently using Linux compatibility and I got it working with 'Jessie'. The printer drivers are no longer required with CUPS as the 'everywhere' driver is...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

My own thought on this is opensource has just gotten a lot better, for both printer and scanner to work more or less out of the box. With my old Samsung, I think somehow I got a printer driver (maybe used the Linux one?) and had to research getting the scanner running (found it from an ArchLinux wiki article, I had to change a line in /usr/local/etc/sane.d/xerox.mfp_mfp.conf.

I was worried after ordering the printer that it wouldn't work with FreeBSD and I'd only be be able to use it with Linux and only after installing Brother drivers, but that wasn't the case.
 
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