Brother Business Color Laser Printer, HL-L8360CDW, Wireless Networking, Automatic Duplex Printing, Mobile Printing, Cloud Printing, Amazon Dash Replenishment Ready,White

The short version is that my wife & I are really liking this printer so far. As the headline reads, the color prints look great (including photo prints) and it prints fast (even from startup). So I chuckled reading some of the reviews (which I carefully did for several models). People talk about this printer being hefty (aprox 40lbs). This printer replaced an old HP 4550N Color LaserJet I had. THAT printer was hefty (113lbs!). So, the approx 40lbs was a JOY! :) I was very pleased with the HP but it was just getting old and was well beyond end of life. So I've been an HP fan for many years and felt I was really taking a risk trying out the Brother. My wife is a teacher and prints a lot of "stuff". So far we (especially my wife) have been just very impressed by this printer. I even printed my first double sided print (full duplex) today and it worked great. We've probably printed 30+ color pages and the toner and other perishables don't even show a dent in utilization (still 100% across the board). So thank you Brother for sending decent starter toner cartridges! I appreciated the one reviewer providing the password "initpass" for the built in web server on the printer. The information and configuration options on the printers web page are impressive. The pictures above are of the unboxing process. There are about nine pieces of tape that have to be removed and there are these orange clips that keep the toner cartridges in place during shipping. They are fairly easy to remove. You will need to pull down the main front door and pull out the cartridge drawer to get to them. Last, it has been great getting this printer. It immediately prompted me to download and install updates (twice). My WIN10 PCs immediately see the new printer and it worked flawlessly. We own iPhones and we can print very easily from them straight to the printer. On the iPhones, if the photo is large it takes a little longer to print which I assume is because it's going over WiFi to get to the printer. Speaking of which, I have this printer plugged into my network and am NOT using the built-in WiFi. APPROX. 1 YR UPDATE -------------------- So we purchased this in August of '19... now July '20. So far this printer has been VERY impressive. We've gone through the starter toner... got approx. 2k prints from those alone!!! I purchased the high yield toner cartridges... that's pricey but not when you compare number of prints to traditional toner. We've been so pleased I recommended this to my mother (and she purchased it). I'll occasionally log into the printer and upgrade the firmware (if a new one is available) and check the stats. So far we have 2,650 color & 151 b&w prints. Excluding toner, all the perishables (drum unit, fuser unit, laser unit, etc are above 90% with most being just under 100%. OVER 2 YR UPDATE -------------------- Printer is still going strong! My wife is a teacher and prints tons of stuff... I have three teens cranking out reports, you name it. I'm on my second FULL toner cartridge set (four). That is to say, I've gone through the starter, a regular full set and on another. So far I have 6,690 color pages & 548 B&W pages. As I mentioned... I have my second FULL / extended toner set in and they are almost 100% each. Sad to hear anyone has issues with this model... I can just tell you my experience. I DID however have one issue where I purchased a full (black, yellow, cyan, magenta) Brother toner replacement. ONE of the toner cartridges didn't work... it was brand new out of the package and the printer showed empty. I tend to purchase this stuff some months before they run out so I don't get caught empty. The bad thing about that is that it was past the seller's return date. I was disappointed with the seller for that. Unfortunately Brother wouldn't help me out either BUT... to Amazon's credit they gave me some credit for the single toner. I ended up purchasing a stand alone toner cartridge to replace the "defective" one and it worked great.

Easy to use and set up. It prints very fast. Note that this is strictly a printer and not a scanner or copier. The colors are pretty vibrant. It isn’t really as noisy as I thought it might be. It has a relatively conservative footprint for its size. Overall, it’s a very nice machine. Brother is the way to go when it comes to printers. It connected very easily to my computer. It works very well for my needs and I would definitely buy it again.

After reading all the negative reviews AND living in an area where UPS delivery consists of kicking the package from one end of town to the other (after it is been opened to see if there is anything to steal) I was expecting the worst. That I would have to return it. Sure enough the box was badly mauled and dented as is every package I get from UPS. But I opened it up anyway. No damage to the printer and nothing missing. Yea!! The printer was very heavy. A good sign! And when I plugged it in it worked. The WPS did not work. But not being a novice, I had no difficulty setting it up on WiFi. Really its completely straightforward with no surprises. Once I had an IP address for it I downloaded the Brother Linux driver and it installed perfectly. Zero knowledge needed, the driver works by itself. And it prints beautiful full color pictures that look like photographs (because they were). My hat is off to Brother for supporting Linux just as well as HP does. They had better if they want to sell printers in China! Some people complained about a delay before printing. Yes,,, but the delay is no different from the HP laser jets I have and all the laser jets at work. In fact the longest delay is only after the printer has not been used for a while, lasts for about 30 seconds and then subsequent prints are much quicker. THATS A GOOD THING PEOPLE!! It means that Brother is not burning your electricity keeping the drums warm! In an office environment it would never be an issue because the printer would be constantly in use and the electricity saver would never kick in. The noise is no worse than any Laserjet I have had for the last 20 years and it is a lot quieter than most. The Laserjets at work make much more noise (but at an acceptable level - (the noise is useful because the printer is 20 feet away and thats how you can tell it worked). This printer could sit on your desk without a problem. The color on this printer is every bit as good as my old HP K80 office inkjet and the 2000 dollar commercial HP color laserjet at work. I am deducting one star because the instructions are not adequate for a beginner. There are plastic pieces and tape to be removed deep within the bowels of this beast that are nowhere in the instructions. And the instructions gives no hint that they are incomplete. I suspect the negative reviews are because people had no way to know they needed to take the thing apart to get all the tape and orange plastic gizmos out. Also while it may be Centurylink's and not Brother's fault, the WPS doesn't work at all even for an experienced person. If I run into any problems I will update but I am a very happy camper right now and recommend this printer. I did forget to mention that the printer does slightly curl the paper. My guess is that the drum is too hot. I will contact Brother to see if that can be adjusted. In the meantime the curl is not very bad so I can live wth it. EDIT: A year later still works perfectly. Zero problems. I have been printing almost every day and still have not had to replace the starter toner. Which is annoying because I bought new toner so I would have it on hand and its in the way! I keep hoping the starter toner will run out but it just keeps going. Also works perfectly with the Windows 10 I installed. Works perfectly in LINUX and Windows 10.

Printer is great for normal printing or copying. The resolution is not for photographs. Order extra toners to replace small capacity ones that it ships with.

**EDIT ** UPDATE ** KEY TAKEWAY ** IF YOU READ ONE THING READ THIS ** Since writing this review, I found the following brother printer hack, which I have now been wonderfully putting to use. In the full review below, I mention a bug where the printer does not recognize brand new toner cartridges. Well, there's another related bug, and I have figured out a hack to fix both issues. This could very well save you hundreds or thousands of dollars over the lifetime of this printer. it has already saved me hundreds. *BUT FIRST* *UPDATE: October 19, 2020* One more useful tip! If you end up buying this machine, make sure to either A) save, or B) photograph the original Brother printer toner cartridges in your machine for future reference. Just now, I had an experience with their tech support which I will describe at the end of this review. Please see below for more information. *RESUME* The bug is that the printer will tell you it is out of toner once it has hit its internal toner counter, without actually checking the cartridges somehow internally to decide whether it is actually out. Here is the hack: When your printer is out of toner, don't believe what it is telling you! look at the last few pages it printed. Are they faded? as if printed by a printer which is low on toner? or are they still sharp and crisp, with your desired level of clarity and readability? if the pages are sharp and crisp, guess what, you don't actually need to replace the toner! what you actually need to do is the following: 1) cancel any ongoing print jobs until you get to the main screen. 2) push the button on the top right front part of the unit to open it, as if you were about to replace the toner 3) the main screen should say something like "cover is open" (note that the hack seems to only work from this "cover is open" screen) 4) *the next step is the hack* I reminds me of the old days of N64 video game cheat codes. game shark for the win! 5) press the following button sequence: (to the left of the LCD screen we have three buttons: "back", "home" and "cancel", listed from top to bottom) the button combo is: - "back" + "cancel" together in unison push down and then release evenly (the whole move lasts less than a second) - now press the "back" button once (with about the same cadence as you pressed the previous two together) 6) you should land on a screen which allows you to completely reset the "toner counters" in the machine 7) you can reset any toner level to standard, high, or super high levels of toner. this will trick the machine into thinking you have actually installed new toner 8) after this is done, you can continue printing 9) you will have to manually decide when you are actually out of toner. there will come a point when the pages get thin, or start omitting words or phrases, washed out white spots, etc. 10) once this behavior makes your toner *actually* unusable, you can manually replace the toner, reset the counters, whatever 11) my experience is that this trick saves me 2000 pages on each cartridge, effectively extending the life of a toner replacement up to 150% of what it was before. This trick works with all 3rd party toner manufacturers I have tried, and has, so far, led to no sort of instability. There have been a few times where I have accidentally printed 20 or 30 pages which didn't have enough toner, but this costs me far less money than if I replace the toner when the printer says it is out. It seems the printer only says it is out once its internal "toner counter" has reached a certain number, 4000 pages, or whatever. 12) I hope this helps you! if you are stuck with this printer, good luck!!! my printing strategy has been to print everything I think I will ever need to print for my entire life up front! in another week or so, I will be done! then I can get back to my life and stop this human brother printer-monkey side business I have been running for the last month. good luck!! ** back to the original review, below ** here are the bullet points, in no particular order: #1 printer makes numerous long pauses during printing jobs, often for 5-10 minutes at a time. it simply says "waiting for a while," in the middle of your print job, and then waits for ten minutes. this has never been a deal-breaker for me. from what I understand it is cooling down to prevent overheating. however, it happens consistently enough, to the point where it seriously decreases their advertised pages per minute #2 printer comes with multiple components that seemingly need to be replaced every few tens of thousands of pages of printing (laser, drum, etc). I have had the printer for about a month in a small home office, and had to replace the drum already. this cost me about 150$. Not to mention, in the final 10,000 pages of the previous drum, the left side of every single page was streaked with black. it looked like every page was toner-burned. this has been highly annoying. it is not worth it to me to buy more toner and paper to replace these pages, so now I will have these burnt out documents forever. we live in the year 2020. we can make airplanes hit mach three and put a man on the moon. you're telling me we can't engineer an office printer that doesn't need its whole insides replaced every few weeks? I don't buy it. I get it that toner is a resource these brother printers consume like a paintball course burns through paintballs. they have no incentive to engineer systems that don't chew through toner because it is their primary revenue stream. but the fact that the core printer components have a an expected lifetime of weeks not years or even months under heavy load is embarrassing. I know they're getting money for the replacements. in my opinion, only second rate businessmen and below average engineers run a business this way. they are not willing to design a product that is worth the money and bears the load it should have been designed for. they push their engineering bugs and inadequacy onto you, their customers, making you shell out hundreds more dollars for toner and parts replacements, essentially giving you the new job of "brother printer technician" in addition to whatever else it was that you were already doing. this printer will eat your time. and then later, you will need to send brother more money to replace the parts of the machine they designed in the first place.... which brings me to my third point: toner. #3 the toner market for brother printers is an interesting one to observe. let's break this down. if you want to buy the brother brand toner, here is what they are offering on amazon: Brother HL-L8360CDW (TN-433) High Yield Toner Cartridge Set and the product description: Brother TN-433 High Yield Toner Cartridge Set contains Four(4) color compatible cartridges (Black TN433BK, Cyan TN433C, Magenta TN433M, Yellow TN433Y) that has been designed to work with a range of Brother printer(s). The black cartridge can print up to 4,500 pages and each color cartridge up to 4,000 pages. Compatible with Brother Printer(s): • Brother HL-L8360CDW the price for this item: Price: $438.00 & FREE Shipping Here are a few of the compatible competitors: 1) MxVol Compatible Brother TN-433 TN-431 TN433 Toner Cartridge 4-Pack (TN433BK, TN433C, TN433M, TN433Y), High Yield use for Brother MFC-L8900CDW HL-L8360CDW HL-L8360CDWT MFC-L8610CDW HL-L8260CDW Printer price: 47.99 2) E-Z Ink (TM) Compatible Toner Cartridge Replacement for Brother TN-433 TN433 TN433bk TN431 to use with HL-L8260CDW HL-L8360CDW MFC-L8900CDW MFC-L8610CDW (1 Black, 1 Cyan, 1 Magenta, 1 Yellow, 4 Pack) price: 48.99 Amazon's Choice! 3) myCartridge Compatible Toner Cartridge Replacement for Brother TN433 TN-433 TN431 Fit for Mfc-L8900Cdw Hl-L8360Cdw HL-L8360CDWT HL-L8260CDW MFCL8610CDW MFCL9570CDW (Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow) price: 48.99 4) ONLYU Compatible Toner Cartridge Replacement for Brother TN431 TN-431 TN433 TN-433 for HL-L8360CDW MFC-L8900CDW HL-L8360CDWT HL-L8260CDW MFCL8610CDW MFCL9570CDW Color Laser TN433 TN431 Printer (4PK) price: 47.79 and the list goes on. Brother: the market is telling you something! toner is not worth that much! it is ink! your competitors are eagerly demonstrating that not only is toner not worth that much, but *high-quality, highly-rated working* toner is not worth that much! it seems to be pretty easy for them to do! on several places on the internet, we (your customers) can see statements such as (paraphrasing from memory) "warning: only use brother official toners. using third party toners is not supported and could damage your printer or void your warranty" but brother, the price of the whole printer is $342.99! why would we buy your printer, and then buy your 438 dollar toner every few thousand pages? I could buy the highly-rated $50 variety, play it on the wild side for an evening, cross my fingers that nothing terrible happens ,and then if the printer catches on fire I could just buy a whole new unit! I would have saved money over buying the brother variety of toner! but I would have wasted my: time, energy, not to mention the whole hunk of burning plastic, emitting who knows what into the atmosphere. does any of that make sense on any level? and so I can say: I have been buying the third party toner, and the prints have been flawless! other than the problem with the *brother* drum. once I replaced the drum (buying the $150 replacement piece of plastic, unfortunately, from brother), the streaks went away while still using the third party toner. But there is larger problem, leading me to point #4 #4 here is the behavior I encounter: some of you are likely programmers or engineers. let's see if we can diagnose this bug. brother printer says *need toner, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow" user says "ok! I have a brand new pack!" user removes old toner, installs new toner, closes unit brother printer shows same error user says "hmm that's odd, this is a brand new set of toner cartridges. these have been working fine up until now user opens another new box of toner and pulls out a new set. "let's try these!" new toner registers as working! wow, the user says. that's a shame that now I have to waste these new toners! I guess brother was right, that the 3rd party toners are unreliable... but wait! the user gets an idea user opens printer again, removes new working replacement toners and reinstalls the first set he tried previously voila! upon closing the machine, the printer still has the updated supply levels from the second *working* set of toner! now, the printer is able to print 4,000 flawless color pages using the toner it had, moments previously, ruled out as a third party dud cartridge. okay wait a second. what's wrong with this picture? is this a software bug? hardware bug? is this a problem with the third party toner or brother's systems? I have been experiencing this behavior consistently. somehow, my toners became "out of phase" with the machine, and I needed a surrogate to trick the brother printer into recognizing them, only swapping them back out later so as not to waste the brand new cartridges! why am I doing this??? oh yeah, it is because brother literally has a mechanism built-in to their machine to brick non-brother toner cartridges that have been removed once previously from their machine. you plug the toner in, brother printer "whirs" for a few moments, and then that toner cartridge, full of ink, will no longer recognize as *new* to the brother machine (unless you get lucky). now, the surrogate toner cartridges won't work later when you try to use them as replacements once out of ink (unless you have surrogates for these) and the cycle continues! there are so many other small design flaws with this machine and its advertising. discovering and troubleshooting them has been a major headache. I am writing this here so that hopefully one of you is saved from buying brother and buys a different brand! final notes: -direct print from USB stick is an order of magnitude slower than the advertised pages per minute -the software interface to the direct print usb stick is MEGA slow, and always returns you to the top of the whole tree after clicking *forward* and then *back*. in other words, you better not hit the wrong key on the touch screen! or you might be scrolling back through your alphabetized USB stick contents for 5 minutes back to the letter "M" -PDF pages with any transparency take orders of magnitude longer to print on this machine -if you fill up the whole tray with paper, and then leave the printer printing with a long job, going to make lunch in the meantime, the printer, (if is has enough time to print the whole tray before you come back) will start spilling over the edge of the landing zone after about 1/3 of the tray has gone by, leaving your pages out of order strewn all over the floor. there is a little plastic flap you can use to mitigate some of this, but it barely works, making is so that 2/3 of the tray can be printed without major spillage. I duct taped a piece of cardboard to the plastic flap. now the pages won't spill, but the printer will literally JAM after too many pages have been printed. that is all I can think of for now... but wow. I feel like I accidentally took on a part time printer technician job after buying this thing. BUYER BEWARE *UPDATE, October 19, 2020* Make sure to save or photograph your original brother toner cartridges! Brother tech support will lock you out if you have a problem with your machine and they determine you are not using genuine brother cartridges. It doesn't matter what your technical problem is, or whether or not it is solvable without the genuine cartridges. It is in their tech support playbook to deny access to all users who can't read them a barcode. It does not matter whether or not your problem is actually related to the toner cartridges or the machine itself. If you can't read them the barcode on the top of their genuine toner cartridges, the brother tech support assistant will put up a wall, responding to everything: "the rest of my technical steps do not apply to you until you use genuine brother cartridges." I say: "okay, well, I don't have any of those. Would you please read me the steps so that we could try them? I know there is a chance they won't work, but if there is any chance at all they do, I would be so grateful! I would be able to get back to doing what I was doing before the machine made that loud buzzing sound and broke!" Brother support in a robotic monotone: "I am sorry for your inconvenience. the rest of my technical steps do not apply to you until you use genuine brother cartridges" in a loop about ten times. If I had one of the original cartridges (that came with the machine) or a photograph, I could have simply read them the barcode. I am almost positive that the subsequent steps could have at least *diagnosed* the issue, but the whole tech support staff refused to indicate what those might be. This occurred after waiting on hold on the phone for well over an hour! So rude! The color printing stopped working after the printer made a loud buzzing sound. I tried two new sets of cartridges and bought a whole new brother drum! nothing worked! If the new drum, and two sets of toner cartridges didn't work, my experience debugging tells me they are not the problem! Instead, there is something wrong with the machine! But I will never figure out what it is, since Brother won't help me! I think they need a new name for their brand. My real brother would never do that. BUYER BEWARE

I was looking for a color laser printer-only. I specifically didn't want an all-in-one. I have a scanner already and I plan to update it. Not having a scanner built in keeps the size relatively small. And I think it's the best looking printer I've seen. The printer is tall (compared to inkjet) so if you are cramped for vertical space it may not work. To my surprise the actual footprint is smaller than my old inkjet printer. I don't print often enough to prevent the inkjet printer from going through its diagnostics and cleaning cycles each time I print. I have to wait for 5 minutes every time. So waiting 20 or 25 seconds (from off to print) seems very fast to me. Setup was easy. I didn't install any software. I plugged the printer in to USB and the drivers loaded before I knew it was happening. The printer worked perfectly from a minute or two after I plugged it in. The printer woke up successfully every time. I was perfectly happy with USB, and I had read the reviews about frustrating WiFi connections, so I had not planned to use WiFi. But I was curious to see if it worked for me. It would be nice to print from my phone sometimes. The WiFi connection was successful first try and I have been using the WiFi connection since then. I have a Deco M5 mesh system router with one of three modules 10 feet from the printer. The packaging is as good as it gets. There are two sets of instructions for removing the packaging including the special (orange) packing on the inside of the machine. I really want to save the box in case I need to ship it some day but it's pretty large. I think that this printer is an excellent value. It's true that the printer comes with the lower priced TN-431 standard yield cartridges, but those four cartridges add up to the approximate price for the printer, so the printer is almost free. I have read that the TN-431 cartridges have an 1,800-page yield. I love the print quality, the speed, the fast warm-up, the quietness, and the ease of use with both WiFi and USB. Update Feb 2020: I use the printer often and I haven't had any issues.

When my wife and I found out that COVID was going to keep our kids home in 2020, I decided to ante up and get a "REAL" color printer. We've had many, many, many color inkjet printers from all-in-one scanner, fax, printers to dedicated print only printers. We've had mostly Epson's (even one that came free with the purchase of computer, one that was $20.00 if you bought ink, and one that was a $129.00 multifunction unit) and a portable Canon I used when I was on the road. The ink jet cartridges were ridiculously expensive and if you didn't print frequently, would end up drying out, causing you to buy more cartridges. There's a reason why inkjet printers are so cheap: the cartridges are soooo expensive and don't last very long. So the "front end" cost or up front cost of the printer is cheap, but the "back end cost," the cost of the cartridges, are expensive and recurring. So the total cost of ownership (TCO) for an inkjet printer is very expensive in the long run. Businesses and hospitals use laser printers for good reason: durability and efficiency. The cost per page of printing is much less than any inkjet. However, the front end costs are high, like this printer at almost $400.00, but the back end cost of toner cartridges, which can last almost 5,000 pages and don't dry out like inkjets if not used for a while, is much less (still expensive if you compared one inkjet cartridge to one laser toner, but much more economical in the long run). So the total cost of ownership (TCO) is much less than inkjets. The start up time is fairly quick, not as quick as an inkjet, but the printed pages per minute (PPM), is much faster if multiple pages are printed (duplex (two sided) printing is really fast compared to inkjet, too). It's a beast of a machine both in size and weight, so we have a dedicated print station at home where we keep our old multi-function inkjet (which we use for scanning mostly and holding paper), our cable modem, router, and surveillance DVR. It's been over a year since the pandemic started and our kids are back to in-class learning, but the printer is still going strong and we haven't even gone through the starter kit of toner that came with it. Now that's value...

After years of dealing with horrible printers, paper jams, small crappy paper trays and nasty inkjet cartridges that constantly need replacing, we decided to go with a color laser. We chose this Brother model and we love it! I just ordered a new box of toner cartridges and, although it was not cheap, I'm a satisfied customer because I noticed today just happens to be seven months to the day that we purchased this printer. That's seven whole months of printing from our home office with zero problems. ZERO. Print quality is great, which is to say very good and fine for our purposes - articles, work stuff and a few color photos. Not high enough quality for some I'm aware, but perfectly fine for most home offices is my best guess. Paper tray is deep and sturdy. It's so great to not be constantly adding more paper! Zero paper jams! Consistently excellent quality. Let me quickly address a few of the cons people mention about color laser printers vs inkjets, since they were things that made me hesitant to make the switch. 1. I read inkjets do better photos and color stuff. This color printer does not accept photo paper. This may be true, but I've found it's just easier to get prints I want to frame done professionally. Saves me aggravation and time to just order prints online. That's just me. So it wasn't a big sacrifice in my personal situation. If I want to print a color photo quickly I just print it on the regular paper and it does a really nice job. Frankly, I'd rather have this Brother laser printer RELIABLY print color photos very quickly on regular paper and sacrifice a degree of quality than deal with our old inkjets which ALWAYS seems to be out of ink, or paper, or both. Just my experience. 2. Price. Color lasers are more expensive than inkjets. True, but I'd rather pay more and have an efficient, reliable machine with cartridges that rarely need replacing. Worth it! 3. This laser printer does not copy, scan or fax. We realized we never used those options much anyway. Def not fax! If I want to scan something I use my phone. Not missing much. 4. Fast to print and very short warm up time, without all the whirring and clicking our old machine had to do before printing. A couple other things that made me choose this particular printer is that you can print via wi-fi/the cloud. I can print anything from my phone. So easy! And very reliable. Our last printer constantly lost the wi-fi signal. This one never does. Also, this model has a small touch screen that tilts up for easy reading. Fantastic feature that really adds to usability. All-in-all a very thoughtfully designed machine. It's actually a pleasure to use! Highly recommend for the home office.