HL-3180CDW
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Brother products have been changing the way people work, and play, for years. Our reliable, high-quality, feature-rich printers, scanners, labelers, and more are hard at work in homes everywhere. Whatever your need, Brother products are always "At your side."
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Sommer Tynes on Amazon
7 years ago
03/27/2016, 13:45 PM
Husband had it hooked up and running in no time ...
Husband had it hooked up and running in no time. Getting wireless set up was hardest part, but still total of thirty minutes for entire process.
BigDeal on Amazon
7 years ago
03/07/2016, 08:45 AM
Love that the pages no longer curl and it prints ...
Replaced an old inkjet. Love that the pages no longer curl and it prints double sided copies. Copies are beautiful. Does a great job with photos even on standard 20# paper. I thought it was going to be way to big seeing the carton size when it came, but most of the size was protective styrofoam. Fits in the space of my old inkjet, just taller. A great buy for only $299. It's fast and prints wirelessly too. And runs on my iMac with El Capitan 10.11.3. Setup took me about an hour as I really didn't know what I was doing. Seemed easier to move around than it was made out to be. Just turn the box upside down, slit the tape open on the bottom of the box, fold the flaps back and place upright on the floor. Then just lift the cartoon off. Don't need two people to get it out of the box. Very happy with this purchase.
qfg on Amazon
7 years ago
01/26/2016, 11:04 AM
I feel like I finally have a printer
Moved away from Canon InkJet to this device. First of all, it's significantly bigger than my inkjet, about 3 time its size. But boy, I feel like I finally have a printer. It can take 10x the ink and 10x the paper. It works flawlessly and produces great prints. Finally, it's connected to the cloud in various ways so that I can print from my phone and scan directly to my Dropbox or Google Drive folder. My Canon was so fickle but this thing is a real deal. Couldn't be happier.
newbud on Amazon
7 years ago
01/25/2016, 17:57 PM
We're pretty impressed with this unit
We're pretty impressed with this unit! I don't make a lot of colored copies, but I did need to print some photos on plain paper for an event. They turned out so crisp and great! The black and white is perfect as well. This seems like a great machine. So far, we love it. Very nice to be able to use it wirelessly as well.
Leah Maines, best-selling, award-winning author, actor, and editor on Amazon
7 years ago
01/03/2016, 17:20 PM
Great! And super easy to install and operate.
I love this printer. It is very easy to install, and the quality of the printing is very good. I'm still using the ink that came with the printer, so I feel like the ink lasts pretty long too. One of my favorite features is the scanner/copier. It is super easy and fast. It reminds me of one of those old time copiers that were so easy to use--just push the button and it is done! The machine is a bit large and heavy but I would expect that with a machine of this quality.
BookWorm on Amazon
7 years ago
12/18/2015, 15:09 PM
Great Quality, Easy to Set Up
I run a small business, and I need a reliable printer. I previously had a Lexmark and the print cartridges were costing me a fortune. This Brother color printer comes with big toner cartridges reminiscent of the old Xerox cartridges that lasted forever! There are four cartridges in all, and they are easy to install--they just drop right in.
Set up: This printer comes with a CD for full functions from your computer screen (scanner, fax, etc.), but the printer itself fairly well sets itself up. It has a big touchscreen functions window that makes the initial setup (language, date, wireless pickup, etc.), and is pretty much self-explanatory. The printer also comes with a quick setup booklet that will guide the owner through setup as well. Very easy, even for non-tech folk like myself. It picked up my router's address instantly and almost installed itself. Out of the box, I had this printer installed and printing wirelessly in about twenty minutes.
It has easy scanning functions that run from the touchscreen or computer interface and produces very good copies and scans with fairly fast output. The front-loading slide-out paper tray is easy to access and load, and takes both letter and legal sized paper.
One thing: although this is a medium-sized printer, it is very heavy--about forty pounds. It took two people to get it up on my desk surface, but now that it's there, it would take a tornado would blow it away, I believe. Nice and sturdy, that's for sure.
All in all, I am very pleased with this printer and look forward to using it for years to come.
Baazumi on Amazon
7 years ago
12/16/2015, 12:04 PM
Needs Improvement!
This is the first time we have used a Brother office product, usually we stick with HP and/or Canon products which have performed well in the past. The machine is quite heavy, about fifty pounds, and it took two of us to unpack it and move it to its desired place. Setting up the machine was pretty easy for wireless networking and comes with a CD ROM, and if you get stuck one of the best features is that Brother offers free tech support for the life of the machine. Another feature that impresses us is the two sided automatic printing which is great to have in an office and helps save paper, as well as standard letter size and legal size printing. The printer has a large LCD display that is easy to use (and see) and the option of color scanning is a great feature for those who do a lot of artwork for their business, and the black and white printing is crisp, clear, and sharp. Printing speeds are fast and the machine has a 250 paper capacity, and the cartridges come with the same choice as our small HP printer, regular printing cartridge and extra large cartridge, (we have always found it's much more cost effective to buy the larger cartridges). The Brother also faxes but keep in mind that faxing was developed for analog phone lines and not VOID lines and Brother has a lot of information about this if you Google it, which we did. What we didn't like is that the machine is very loud when turned on. Also the paper doesn't come fully out of the machine when copied so you have to put your hand about 3-4 inches inside to pull the rest of the paper out. These two complaints indicate to me that the machine has not been fully considered and tested. Why would anyone in this day and age want a machine that sounds like a car starting up and why would Brother not notice that you have to place your hand inside the machine slot where the paper comes out about 3-4 inches.
J. Peterson on Amazon
7 years ago
12/13/2015, 02:30 AM
Easy to set up and use; great results
The Brother HL-3180CDW color printer/scanner is one of those rare products (for me) that immediately impressed me as being "right."
It was very easy to set up and get running, and it worked immediately. The whole process took me about 10 minutes, of which the hardest part was lifting its 50 pound bulk up and out of the shipping box. I didn't need or use a USB cable for this - the wireless connection worked fine. I did run the installation utility on my PC from the included CD to load the appropriate device drivers, but then finished the installation from the printer's touch-screen control panel to manually configure a static IP address which is what I prefer to use on my home network
I admit to approaching the Brother with a bit of skepticism. I've been a diehard HP LaserJet user since my first LaserJet IIIP; I have tried to avoid the need for printing stuff in color especially due to the cost of color consumables; I generally don't like multi-function devices; and I was concerned about the amount of time required to print the first page. So I started out with a "show me" attitude, but after a few hours of using the Brother for various jobs, I was very happy with all aspects of the product. Let's look at each of these:
HP vs. Brother: Long ago HP was the clear market leader and standard-setter, but the HP units have become "cheaper" while the others have long since caught up or surpassed HP. The Brother has a pleasing appearance; is easy to use; and just feels substantial (in contrast to the cheap, plastic construction of recent HP products). The Brother has nothing to apologize for.
Printing in color: I can still mostly live without this, but more and more stuff is in color these days, and I admit that it is nice to have good color printing capability (see my last paragraph). I have had an old color ink jet printer around for the odd color job, but it is glacially slow - and takes up space - so have high-quality color printing available is nice. The cost of the consumables is still somewhat of an issue, though. This unit, with its 4 included standard-capacity cartridges, sells for around 300 dollars on Amazon, but replacing those 4 cartridges with genuine Brother replacements will run about 200 dollars, and more like 260 if you opt for the high-yield cartridges. So like most color printers these days, you're getting the mechanism for an initially low cost that obscures the total lifetime cost of ownership. A few other notes about the consumables:
- While researching the cost of replacement cartridges, I was puzzled by why the 3 color cartridges are offered in both standard and high-capacity versions, while the black cartridge is only offered in standard - that is backwards of what I would have expected. The explanation is that the standard black cartridge is rated for more pages (2500) than even the high-capacity color ones (2200).
- Each of the cartridges comes with quite a bit of bright orange plastic protective covering that you need to remove and discard. From all 4 cartridges this yielded quite a mass of material for the garbage. If you are worried about saving the planet, this might be a concern. My HP laser printers always used cartridges that were activated simply by pulling out a thin strip of material, in contrast to this.
- Besides the 4 cartridges, there are several other consumables that apparently will need to be replaced eventually, including a drum unit set after 15,000 pages, a belt unit, and a waste toner box. Just part of the additional complexity of a color printer, I guess.
Multi-function device: I do a lot of printing and quite a bit of document scanning, so having both functions in one unit seemed appealing - provided they both worked well. And in this case, they do. The scanner is a manual-feed flatbed unit just under the top cover. Compared to the Canon scanners that I have been using, this one is *much* faster, and yields color scans that are much higher quality and with much smaller PDF file sizes. So at this point it looks like I will be able to free up some desk space by replacing my scanner and B&W laser printer with this single unit. Oh, and the Brother also has lots of various fax capabilities.... does anyone use fax anymore?
Amount of time to print first page: Compared to black & white laser printers, this is an issue for all of the color LED or laser printers I have ever used. I admit that I am impatient: When I press print in an application, I expect stuff to start printing immediately. My recent LaserJets have all been really good about this, but I have a Dell multi-function color unit in a remote office and it takes forever (20-30 seconds) to start printing. The Brother is spec'ed at 16 seconds for this, but despite some lag, it's actually OK for me.
Some additional comments and observations:
* Mine came with firmware level R, which I immediately updated to the latest level S by downloading and executing a program from Brother's web site. This was very simple and easy to do, like everything else with this unit.
* After the Brother finishes printing, it remains on for a few minutes, emitting a low amount of audible noise. I work in a very quiet office and hate any kind of noise from fans and blowers, so this was a little bit annoying at first, but its not all that loud and does stop fairly soon.
* I really love that it can connect wirelessly, which means one less cord in the rats-nest of cords to deal with and one less USB port to use up or one less ethernet cable and port to deal with.
* To help you get started with the scanner, Brother throws in a special edition of PaperPort (I believe version 12). I didn't install that because I use PaperPort 14 for my document management thus didn't want to mess things up for it. I was very pleased that the Brother's scanner appeared automatically in PaperPort's scanner list, and worked perfectly with no further configuration or fussing around. (Side note: I have used PaperPort for all my PDF document management for many years going back to version 9. I'm now usingPaperport Professional 14.0, and even though many reviewers have had bad experiences with it, it has worked very well for me. I operate a nearly paperless office, and relentlessly scan all paperwork into PaperPort to get it off my desk or file folders, and also to make in searchable via PaperPort's automatic OCR.)
Once I got it all set up, it was put to immediate good use: My spouse had just finished creating this year's Christmas letter that included a number of color photos, so I ran them off on the Brother. Print quality was superb and the whole batch of letters printed very rapidly.
4.7 stars, which rounds up to 5.