Brother HL-3170CDW Digital Color Printer with Wireless Networking and Duplex, Amazon Dash Replenishment Ready

I've only had this a week but can report it works like a champ. The photos, which I was expecting would look horrible, are much better than many people report. They're typically flat in saturation and tone...that's helped with good matte paper and vivid setting in printer properties.After years and years of messing with inkjets, though they do better photos, I'm done with them. This LED-based (not true laser) but laser-style printer set up beautifully, found my wireless booster here upstairs immediately and connected with a button push (WPS function, not all routers have that), prints beautiful text and the photo images as I said look certainly very good with a little tweaking. And they print fast...like almost text-page fast! Try a high res print on a consumer-level inkjet and see how long it takes.The key as always is follow the start up guide to the letter and make sure you check with brother if you're not sure which setup mode you want (mobile, wireless, usb, ethernet etc). Then just take it slow, step by step, and you won't have any problems.If you do, call Brother: their support is supposed to be very good.I will reset the start-up cartridges that come with the printer when it says they're out: apparently the printer is set up to count pages, not actual toner usage.There's a five-star review fairly recently that tells you exactly how to reset the carts so you get the full amount of toner in them...it'll add 100s of pages to your capability.Here's my summary of how to do the ink cartridge reset process to save you time reading a bunch of reviews:toner reset tips for Brother HL-3170CDW (below are comments from a number of reviewers)Great printer, but the toner life is based (as far as I can tell) solely on pages printed. So if you print x number of pages even with only a single dot of color on it, the printer will count that as a page printed in that color. My starter black toner quit after 250 pages.Here is how to fix this -1. open the top of the printer, just a little bit, not all the way. leave it propped open for this to work.1. someone else disagrees: "Seems you have to open the lid all the way until it clicks."2. another reviewer: "At first the printer didn't accept the "Secure" and "X Cancel" keypress, but did after I power cycled it."3. turned printer off/back on and repeated the simultaneous pressing of "security" and "X-cancel,"1. that seemed to do the trick2. Hit the round button at the top left corner. (on/off button)3. Simultaneously press the "Secure" and "X Cancel" buttons.1. This puts printer into special service mode.4. Use the + and - buttons to scroll to whichever toner you want to reset. Each color should have three options which let you tell the machine what type of 'new' toner cartridge is installed5. "Y.TNR-STR" is yellow starter, "Y.TNR-HC" is high capacity and "Y.TNR.STD" is standard .6. hit the "OK" button to get an "OK reset cancel" type screen.7. Hit the up arrow to reset. Now you're back to printing in style!another reviewer: purchase a replacement cartridge in the meantimeso that you will have one on hand when you do run outconsidering the toner measurement level is practically useless.KUDOS from another reviewer:I have used this method twice and STILL have not replaced a cartridge!GOOD LUCK!

I just received this printer yesterday, so it will be a while before I can comment on longevity- if I have any issues I will come back and update this review. As far as setup and usage out of the box go, though, my experience thus far has been flawless. The wireless network was easy to set up- I did use a USB connection for setup, but have since done all printing over the wifi network with zero issues.I was not pleased with the color from the printer at first- the prints looked dull and muddy, even at the "Best" print setting in my Mac's print dialog. After a bit of time on Google, though, I found an article on Brother's site[...] (it's article number faq00002716_000 if Amazon removes my link) that outlined how to adjust the density settings for each toner individually as well as the brightness, contrast, and saturation. To access these settings, you have to be using either the Brother print driver for Windows or the Brother CUPS driver for MAC and NOT the PostScript driver. Mac will try to install the PS driver by default, so be sure to choose the CUPS driver in the "Print Using" section of the printer install screen (it's a drop-down box near the bottom of the dialog) when setting up your printer. Once the proper driver is installed, you can access the advanced color settings. Also, be sure to set the print quality to "Fine," otherwise you'll see some of the jagged edges and pixellation that other reviewers have posted about. I have saved all of my custom settings in a print profile so they're easily accessed for future photo prints.For photos, I found that the "Vivid" setting worked well. My printer leaned slightly toward the red side of the spectrum, so I set the red to -2, and I've also played with bumping up the saturation a bit overall- your settings may be different, and you'll have to play around a bit to find what works for you. You do still see some of the banding that you'd see with any laser printer, but overall for photos that are not for gallery display this printer suits my needs very well- it is definitely better than expected given some of the reviews that I read prior to purchasing.I did have the printer jam once while feeding in a sheet of labels through the manual feed. This turned out to be user error, though- for thicker materials, another reviewer recommended opening the back pass-through door and opening up the detents that allow thicker materials to pass (switch them to the envelope setting). This will allow thicker papers to pass straight through the machine and not have to wind up through the normal output tray, which is where they jam. After doing this, I ran many more sheets of labels (I was printing some stickers for my planner on full-sheet label paper in order to Print and Cut on my Silhouette) with absolutely no issue.The price I paid for this printer is only a little more than what I paid for a Brother monochrome laser printer about a year ago. That printer doesn't print in color or have duplexing (yes, I have used the duplexer, and it is fabulous!), so I consider this printer a bargain!