I wanted a copier for the print shop because I like to make zines the old-fashioned way, but it's hard to get a plain-old copier these days. Most copiers are leased, and huge so the only option I could find in a desktop-sized copier was to buy an old one and restore it. That's cool but I have enough projects that are a stack of dependent projects and if I'm ever going to actually finish the zine I want to make with this thing I probably shouldn't start with a broken old copier that I have to make my own parts for.
The closest thing I could find to what I was looking for are laser printers that are really more of a printer/scanner combo than a proper copier, but I found a Brother for about $200 and decided to give it a shot.
It's a surprisingly compact machine which is nice because we want room for more interesting things in the print shop.
Maybe it's dumb, but I love helpful legends like this, I can never remember which way I'm supposed to feed things into a printer/scanner.
It was very easy to unbox and setup, and once it was plugged in I could stick a piece of paper in it, drop a piece of art on the glass and hit the green button to produce a B&W copy, beaute!
The controls are basic and very copier-like, and if this was all it could do I'd be perfectly satisfied. That said, it's also a printer and a scanner so I set it up on the network to see if all that would work as well.
Getting it connected to the WiFi network was simple even using the small display and limited buttons on the control panel, no apps, no setup programs, yay!
Printing from ElementaryOS pretty much worked like magic. The printer showed-up on it's own in the Printers control panel, and I was able to print a page from LibreOffice with little more than pressing CTRL-P and clicking "Print".
One weird caveat: I wasn't able to get a "Test Page" from the Printers control panel to print. The job simply never completes. I wasn't able to figure out why, but I know that I've had problems printing graphics from some programs (in particular some PDF's) so maybe it has something to do with that?
I was able to print single-sided and double-sided with equal ease. I haven't tried manually feeding anything like envelopes through the slot in the front but other than that printing is as trouble-free as I've ever seen it from Linux. I was also able to print from my phone (iOS), so that's a nice bonus.
What about scanning? I wasn't even sure what to use to scan something from Linux over the network because I don't think I've ever used a scanner from Linux since the days when they were tethered directly to the computer. I did some poking-around in Elementary's AppCenter and found a program called "Document Scanner" that looked simple enough, so I gave it a shot.
Document Scanner (aka Simple Scan) by Bartosz
It started-up and found the Brother automatically. I threw the printout from an earlier test on the glass, clicked "Scan" and in a few seconds I had a scan of the page. This worked so slick that I decided to push it and loaded the page into the auto-feeder thing on top of the Brother. Clicking "Scan" again did nothing, but looking under the "hamburger menu" I found an option labled "All Pages From Feeder". With that option selected clicking "Scan" grabbed the page from the feeder and scanned it in one step.
I know that this is what these machines are supposed to do, but I'm so used to them failing to do anything that I'm completely amazed that it does anything beyond the most fundamental things.
There's more to explore with this machine but as I said at the beginning, all I really need is a copier and it looks like this Brother fits the bill. What's left is to see how it holds up over time, but based on my experience with other basic Brother printers I expect it will at least outlive the software that it depends on.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026