https://consumerrights.wiki/Brother_ink_lockout_%26_quality_sabotage

Mixed messages coming from this write up.

Yeah printer at work suddenly decided it would not work unless there was oem brother cartridge in it. It was printing fine with third party ink the day before.

I recommended Brother to everyone and now BAM ! No more good company out there.

Oh, brother

Oh no, just got one similar to OP’s but the MFC series with extra copy/scan features after a great experience with the old equivalent Brother model I had for about 20 years with near zero problems!

I realized the new model was surprisingly cheap and with features I always wanted on the old one (which was now starting to show its age in a few ways), so I made the upgrade. Hope I won’t regret it.

Weird, I bought the sticker paper years before I got my laser printer because it said it was for ink jet. The ink jet stickers always smudged or ran. Once I got a laser printer, I tried printing a sticker and it worked great. No smudging or running.

Brother has enshittified and their inkvestment "ink tanks" aren't actually ink tanks at all, just ink cartridges with DRM chips. You cannot refill them with generic ink.

Actual ink tanks are Canon MegaTank, Epson EcoTanks, and HP Smart Tank, which explicitly allow you to refill with generic ink. Ink Tank printers do however require maintenance/replacement of a waste pad (basically a sponge).

Of the three, Canon's Megatanks don't have a waste pad at all and just randomly dump ink so you have to throw the printer out, Epson offers a replacement with a DRM chip (although cheap), and in a rare HP win the waste pads for their Smart Tanks are user serviceable (albeit somewhat labour intensive).

They make 90° power cables.

I haven’t purchased a new canon in years because my current TS5020 has been a workhorse for years… and I can buy a box with 5 complete sets of 3rd party ink carts (C,M,Y,K & BK) for $15 on Amazon… and they just work.

I’ve heard rumblings that they’re no longer as good, but as long as this continues to work well I’ll keep it. The current printer landscape is a mine field.

There's still fuckery afoot in HP's lineup. You really need to find the sweet spot of a unit that's old enough to predate their BS with non-HP toner, but new enough that consumables and parts are still readily available.

I rescued from e-waste a CP5225dn (2012 model, though mine was manufactured in 2017); an A3 colour printer with network (10/100, baby) and automatic duplex. It's not blazingly fast, but it has enough features, consumables are still readily available, and the print quality is honestly quite respectable.

As for firmware updates? Well there hasn't been one of those since 2015. Pretty sure they're not about to start releasing new versions now :)