my son got an M2 MacBook Air which runs the latest OS, I believe Monterey.

he needs to print and scan stuff and the machine did not see the 12 year old Brother HL-2280DW printer when connected via USB.

I went to the Brother's web site and they only have drivers up to macOS 10.15.

I downloaded those and they installed just fine, and the printer works fine. Both the printer and the scanner.

I am very pleased.

am I missing something?

A MacBook Air (laptop) and a Brother HL-2280DW wireless printer

Why not print over WiFi?

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Embarassing myself on the Internet since 1978.

More reliable over USB

When I got my M1, the brother driver wouldn't work. I ended up finding an updated one on the UK Brother site.

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The German word for contraceptive is “Schwangerschaftsverhütungsmittel”. By the time you finished saying that, it’s too late

I had to enable printer sharing on a spare mac to make my old Brother MFC-7345N visible to the new M1 MBP.

Haven't used Monterey or M1/M2 systems yet but I'm in the middle of transitioning from Snowleopard to Mojave and wanted to get all of my Brother printers/MFCs to work. The MFC-7820N from 2005 was only one that Apple didn't have built-in Mojave support for.

Brother's site ended support for that at 10.10 (Yosemite) and it still worked on Mojave, but Apple has had a number of software updates for Brother Printer support over the years, and I tried them in reverse order until I found one that still had that MFC, it was the 3.0 version from 2015. I always prefer getting printer drivers from Apple instead of Brother because Brother sometimes includes other stuff in their installer that I'm not interested in.

[support.apple.com]
[support.apple.com]

Does CUPS still exist in Monterey? Just wondering how far into the future I can still use these printers.

When I installed the software from Brother, it shows as CUPS in Monterey on M2 architecture

Brother drivers for older printers usually work in OSs later than the last one they were released for. Still using my 20+ year old HL-1670N on Mojave, the drivers were last updated for Yosemite. Only thing that has changed since the early versions was that originally it was used as a Postscript printer. At some point the driver was switched to CUPS and prints using the PCL emulation. Postscript sent to the printer just prints out the Postscript in text format. I haven't found a setting that will fix that. This may be related to having to print to it by IP address, connection by AppleTalk was removed in Snow Leopard.

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JoeH
Still using my 20+ year old HL-1670N on Mojave, the drivers were last updated for Yosemite.

That was almost my first Brother printer after having LaserWriters before that. In 2002 I had been looking at the 1670N for a while and just as I was getting ready to purchase it the HL-1870N came out, so I got that instead. Used it for 11 years and 200,000 pages and replaced it with a HL-6180DW.

The current HL-6180DW is at 9.5 years and 195,000 pages and I've got an identical replacement for it, new in the box for when it dies. When they were selling for about $200 new I picked up a spare. I really liked the 550 page paper tray so that I could feed it a full package of paper at a time, and it still worked with Snowleopard.

wow, you print a lot!

There can be issues installing Brother print drivers and other software, especially for scanners.

How to fix permissions issues with Brother software:

[discussions.apple.com]

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gadje
wow, you print a lot!

I print very little, my wife prints a lot. Telecommuting for as long as we've been married, long before a pandemic made it popular. And a lot of her work involved book manuscripts so she was printing chapters or entire books quite frequently.

Brother lasers (at least) have HP emulation that lets you use the built in PCL driver if you can't find a driver specific to your printer.

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Well, I just tried WiFi on my M1 MBA (still on Big Sur) and I can see the inkjet MFC-J835DW, I can install it as a printer, but no scanner. I tried both AirPrint and downloaded drivers from Bothers.

I need to see if I can scan via USB.

Too tired to connect the HL-2280DW to WiFi tonight. May try that in the weekend.

EDIT: my point is; AirPrint is not always sufficient.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/12/2022 08:12PM by gadje.

Quote
gadje
Well, I just tried WiFi on my M1 MBA (still on Big Sur) and I can see the inkjet MFC-J835DW, I can install it as a printer, but no scanner. I tried both AirPrint and downloaded drivers from Bothers.

I need to see if I can scan via USB.

Too tired to connect the HL-2280DW to WiFi tonight. May try that in the weekend.

EDIT: my point is; AirPrint is not always sufficient.

Just went through some of this on Mojave with a J825DW (and other MFCs). It offered to download the CUPS support direct from Apple, and when it completed the install there was no scanner. The fix was to reboot, then check with Image Capture to see if it can see the scanner (it always does for me), and if it does, delete the J8x5DW printer and add it again (using the CUPS driver), and then it will show the Scan option.

The reboot after the download is the missing step in the initial install, but Apple adds the printer right away, with no chance for the reboot.

My wife bought a Brother MFC-L2717DW from Sam's Club this year and we have yet to install any drivers on our Macs and all print fine. We've also scanned a few docs with the printer using Image Capture. I believe I set it up as a Network printer with 2010 iMac.

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Grateful11

Oh, Bother!

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