Originally Posted by
Curt Harms
$180 for a Brother HL-3170CDW is a nice price. If you're willing to take a bit of a risk, Walmart sells the same machine refurbished for $158.50. We just bought one. It was a bit of a hassle, it came with a black toner/drum assembly in place of one of the color assemblies. Brother sent the correct assembly no problem. Ink Jets are a problem if used infrequently like Jim says, the ink may dry in the print head and require one or more cleaning cycles which can use up quite a bit of ink. The only downside to color lasers over inkjets besides $$$ is photo quality; lasers generally aren't as good as a good inkjet. Color graphics are not bad by any means but the colors tend toward a little dark.
Max memory on the Brother is 128 MB, A comparable Canon machine can support up to 1 GB. I wonder if that has something to do with the graphics quality. As far as connections with the Brother, it supports USB, wired ethernet and wifi. You can have USB and one of the networking connections in use at the same time. 3rd party toner and drums are readily available. The Brother laser is not small if that matters.