Brother MFC-J480DW is a piece of ****!
- Thread starter estes53
- Start date
- Joined
- Jun 18, 2020
- Messages
- 8
Must have a lemon. That was my daily printer/scanner for a couple years. Still works fine but I retired it as I upgraded to a much faster MFC8900.
You obviously got the odd lemon. I have been using that model for over 3 years with refillable cartridges and until I monkeyed around with it a little, no problems. BTW... I'm 77, and have retired from the computer manufacturing industry, working around printers since 1983... I still don't understand 'em.
I mentioned I was having a problem with my MFC-J480DW. After inquiring on more than one "forum", I solved the problem myself. Though I have been working with built in maintenance and diagnostic routines for many years, I still neglect to read the books that come with the stuff (is that a common man thing, or is it just me?). Of course I never called the manufacturer's tech support because the warranty on the printer was invalidated the minute I set it up by installing refillable cartridges from the first time I powered it up. I know they won't talk to people like me, and most of them are useless anyway. Most of them don't want to talk to anybody that isn't interested in buying a new printer. I opened up the owner's manual for the first time and went to the troubleshooting section. There it was... get into the maintenance section of the control panel, and do a couple of print tests. HA! The Black was trashy... Run the nozzle cleaning routine... WHAT? Doesn't the printer run nozzle cleaning regularly all by itself? YA!, but that routine apparently isn't thorough enough. One pass of the maintenance nozzle cleaning and the problem was fixed and my 3+ year old Brother prints like a new one. My total costs for printing, scanning, and copying as much as I want, as often as I want has been approximately $100.00. Unfortunately, they don't make that one any more. When all else fails, RTFB.
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