Brother MFC-L3780CDW/MFC-L3720CDW Printer Review

The build quality is superb. It's made mainly from hard, dense plastic. The input and output trays are well-designed, with sturdy tabs to hold paper in place. You can easily access the sheet rollers through the cartridge bay or via a port at the back of the printer. Unfortunately, the control screen is at a fixed angle, so it can be hard to see if you aren't looking at it directly.

The Brother MFC-L3780CDW is a laser printer, so you don't need to worry about printheads clogging the way you do with inkjet models. There are a few components that need periodic replacement, but, thankfully, these items are easily accessible and readily available from the manufacturer.

• Cartridges/Drum Units: You can access the cartridges by lifting the top of the printer and simply pulling them out of their respective slots. As seen here, the drum units aren't integrated with the cartridges, so you have to replace them separately. They have an estimated lifespan of 20,000 pages. You can only buy them in packs of four from the manufacturer, seen here. This can be problematic if one of the four wears out prematurely or gets damaged.
• Belt Unit: The belt unit is under the cartridges and the drum. You can remove it by pulling the green release lever. It has an estimated service life of 50,000 pages; you can get a replacement here.
• Waste Toner Box: The waste toner box is under the belt and removable by pulling on the green handle. It also has an estimated service life of 50,000 pages. You can buy a replacement from the manufacturer here.

The fuser unit and paper feeding kit also need periodic replacement, though it's best to enlist the services of a professional to replace these components since doing so requires some disassembly. If you need to clear out any paper jams, you can access the sheet rollers by either going through the door at the back of the printer, removing the cassette tray, or by lifting the scanner.

See the user manual here.

The Brother MFC-L3780CDW's display is excellent, with a few caveats. It's relatively large, touch-sensitive, and is responsive to inputs. The virtual keyboard that comes up whenever you need to enter passwords or punch in file names for scans has large keys, so you won't accidentally press the wrong symbol. That said, while it has good viewing angles, it's in a fixed position, so it can be hard to see if you're seated.

This printer's cartridge system is excellent. Its standard TN229 cartridges are more than sufficient for regular printing at home, though if you're regularly printing at high volumes for office work, you'll probably want to invest in high-yield TN229XL, which have an advertised yield of 3,000 black or 2,300 color prints, or super high-yield TN229XXL cartridges, which have an advertised yield of 4,500 black or 4,000 color prints.

Unfortunately, the printer won't output pages with an empty black toner cartridge, though you can still scan documents. On the upside, you'll have ample warning that you're running low; you'll see a banner notification on the screen when you're running low, which links to a real time estimate of remaining toner levels as well as a splash page for its Refresh ink subscription program. The printer will also provide a multi-step slideshow showing you how to replace a toner cartridge (1, 2, 3).

This printer has a scanner with a remarkably broad range of features. It has an automatic document feeder with automatic single-pass duplex scanning capability, making it easy to process long and two-sided documents. Additionally, the scanner's lid has hinges that can extend to accommodate thicker documents or books. The printer has optical character recognition; however, you need to initiate the scan from your computer if you want to save the scan as a searchable PDF. Initiating an OCR scan from the printer only allows you to save the file as a txt, HTML, or RTF file.

The scan quality is superb. Scanned text is very legible, and fine details are clearly visible. There's also less obvious graininess when looking at highly saturated areas compared to scans from the Brother MFC-L3770CDW Laser.

Note: The sample scan's color reproduction isn't the same as scans from other printers we've tested, as it has a slightly greenish tinge. This isn't an issue with the printer but rather the sample document itself. We're looking to resolve this issue in testing. As such, we've scored the scan quality without consideration for color accuracy.

• Phone cable
• Power cable
• Quick setup guide
• 4x DR229CL drum units
• 4x TN229 starter toner cartridges (pre-installed in drum units)
• 1x black
• 1x cyan
• 1x magenta
• 1x yellow
• Not shown:
• Waste toner box (pre-installed)
• Belt (pre-installed)

The Brother MFC-L3780CDW is a corded printer with no battery.

The black-and-white print quality is superb. Printed text is sharp, and fine details are clearly visible. There isn't much graininess, and lighter colors, like yellow, that have been converted to grayscale don't look very faint, with clear delineation to similar shades.

The print quality of color documents is also fantastic. Printed text is legible, and you can easily identify most fine details. Color reproduction is also fairly accurate, especially compared to the Brother MFC-L3770CDW Laser, which tended towards over saturation.

Printing artifacts might appear when using the 'Document: Mixed' setting. If you look at the sample print outputted using this setting (as opposed to the 'Document: Standard' mode sample above), you can see a faint pink rectangle around the pie chart. This same sort of artifact was present on sample prints from the Brother MFC-L3770CDW Laser. Let us know in the discussions below if you have this printer and encounter the same issue.

The cost-per-print is impressively low, though far from earth-shattering compared to a lot of other high-end business-grade laser printers. Replacement cartridges are fairly close in price to the TN-227 toner cartridges used by the Brother MFC-L3770CDW Laser, but the printer itself is a little more expensive.

Printing speed is great. The printer is a little slow to warm up, but once it does, it can output pages very quickly. We could only get close to its advertised output of 31 PPM (black) when connected via USB, which nets a print speed of 30 PPM. Printing over Wi-Fi drops its black-only print speed to 20 PPM due to buffering. That said, your experience may vary. If you want a color laser printer with faster printing speeds, check out the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4301fdw/4301fdn.

The MFC-L3780CDW and Brother MFC-L8390CDW have a 30-sheet multi-purpose tray, and they support an additional (optional) 250-sheet input tray, which you can buy here. The Brother MFC-L3720CDW, MFC-L3760CDW, and MFC-L3765CDW variants don't support the optional input tray and only have a single-sheet manual feeder instead of a multi-purpose tray.

This printer's main paper tray accepts plain paper, thin paper, thick paper, and recycled paper. The multi-purpose tray can take all of those paper types along with bond, label, thick/thin/standard envelope, and glossy paper too.

This printer tends to curl sheets at a higher rate than other laser printers, and unlike some alternatives, those sheets tend to stay curled instead of straightening out over time.

This printer has a poor color gamut. It can't produce bright, saturated colors, and it struggles with darker shades of green and yellow. Its narrow color range makes photos look flat and lacking in detail. There's plenty of banding in the lighter shades, and color transitions look very grainy due to the printing pattern.

Color accuracy is poor. Most colors look different from the original source. Ultimately, this won't be an issue if you're adding a pop of color to a document, but it does make it a poor option for photo printing or graphic design.

This printer is bad at reproducing small details. It prints at a low resolution, and like most laser printers, the printing pattern is very noticeable and causes the loss of fine details, to a greater degree than the older Brother MFC-L3770CDW Laser. The default print resolution (labeled 'Fine') is 2400 dpi. The 'Regular' resolution is 600 dpi; here's a sample printed at that resolution.

Note: The suggested variety of glossy paper for this printer is NewPage Futura Laser Gloss 80 lb Text paper. Unfortunately, this kind of paper is very difficult to find, with the only accessible format being highly expensive 11 x 17 sheets. The limited availability of compatible glossy paper, combined with the fact that this printer isn't really designed for photo printing, led us to set the 'Glossy Paper' result fields to 'No'.

This printer can print files directly off of a USB flash drive. You can see a close-up view of each of the printer's ports below:

• Front USB
• Phone line input
• AC in

The Brother MFC-3780CDW and MFC-L8390CDW support NFC, allowing you to connect an NFC-enabled device by tapping it against the printer. The Brother MFC-L3720CDW and the Brother MFC-L8340CDW lack Ethernet support. Additionally, the MFC-3720CDW can't print from a USB flash drive.

The Brother Mobile Connect app is superb. You can print and scan documents from the app directly to your mobile device, even when you're away from home, manage your Refresh EZ Print toner subscription, or purchase toner cartridges.

You don't need to install any drivers to print or scan on Chrome OS and macOS devices, but you do on Windows devices. You can download the drivers here.