The scanner was expensive, but really nice. And it worked perfectly with MacOS 'capture' application that existed on Snowleapard (10.6).
However, Apple removed TWAIN support in MacOs Lion (10.7), and Brother refused to release updated drivers. The only way to use the scanner was using the horribly bloated third party scanning software, that was basically useless for document scanning (but it did allow you to draw a hat on the photo of your dog!). Up to this day they still market the scanner as 'MacOS compatible'.
Ironically, my scanner is now an expensive paperweight. Which makes it double useless, since I have no paper.
It's an application that has its own (reverse-engineered) drivers for many USB scanners that doesn't depend on the system having support for it. I've used it and it works perfectly, though the UI is quite complex at first glance due to the amount of various configuration options it offers.
I remember also being quite annoyed that I had to spend more money on a VueScan license, just because Brother refused to release a compatible driver for a scanner that was then still sold as new and 'MacOS compatible'. This was not a cheap scanner, the least they could have done was to compensate the license cost of the piece of software that made their product usable.
Most scanner makers wouldn’t release new drivers, so VueScan was the only way to get often quite expensive hardware working again.
I've have old ScanJet 3600C and it's still works flawless. But no drivers for new macOS versions.
And short research found this: http://www.sane-project.org
I guess I kind of lost my sanity with SANE ;-)
Anyway, it wasn't a solution, extremely hacky at most. Not something what you want to spend your time on if you buy a scanner that is supposed to work with your OS.
Build quality has gone down a little but so have all brands.
Recently got a Xerox, it's better.
I do have a LaserJet at home; all I did was to connect it to the network and it popped up in the printer dialogs on Linux and Mac machines. On Linux, standard cups+hplip that's in the default package set in most distributions does the job.
> Most Linux distributions include HPLIP with their software, but most do not include the plug-in
Due to recommendation here on HN, I've been checking Brother laser printers. They also require installing a proprietary package from the manufacturer, and a proprietary tool for the print queue setup.
It wasn't the lowest-end model but it wasn't super-expensive either. I think the next model down was the same but wouldn't take PostScript.
Can anyone confirm, that this is not necessary and it works OOB with software shipped with distributions? (I need it to work with Ubuntu 20.04 and future LTS releases, preferably without anything that would bite me two years down the line).
Scanning is more difficult to tell but it may well work using SANE's AirScan driver, called eSCL as it looks like this model supports AirScan/AirPrint scanning. This shouldn't need the proprietary drivers as I understand it. The next models up (MFC-273x and higher) look like they support scanning and saving directly to an FTP server or CIFS/SMB share on your network which wouldn't need a driver so that might be a more surefire option.
Year ago, the plugin was needed for the scanning. Today, it works out of the box with Fedora 33, no plugin (I'm using eSCL mode).
Fedora 33 ships with sane 1.0.31, sane-airscan 0.99.18 and hplip 3.20.9.
The only thing that has worked (at all) has been the instructions and software from http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/, even if the site looks way too sketchy to my liking. Recently, though, even those drivers have started misbehaving and do not print the last centimeter or two on the page---the solution is to select upside down printing in the print settings.
My lesson: avoid consumer companies.