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We are experiencing a very high failure rate with fusers in the 8950DW MFC and 6180DW printers. The output gets very fuzzy and has a shadow. Often, the devices will start to have paper jams. We have been getting these units repaired under warranty of after warranty has expired, but our time is definitely not free. Some of these units fail before they get to 30,000 pages printed.

Has this issue been resolved? I just had a 6 month old unit do this.

We have used Brother printers and MFC’s for well over 10 years. Previous generations of devices from brother would easily go to 100,000 and sometimes to 200,000 prints. I am very happy with the firmware and drivers on these new units, but we can’t continue to use Brother products if the quality is not improved.

1 Spice up
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Hi Jim,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. If you could direct message us your contact information, we are happy to have someone from support reach out to help you through this issue.

Thanks!

Tara

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I am not talking about a particular unit, but a pattern of failures that is either a design flaw or a manufacturing defect. I would like to know if there has been an engineering change to manufacturing that will prevent these early failures. I

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I have an update for you, can we private message and I can fill you in?

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Hi

We are also seeing a pattern of fuser units failing with 6180DW printers

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Brother is aware of this issue and will replace the fusers after the 1 year warranty. But, you will have to take the device to an authorized Brother repair shop.

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Thanks for the reply

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Hi Mike, feel free to message me directly if you have any further questions on the issue or warranty process.

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We have 2 6180 DW Printers. When each printer prints around 30K Pages the quality of prints is really, really bad. I did fuser replacement which was covered under warranty. We have some older (7 year old) Brothers and have never replaced fusers in those units. Not sure what Brother will do (if will) to fix it.

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Same fuser issues with a 6180DW printer here, only about 25K pages on this one but it’s about 1 year out of warranty. Hoping Brother will replace the fuser, on hold with them right now…

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The 6180s are great printers but I can no longer recommend them in good conscience due to the problems with the fuser film sleeves and the paper jam / blurred prints when the sleeve begins to lock up. If brother has an update, I think it is in their best interest (and ours) to post it instead of private messaging people individually. Most of us on here are working in the IT world and this will (and already does) affect brand confidence and potential enterprise sales.

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I have been recommending Brother machines for years.

The original concept was to replace the $10,000 contract machines with these “smaller” $1,000 machines.

We said that even if they only lasted a year we would still break even. In some offices we bought two and put them side by side. Everyone loved the fact that they could print at one and photocopy at another but when it was busy at one they could switch to the other.

Something went wrong when we went to the 8950 machines in all locations.

The offices go through a fuser for every drum.

The office cannot lug a a machine to a repair depot every couple months.Brother has sent out a tech to replace the fuser but this ends when the one year warranty is up.

Has Brother been able to correct this issue?

If we buy an extended warranty will Brother still come and fix the machine or will it get lost in a repair depot some where?

Really want to keep using Brother but this machine has proved to be a lemon.

Tom

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It is also strange that Brother hasn’t come out with an updated model. This one has been out for quite some time. I had hoped that they would fix the issues and have a new model by now.

We are now evaluating a Lexmark MX511. It doesn’t do network scanning very well, but we are seldom using that in most places.

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Jim9456:

Would love to see your conclusions.

The offices are after me to recommend a replacement for Brother products.

I feel like I am selling my daughter to the gypsies, but Brother has not provided a direction that we can go.

(I should have sensed this internal problem with a very rude support manager that just didn’t understand I was on the same team)

Tom

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Well for our 6180DW, Brother has offered to replace the fuser unit at no cost to us despite the unit being out of warranty by 1 year, so I do give them credit for that. The bad part is we have to bring the printer to an Authorized Service Center, but luckily there is an ASC ~20min away from here.

Time will tell if the replacement fuser ends up having the same issue…

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gp5102:

We have been getting our’s fixed out of warranty also, but the nearest service center to us is about 45 min away. That on top of all the time and hassle to remove and replace a unit just doesn’t make it worth while.

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Yeah I hear ya…lots of screwing around for an issue that should have been caught during the design phase before releasing to consumers…

Just wondering- have any of the units you’ve had repaired end up failing a second time?

BTW- thanks for starting this thread and letting others know that this is NOT an isolated occurrence…

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Jim:

One of our busier yards has had the machine for just under one year, has 100,000 on the counter an is on their 4th fuser.

The tech thought this was “extreme” usage (just under a ream a day) and noted that the machine was not made to do that much. He claimed that he would not be coming back after the warranty. A call to Brother was very discouraging. They claimed that “pirate” toner was being used even though only genuine Brother toner was being purchased from the biggest office supply store.

Don’t get me wrong, my heart is with Brother and I would be thrilled for them to do something that would either fix this problem or promise the users that their machines would be kept going until the next model comes out.

Otherwise, I believe their entire printer brand will be tarnished for many years to come.

How do you get the big chesses to see that this is serious?

Tom

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I looked at the Brother specs on duty cycle. They are kind of nuts. So you are over the recommended duty cycle but well under the Max duty cycle.

Max. Monthly Duty Cycle 100,000 pages

Recommended Monthly Print Volume 1,000 to 5,000 pages

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That would be a page every 6 seconds!

This would not be such a big issue if the fuser was rated for a reasonable number of copies and could be replaced by the user. It would then be a simple matter of factoring in that cost to the TCO. (I am guessin it woul dstill come out to the best deal out there)

From the best I have gathered the problem is manifest in offices that run the machine for more than one page at a time. I am lead to beleive that in the “one page with a rest” usage model the fuser will last a good long time. The thought is that with multiple pages the fuser falls out of its optimum temperature range with its life is severely shortened. This may suggest that a firmware update may be able to improve the situation?

…that is if anyone at Brother cares.

Tom