Brother’s presence in this magazine’s 1990s sister edition was nil — the company spent that decade making fax machines and typewriters, which turns out, on the evidence of the 2026 catalogue, to have been excellent training for building small, cheap, reliable boxes nobody has to think about. There is still no Brother A3 laser copier at the top of this range. Canon and Ricoh built the big corridor machines with fusers the size of toasters; Brother instead perfected the compact A4 laser MFP — the MFC-L5915DW, the MFC-L6900DW — and placed a colour version of it at every desk the corridor machine used to walk to. The strategy reads as geometric rather than competitive: put a 33-ppm colour box at everyone’s elbow and let managed print watch the fleet, rather than build one machine to serve the whole floor.

That managed-print seriousness shows up in the channel, not just the spec sheet. The 2026 MFC-L8970CDW is functionally identical to its L8930CDW sibling — same 7-inch touchscreen, same 1GB memory, same 100 ipm duplex scan — except that it is sold only through Managed Print Services resellers, a deliberate segregation most desktop-printer brands do not bother drawing. The one concession to big paper is a pair of business inkjets, the MFC-J6960DW and J6975DW, which print A3 at the same 31 ppm the A4 sheet gets, need no fuser, and ship with more than a year of included ink. The pitch, reportedly, is no fuser, no eight-thousand-dollar machine.