Industry Trends

The Real Cost of Printing: Why the Brother MFC-L3720CDW is a Smart Buy for Businesses Watching Their Budget

If you're buying a printer based on the sticker price, you're doing it wrong. After tracking over $180,000 in office equipment spending across six years, I can tell you the real cost is in the consumables, the downtime, and the hidden setup hassles. For most small to medium businesses, the Brother MFC-L3720CDW color laser all-in-one is the smartest financial choice—not because it's the cheapest upfront, but because its total cost of ownership (TCO) is way lower than you'd think.

Why You Should Trust This Breakdown

I'm the procurement manager for a 75-person marketing agency. I've managed our office operations and tech budget (about $30k annually) for six years, negotiated with 20+ vendors, and documented every single order—from laptops to label makers—in our cost-tracking system. When I audited our 2023 spending, I found printer-related costs (toner, service calls, replacement units) were our third-largest office expense. That's when I got serious about TCO.

I don't have hard data on industry-wide failure rates for every brand, but based on our own history of 15+ printers over six years, my sense is that the difference between a "good" and "bad" printer decision can easily hit $2,000-$3,000 over three years. And that's not even counting the productivity hit from constant troubleshooting.

The Hidden Costs Most People Miss

From the outside, printer shopping looks like comparing specs and prices. The reality is you're buying into an ecosystem of consumables and potential headaches. People assume the lowest quote means the best deal. What they don't see is which costs are being hidden or deferred.

Let's break it down with the Brother MFC-L3720CDW as our example. Its street price is around $450-$500. Not the absolute cheapest, right? But here's what I almost missed when comparing vendors:

• Toner Yield & Cost: This is the big one. The MFC-L3720CDW uses Brother's TN-243 series cartridges. The high-yield black toner (TN-243BK3) prints about 3,000 pages and costs roughly $110. That's about 3.7 cents per page for mono. The color cartridges yield about 2,300 pages at ~$130 each, so color pages run higher. Compare that to some competitors where "compatible" or remanufactured cartridges are cheaper upfront but can have yield issues or void warranties. Brother's INKvestment tanks on some models are a game-changer for volume, but even with standard cartridges, the cost predictability is a major advantage.
• Drum Unit Life: This is a classic hidden cost. The drum (the part that actually transfers the toner) wears out. On the L3720CDW, the drum unit (DR-243CL) is rated for about 25,000 pages and costs around $200. That adds another 0.8 cents per page to your running cost. Some cheaper printers have drums that need replacing way more often, or they're integrated into the toner cartridge at a higher per-page cost.
• Setup & Connectivity Time: Ever spent half a day getting a printer on the network? That's a real cost. The L3720CDW supports Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and USB. More importantly, it's on the Brother AirPrint compatible printers list, which means Apple devices can print to it natively without extra drivers. For a mixed-device office, that's a huge time-saver. The WPS setup is straightforward if you use it (you can usually find the WPS PIN on the Brother printer's control panel or in the network settings menu). This stuff matters—I've literally billed hours to "printer setup" projects for clients.

The "Good Enough" Specs That Actually Matter

This gets into IT territory, which isn't my core expertise. What I can tell you from a cost and reliability perspective is that the L3720CDW has the features that prevent most common, expensive support calls:

• Automatic Duplex Printing: Saves paper. It's basically a no-brainer for any office doing more than basic flyers.
• 50-Sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF): For scanning or copying multi-page documents. Without this, you're standing there feeding pages one by one—a total productivity killer.
• Print Speed (22 ppm color/black): Honestly, for most SMBs, anything over 20 pages per minute is fine. Chasing ultra-high speed specs is where costs balloon for minimal real-world benefit.

After comparing 8 different models from 4 brands over 3 months using a TCO spreadsheet I built, the Brother consistently came out ahead for our usage pattern (about 1,500 pages per month, mix of color and mono). The "cheaper" upfront options had higher per-page costs or lacked features that would've forced us to buy a separate scanner or deal with manual duplexing.

When the Brother MFC-L3720CDW Isn't the Right Call

I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't tell you where this advice breaks down. This isn't the printer for everyone.

If you're a micro-business or home office printing less than 200 pages a month, a basic inkjet might still be more economical, despite the higher per-page cost, because the upfront investment is so much lower. You gotta run the numbers for your volume.

If you need large-format printing, photo-lab quality, or heavy-duty production volumes (like 10,000+ pages a month), you're in a different market entirely. The L3720CDW is a workhorse, but it's not an industrial press.

Also, a quick note on supplies: while I focus on genuine Brother toner for warranty and reliability, I know third-party options exist. Our procurement policy doesn't forbid them, but we require testing and sign-off from IT due to past quality issues (one batch of "compatible" toner once cost us a $300 service call to clean a mess inside a different printer). It's a risk/reward calculation.

Look, my job is to find the optimal balance of cost, reliability, and functionality—not to find the absolute cheapest thing on the market. Based on that, for the vast majority of small to medium businesses looking for a dependable color laser all-in-one, the Brother MFC-L3720CDW is a seriously smart financial decision. You pay a bit more at the register to save a ton over the next three to five years. And in budgeting, that's the only math that really matters.