I have one of those cheap Brother laser all-in-one machines - an MFC-2700DW - that you buy and then forget about for years because they reliably do their job.
It’s connected to my LAN, and I can print without any problems from the Macs or the iPhone, without even setting it up thanks to the magic of AirPrint.
Recently however, it has started to give me some headaches. I decided to digitize some of my paper records, mostly letters, documents, or receipts, that don’t really need to be kept around in their original forms, but nevertheless should be archived somewhere.
Scanning on MacOS is inexplicably hidden in the printer settings, so once you navigate there and open the scanner menu, you are presented with some controls of the scanner and the desired scan quality. You can choose to combine multiple scans into one document, select the document format of your choice (PDF, PNG, JPG), and where to save the scan.
Apart from the somewhat clandestine location of these controls, this usually works all very much Mac-like out of the box. But now that I use the scanner more than once in two months I’ve come across the situation that the scanner controls are completely empty. And I mean that literally: an empty window with greyed out buttons at the bottom.
It looks like the OS tries to contact the scanner, but for some reason never hears back, and there are apparently no timeout safeguards that should be triggered. The empty window just sits there.
I suspect that it is related to the energy saving mode the printer enters after a couple of idle minutes, but although I can wake it up by sending a print job, requesting the scanner doesn’t seem to do the trick.
The only workaround that enables me to use the scanner in this situation is to remove the printer from the settings and add it again. Very tedious.