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Brother does build some decent stuff, and the price is pretty good.
Did you know Brother invented the dot matrix printer? An offshoot of
their embroidery machine business.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centronics
"Howard developed a personal relationship with his neighbor, Max
Hugel, the founder and president of Brother International, the United
States arm of Brother Industries, Ltd., a manufacturer of sewing
machines and typewriters. A business relationship developed when
Centronics needed reliable manufacturing of the printer mechanisms-a
relationship that would help propel Brother into the printer
industry."

In the mid 80's I helped develop a color ink jet printer designed by
the former Centronics engineers. They contracted Juki to build it in
Japan since they said the growing regulatory and union burden had made
manufacturing impractical in the US.

I dampened Japanese bragging that Nihongo is the only language with a
word for 10,000 (ichiman).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad

-jsw