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Brother Industries, Ltd. (ブラザー工業株式会社, Burazā Kōgyō Kabushiki-gaisha^?) (TYO: 6448 ) is a diversified Japanese company that produces a wide variety of products including sewing machines, large machine tools, label makers, and fax machines, printers, typewriters, and other computer-related electronics. Brother distributes their products both under their own name and under OEM agreements with other companies.

Brother's history began in 1908 when the Yasui Sewing Machine Co. was established in Nagoya, Japan. In 1954, Brother International Corporation (U.S.A.) was established as their first overseas sales affiliate. The corporate name was finally changed to Brother Industries, Ltd. in 1962. Brother entered the printer market during its long association with Centronics.

As of 2004, Brother's annual turnover is in excess of 420 billion yen.

[edit] Machine Activity Designed into Firmware

A problem for home office users of Brother ink jet fax machines is their periodic (weekly) "clean print heads" cycle. This activity actually uses up ink so that, if a fax machine is left for several months without ever receiving a fax or printing a document, it will eventually run out of ink and become non-functional. When one of the ink cartridges is spent, the machines will not operate until they have been replaced. On some commonly available machines, it is not possible to disable this cycle. This means that even inactive machines have to be regularly resupplied with ink at a substantial cost. Brother's competitors, such as Hewlett-Packard for example, do not seem to need this cleaning cycle and can be left idle without loss of machine functionality. This functionality, and the end-users inability to disable it, are prominently featured on Brother's on-line support web site.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] External link

• Brother Global sitede:Brother (Unternehmen)

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