I was in the same situation less then a month a ago, inclusive a discussion whether you should trust something like several pages of 1-star reviews complaining about terrible network connectivity (my short opinion: you either want to push your luck, have some time and nerves to waste or you totally should).
Now, in detail: Brother was an obvious choice for me, too, but their network problems across several models indicate they either have a very bad network stack, or a cheap WiFi chipset. Note that not all chipsets are born equal, I had a MacBook (broadcast chipset) which had terrible problems with 2 routers (atheros). Both were otherwise completely reliable devices.
HP seems to be a “low specs, high prices” company these days - most of their machines have 600x600 dots resolution.
Samsung has poor driver support and as far as I know, they’ve sold their printer business to HP recently.
A lot of these “cheap” monochrome printers are not cheap at all, if you want some reasonable options like duplex and WiFi. Many of newer models have cartridges with chips, so you can’t get cheaper third-party cartridges. So, after some search my decision was to avoid them.
I went with a pretty expensive Canon MFU which is pretty good so far, but one option I almost went with was a Kyocera Ecosys P5021cdw.
Pro:
- Color Laser, but can be switched to monochrome mode in settings, where it should use only black toner
- Has third-party cartridges, no chips on them
- WiFi no one complains about
- Duplex
- Very good resolution and print quality
- With some luck, you can get it to a price of a new monochrome laser
Contra:
- Big and heavy