Hello all,
Would really appreciate some suggestions!
This has confirmed what I have already known for a long time >> the days of our using our Samsung colour laser-printer are numbered. 
The printer works perfectly fine – but the fun and games started back in macOS Yosemite/El Capitan already – with it being increasingly difficult to scan from the printer.
The issue is the driver software – which had not been updated by Samsung since even before then.
Now, Samsung appears to have sold their printing division off to HP(??), which at least still has the driver to download – but again, no updates.
At the moment, through a process of elimination, we have it working relatively well.
Connecting to the network has never worked well.
But a direct plug-in via USB, has mostly done the trick.
However, of late, whilst printing is still fine – scanning in B&W works, but scanning in colour delivers an empty (but massive) PDF file, that won’t even open on account of being ‘corrupted’.
The final straw is that it is (as above) a 32-bit piece of software, and I am not holding my breath for any updates to work on Catalina and further.
We spent quite a bit of money on the printer, albeit being purchased on a great special – but since we’ve only had it 2 years or so, it still works perfectly. At least, the hardware does.
So we will shortly be faced with – from what I gather – the following options:
1.) Bite the bullet and spend the +/- $500 on an equivalent, but newer & air-print ready Brother laser printer.
This will be a bitter pill to swallow, since as mentioned – the printer is not that old, and still works well.
We’ve also replaced all the cartridges recently, which is not an inexpensive exercise…
2.) Look at picking up a cheap 2nd hand Mac something (older Mac Mini/MBA/cMBP) – and plug it in and leave it, directly connected to the printer, in the study…
This is tempting – since as the one child has already hit the age where plenty of printing is needed for school (with another one, a few years behind) – she would presumably be able to airdrop/share directly to the Mac, and print from there, without our intervention…
3.) Keep the downstairs ‘home-server’ MacMini (2012 quad-core) on Mojave, attack the upstairs printer & its software again – and see if I can finally get it connected to the Network…
This is tempting – BUT me and networking, are not friends…
4.) Buy an even cheaper Windows NUC/old laptop (or Raspberry PI??) – and set-up a something involving a direct-connection to the printer, and a “print-only” GMAIL account for it to access, to allow my kids/SO to “email” their printing there, and then open&print…
Could work – but kludgy. Potentially cheap though…
5.) Install VM software on my and my SO’s machine, to have the driver still work (presumably) over in Windows.
I mention this last, since it will require 2x licences for Parallels (one new, one upgrade), and 2x licenses for Windows (one new, one upgrade from Win 7) and since my specced-out 15" MBP will deal well with VM, my wife’s 11" ageing MBA, not so much…
Also – this will still require our machines as a go-between for the kids’ printing, which is not ideal.
So this is a viable, but not really friendly, option…
The cleanest option is 1.), but its the one I only want to take if the other options are really not worth it…
Any advice on the others? What would you do, assuming you were budget-sensitive?
(Many thanks for the read!)