I swore never to touch a Brother printer or fax ever again - dodgey drivers, poor support, generally rubbish machinery (in my opinion). This was 5+ years ago though, so they may have improved - I've stayed true to my word since (although they make great labelling machines!).
In general, avoid printers at all cost - they are electro-mechanical devices with many moving parts and as such are prone to failure and general misbehaviour.
I can't really recommend anything relating to printers - a high end HP is probably going to serve you well - they generally have good drivers, but will cost you a fortune to buy (I'm talking business models, not personal models which are cheap and nasty these days), and HP will gouge you on consumables.
I'm currently using a Samsung network colour laser, it's okay - has been reasonably good and consumables are reasonably priced, but it has already been replaced under warranty once and is partly broken again (one of the sheet feeding trays no longer works). It fails your "airconditioner" test too - but most decent printers will I think you'll find.
Did I mention that I hate printers?
I think my issues started during my first full-time job out of uni when I was doing tech support work for a government department in Adelaide ... 60%+ of our support calls were printer related. The bane of our lives.
I strongly recommend you don't look for something compact enough to fit on a bookcase shelf ... it's going to be a cheap personal printer and won't handle the workload I'm sure you're going to throw at it. If you will be printing a lot - spend the money on a good printer - small personal printers are not worth the effort and don't give you the same flexibility when it comes to paper-handling options.
I also prefer not to get all-in-one devices, but rather pick individual devices based on their own merits (eg Canon sheet-feed scanner, Epson flat-bed scanner, Nikon slide scanner, mbox virtual fax, epson photo printer, some other brand of laser printer, etc) ... but that's just my preference - an all-in-one device might suit you better. Just remember that it does become a single point of failure - if it breaks, you lose all your paper handling capabilities at once. You need to weigh up the loss of productivity if it breaks versus the cost and space taken up by separate devices.
Fortunately I rarely print anything in my day-to-day work ... but I did need to print a lot of reading material for the uni course I've just finished, so it's been getting a good workout. Hopefully now it can go back to being almost never used.