Printers

My wife is a middle grades teacher and the copiers at her school are always broken are in use by someone else, so we do all her printing and copying at home - LOTS of printing and copying. I really like the speed and the automatic duplexing. We expect to cut our paper cost by 30-40%. We also create a pdf of each assignment/worksheet to upload to her website so students can get any missed assignments. The scanner - scan to file - option allows you to specify pdf file type and is very fast.

The Automatic Document Feed is excellent with no jams so far even with large documents. We also print hall/bathroom passes on business card stock using the single sheet feeder with no jams. So far we have printed about 5,000 pages and have had no real problems. Setting up the network for sharing the printer was very easy. We expect to print about 5,000 pages per month - well under the 25,000 duty clcle. Our previous MFC 8220 is still being used by a colleague after 3 drum... Read more

I gave 4 stars instead of 5 for the following reasons:
1) Scanning from the ADF is slower than I expected once you get past the first page.
2) The printer memory can be easily upgraded with up to 512 MB. However, the memory module is a 144-pin PC100/133 SO-DIMM. This is very out of date memory. You would think that out of date memory would be dirt cheap but it is not. Compare prices and you will find that it costs about as much as 4 GB of the very latest memory because very few manufacturers still produce it and very few retailers stock it. Even if that memory is more than adequate for the printer's needs, Brother should still use something more modern to keep the costs down.

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I have a network with machines running Windows Vista, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and Ubuntu 9.04 Linux. This printer worked with all three operating systems with no tweaking at all. In fact, the only headache was that the Windows software provided by Brother... Read more

I owned the 1st gen. of the Brother MFC printer. This is my second Brother MFC. This one is generation 3. My original Brother MFC lasted about 5 years. I hope they worked out the bugs out of this one. It works just as good at the original one but it's one does 32ppm and have more built in memory. My 1st gen has scanner lock issues and ADF started giving me issues. The high yield toner is TN-650 (8000 pages). It's expensive toner but it lasts very long for the toner. It's toner is also bigger than many other printers. Check that out if the price is what you need in features before buying. I was hoping Amazon sold it when I was buying it so I could have purchased it from Amazon.

Pros:
- The best ADF that I have seen for a while.
- Doesn't jam much.
- Features. I looked at HP, Sharp, Canon, Lexmark, Minolta and can't find any printer that comes close to the features and abilities of this printer. Too features much to list, read Brother's website. Even supports... Read more