Brother MFC-7420 Flatbed Laser Multi-Function Center

List Price: $199.99 Discount Price: $159.81

Features:

• Multi-function unit prints, copies, color scans, and faxes
• Flatbed design for quick and easy copying and scanning
• Print and copy speeds up to 20 ppm; up to 2,400 x 600 dpi resolution
• 35-page auto document feeder for copying, scanning, or faxing multiple-page documents
• Dimensions: 17 x 15.6 x 11.6 in. (WxHxD); weighs 20.8 pounds; 1-year limited warranty

Accessories:
Fellowes Mobile Printer Workcenter	Brother IntelliFax 2820 Laser Fax Machine and Copier	Brother DR350 Drum Unit	Brother TN350 Black Toner Cartridge

Customer Reviews:

Scanning Quick - Printing Great - It does the job right [Posted on 2008-03-15]
I originally bought this machine because I was having problems with my other multifunction laser's scanning in Windows XP x64 Edition, after an upgrade. And although you have to download the drivers from Brother to work with this edition of 64 Bit Windows, it is easy to find them if you try to install the regular versions, because there is a link right in the software telling you where to go. And amazingly enough, the link works! (This was never the case with HP's or a variety of other company's outdated printer links)

The first thing I used was the sheet feed scanner, for a particularly long scanning job. I unbound a book and wanted to scan it so I could OCR and search the document. (What a time saver that was) I made quick work of the scanning with Paper Port. After you set it up on your PC, all you have to do to get something into your pc is hit the scan button, and then select the mode you set up, and press the center button. You can scan pages in at the rate of about 1 every 10 seconds or so, or as fast as the sheet feeder will keep up. I always did it one sheet at a time, because my edges were kind of curly from being unbound.

Unfortunately, the OCR that comes with Paper Port is not highly reliable. For a 430 page document with 2 GB of memory, it would never finish, and when it did, the pages were out of order.

I finally finished the job with a third party PDF compressor/OCR combo, after scanning it into a PDF with paper port. The Paper Port interface is about stacking pages like cards. So you don't have to do the job all in one shot and can easily combine stacks of jobs. It took only one day and one night of scanning and several days of shopping for third party OCR software to get the right software and settings combos. But the scanning is very quick and efficient, not to mention intuitive. If you have a color printer, it serves as a color copier as well.

I also wanted to comment on the printing. It has a lot better quality than my previous multifunction--which was an HP Laserjet 3015--in terms of clarity and contrast. Since I'm not a heavy printer user, I haven't run out of the starter toner yet, and don't expect to soon.

I'll just say that I am totally happy with the quality of this machine, but not with the quality of the software. It's fast, inexpensive, and does the job right.

My old 3015 is now my I-Mac's printer. I had intended on donating it, but couldn't find a way to share the windows printer (MFC-7420) without a print server, to the Mac. Maybe in the near future I will go the print server route instead of running two printers.

Executive Summary:

Printing 5/5 (flawless)
Scanning 4/5 (minus one star for unhelpful OCR in Paper Port SE)
Windows Compatibility 5/5 (Only Minor Issues with bundled software)
Mac Compatibility 5/5 (Would have worked if it were not a shared printer)
Windows Sharing to a Mac 3/5 (not possible without external print server)
Reliability ?/5 (so far, runs large scan jobs without jamming... Will update this review if it ever breaks)
Overall 4.4/5 (4 stars)

brother laser printer [Posted on 2008-03-23]
Comared to my previous AIO Dell inkjet, this one is a good deal faster. It also has large paper load capacity so I don't have to refill paper nearly as much as before. The copies are very good quality.

Best Bargin [Posted on 2008-03-27]
This printer saved me time and money compaired to my old ink jet. I use this product for scanning and faxing as well as printing over 1000 sheets a week. This was the best investment I had in a very long time.

Good printer for price but rips you off on toner cartridges [Posted on 2008-05-24]
For the first 2000 or so pages I was very pleased with the printer. It is a little loud and tends to throw paper all over the place on larger print jobs. But overall it performed well considering the cheap price tag.

However, at a little over 2000 pages the printer just stopped half way through my current print job. A message indicating the toner was low appeared. I tried to get it to finish the print job but the stupid thing refused. It was an important print job that I needed to turn in in a couple hours and I had no spare toner cartridge.

Finally after much frustration and after almost destroying the cartridge trying to shake the toner to the front to try to finish the current job I discovered a way to circumvent the low toner "feature". I placed some tape over the little laser "eye" on either side of the toner cartridge. After that I was able to not only finish the current job but print hundreds more pages without any fading. I've gone through another 500 page package and still have not replaced the cartridge.

If brother included this "feature" to sell more toner cartridges then I consider their tactics dispicable. In any case I will pay a little more next time and avoid the brother brand on principle.

I suggest you avoid this one....but if you buy, be sure to have replacement toner cartridges handy....or some electrical tape.

Not very impressed [Posted on 2008-07-03]
I have owned this printer for 5 months now, so thought I would write my review now that I have had some experience with it. On the plus side, it does print, copy, fax, scan etc. (most of the time) And actually handles envelopes pretty nicely. But overall, I have not been very impressed. If you print more than about 5 pages, everything starts to get all wadded up in the receiving tray or ends up on the floor. This is really irritating. When trying to scan more than about 10 pages at a time, it locks up and has to be rebooted. I think this may be software related, but that's another issue. The ScanSoft paperport software that comes with the printer is pretty useless. It's a very old version, and not very stable. And sometimes the printer just goes off into it's own world and I have to turn the power off and back on to get it to work again. It shows up as available and online, but won't print anything I send to it. So, overall I have not been very impressed with this printer. I guess you get what you pay for. I have owned other Multi-Function printers which performed much better. Thought I would save some money this time and try this one. Wish I hadn't now.

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