J. Tant on Amazon 7 years ago
05/06/2016, 09:53 AM
A decent *printer*, some handicaps on the rest of it
First, it's important to note something - this is a business printer, intended for business use. You can tell by the promo pictures because everyone using the printer is wearing business attire. And that's the key thing to keep in mind, because while setup is relatively simple the underlying assumption behind the documentation and such is that you have one of your IT people setting this up for you. And even granting that this printer is aimed at a business audience and won't have the same feature set as a consumer-oriented printer does, I have to point out that it's fairly basic even for a business printer.
So to spare you the need to comb through the ad copy, try to find a PDF of the manual online, and pore through the description, let me briefly say what this printer will NOT do. It is NOT a color printer OR scanner. It will NOT support faxing, either via the printer itself or through a PC application. It does NOT have WiFi. And most troubling of all (for me): it will NOT support two sided scanning/copying through the automatic document feeder..
It's not a *bad* printer - print quality is actually quite nice and it does print very fast. It does support two sided printing as well, and it handles such jobs gracefully. I like that it has multiple options for paper sizes/types, and using the secondary tray for envelopes worked acceptably well. However, if you're looking to do more than just very basic copying, well, this isn't your guy. Cooling my ardor somewhat, alas, is the construction. The printer itself looks like business, but in actual use there are some parts that feel a little fragile. Lifting the lid to the scanner window made me fear more than once that the lid was just going to come right off. There are also various fold-out paper guides and things that, well, just feel a little on the tinny side.
There are some added features though. While it doesn't have WiFi, it does have an Ethernet port and adding it to the network was really quite simple. Assuming you grant your printer Internet access, it will offer built-in cloud drive support for major providers. For example, I use Microsoft's One Drive, and there's a built in app in the printer where I can access that drive, select a document, and print it without going anywhere near a computer. This is handy for, say, setting up a shared resource among different departments/locations, and instead of emailing files around they can simply be printed from that resource.
It also handles mobile devices gracefully. It's AirPrint enabled, so iOS users on the same network can print directly to the printer. There is also a scan-to app where one can scan a document on the printer from/to a mobile device running the required Brother app. Again, this helps save effort, meaning you don't need to scan the document to a computer and email it to yourself.
So some of the value-add features help mitigate the biggest shortcoming of this device: the inability to do two-sided copying via the automatic document feeder. Oh, you can PRINT two-sided, but if you want to do two-sided COPYING you must manually scan the front and back of each page. There is a business term for this kind of requirement: PITA (Pain In The ....). For documents with two or three pages is bad enough, any more and you'll be saying to yourself "Oh, Brother." This functionality is available in the next model up from this printer, but honestly...even my old(er) AIO printer can perform two sided scanning from the ADF.
Another shortcoming is the lack of WiFi. Frankly, at this price point I believe WiFi should be an expected and standard feature. True, this is a business-oriented printer with a different pricing strategy, but if the focus of the printer is to enable the productivity of a mobile workforce (as the added functionality of AirPrint and cloud printing necessarily implies), then not having WiFi capability becomes simply baffling.
So as a home printer this is extremely basic and many of the added features will simply be left unused (secure printing, cloud printing, etc). As a business printer it has at least one serious handicap, which is the single-sided ADF. For extremely basic use though, I can't fault this printer too much. It prints and scans quickly and quietly, quality is good, and it handles a variety of printing media like letter, legal, envelopes, etc. So on balance I like it as a printer for routine jobs, I LOVE it for the cloud printing, but as a copier I'm really not very impressed. Since my use case prints documents more than copies them, I'm getting Four Star Fuzzies with it.