Dr. Stuart Gitlow on Amazon 7 years ago
06/08/2016, 03:55 AM
Fast printing, scanning, copying. Great build quality. Networking less than intuitive with Mac-based systems.
Once upon a time, you could easily purchase a copy machine or a computer printer, but over the years the two have become very much the same device, and while there still remain products that are only printers, all the copiers appear to also function as a computer printer as well.
Let's talk about the copy machine aspects first, since that may be your main reason for buying this unit. First off all, the 5600 has a small footprint, not much larger than the paper that it holds at its base, its copy head being larger than the base so as to permit routine scans of larger items. The speed of this unit is quite fast - faster than the equivalently priced unit from Canon, and faster than the vast majority of printers from Canon and HP. So if you want 50 copies of a poster to put up around the neighborhood, this unit is perfect. The base also holds a larger supply of paper than the equivalent unit from Canon, so again this unit is a winner. Note that there are times during operation when the 5600 will briefly pull a little more than 15 amps, so depending on what else is on your power line, you may find that this needs to be plugged in to a separate circuit. The top panel provides a color touch-screen interface that works intuitively and quickly, allowing you to wake it from sleep and begin the copying process just about immediately.
Importantly (*****), note that the 5600's ADF is not capable of duplex scanning or copying. This isn't evident in Brother's promotional materials, and it took a while to find even in the manual that the 5600 cannot handle two-sided scanning. You can make two sided copies, however, so going from one sided to two-sided IS possible. And you can manually go from two-sided to two-sided; you just can't do it with a stack of paper piled into the ADF.
Copies are predictably high quality and I had no problem with paper feed or other mechanical components. The overall build quality is excellent, so no complaints there either.
Now let's look at the printing: I hooked my unit up via the Ethernet port to my Mac Pro running 10.11.5. Although the printer connected perfectly to my Mac locally, it would not connect to the Internet. I'm sure that if I spent a few hours trying to figure out where the problem was in terms of how to make the network work perfectly, I'd have gotten this going, but this needs to be more intuitive. I even unplugged the unit and plugged it into my Airport router directly to see if that would allow it to have internet access. Nope, still didn't work as advertised. I suspect I'd need to go directly into my Verizon FIOS router, but that just wouldn't be very convenient given where that's located in my home. So I went back to having the printer near my computer, now hooking it up with the USB cable. Eventually, using Brother's software, I managed to upgrade the firmware from 1.06 (the shipping version) to 1.08. Installation of Brother's software was necessary for the unit to print from my computer and scan to my computer correctly, but that was easy and quick.
Unlike my usual printer, a Canon dedicated laser printer, the Brother wakes up from sleep as soon as a print order is sent. So if I want to print one page, I do so, walk around to the back of my desk to fetch the printed page and by the time I get there, the page has been printed - even if I haven't used the printer for many hours. It's even faster if it was recently used. I've had no problems with printing or scanning, and there are all kinds of special abilities such as scanning directly to a flash drive, using a special feed mechanism for envelopes, and so forth, all of which work well.
Ultimately, this is a very nicely designed copier/printer, the first such unit I've seen where the printer capabilities rival those of dedicated printers. Be aware that this particular unit does not have faxing ability and does not have a duplex-capable ADF. If those issues are not of concern, then you will do quite well with this printer. I do think that Brother could upgrade their Mac interface to make connection to the internet more easily established without requiring a call to your local IT guru. That said, I'm impressed that Brother has designed the unit so that even while asleep, a print command wakes it up (my Canon requires me to physically push a button to wake it so that it will then detect the print order).