A Plesant Surprise - Great value

I bought the MFC-8660 DN to replace an aging (and slow) Xerox XD-100. I was a little skeptical at first because some of the doors, trays, etc. on the Brother looked a little "flimsy" and I thought "this thing will break real soon". That was six months ago and I like this machine more every day!

Things I like:
#1 - It is fast! It comes out of sleep mode in about 5 seconds, with very little noise, clunking, blinking, or etc. It just quickly comes alive and prints, then goes back to a power saving sleep mode. The printing and copying is fast as well. Thirty pages per minute is pretty accurate, and a big step up from the 8 PPM of the old Xerox.

#2 - Good paper feeding - it seems to love envelopes, card stock, partial page checks and labels. It hasn't choked yet.

#3 - Economical. This printer does seem to live up to the toner cartridge "rated pages". I have had laser printers in the past that were lucky to achieve 50% of the page rating on consumables.

#4 - Easy network setup. No geek factor here. I have set this up on three different computers on my small home network. Just insert the CD, click the appropriate "YES" and "NEXT" buttons and you are printing in about 10 minutes.

Things that could be better:

#1 - I don't fax much. I use a shared phone line (fax, answering machine and regular phones). So far I haven't found the setting that will keep the MFC-8660 DN from answering the phone automatically (I would like to just have a button to push to receive faxes manually). At this point I just keep the phone cord unplugged except for when I want to send or receive a fax.

#2 - On rare occasions the automatic document feeder fails to feed when copying. It just inches the paper along at the rate of about one page per hour for no apparent reason. Hitting the "STOP" button, reinserting the paper and pressing "COPY" again seems to solve the problem.

#3 - Manual Input Feed Tray is flimsy. Granted it seems to work perfectly well, but it does not inspire confidence and is not in keeping with the overall quality of this machine.

#4 - Copies in default "contrast" setting are a bit washed out looking. Copying anything that has photos needs to have the contrast setting moved to the "maximum" position in order to have good looking output.

I would recommend this machine strongly - it is economical, quiet, reliable (so far) and fast, with many good features and good looking output.

UPDATE: After using this MFP for a full year I like it more every day. It has yet to have any problem or malfunction at all, and has a very low cost-per-page.

MORE "PROS": Uses very little power in standby but has a very quick warm up to first page output (about 8 seconds). This is really great as I only use it a couple of times a day.

MORE "CONS": In "COPY" mode, the copies tend to be on the "light" side unless the contrast setting is manually tweaked to the dark setting. A small gripe for an otherwise bullet proof machine.

UPDATE # 2: After two years I continue to like this machine more and more. It continues to be economical, trouble free and does just what I would like a printer to do. I would buy this machine again in a heartbeat.