Affordable and reliable - packed with features

Over the years I have had my share of experience with various Brother printers and MFC units. Before buying a color laserjet printer, I purchased a Brother inkjet multifunction machine. I don't do a lot of color printing, so at the time, it was a reasonable choice for occasional color printing. The printhead began to develop problems, so I decided to move up to a B&W multifunction machine.

My experience with HP all-in-one machines has been less than positive. The ones that I used at work were terribly slow to scan and tended to jam papers in the document feeder.

I work for a public school system and we use a product for mass-testing students called Edusoft. Encoded bubble sheets are scanned and scored producing various reports on student performance. Edusoft highly recommends several different Brother MFC units for their software because of their reliability, durability, and precise scanning needed to forgive irregular bubbling by the students. Since my experience was positive at work with the MFC-8460N, I decided to purchase one for home.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that most stores are selling this unit for $399.00. However, Staples offered a $100 rebate thus making the price very attractive.

Unpacking the unit was a snap. Setup instruction sheets are well-marked, and provide step-by-step, plain English instructions. I literally had the printer set up and running within 15 minutes.

The CD provided (3 CDs ship with the printer - MAC, Windows 98, 2000 and XP and a 3rd for Windows VISTA), contains the drivers, PC Fax applications and Paperport SE. One note: it is annoying that the user has NO choice as to the installation of Paperport. I find the program bascially useless - my preference is Acrobat Professional. In addition, all attempts to uninstall Paperport fail miserably leaving a potentially useless piece of software taking up hard drive space.

This printer has a built-in 10/100 Ethernet interface. It quickly picked up an IP address from my router via DHCP. The software found it instantly on the network. The Brother management software also allows scanning over the network which is a very nice feature.

The document feeder accepts up to 50 sheets of originals and scanning is lightning fast. I like to scan all of my paper statements and bills, convert to pdf and clean out my file cabinet regularly. The document feeder makes this task a snap.

With the document feeder, you can also use the printer as a digital copier. At 30PPM, it is a very fast printer for home use. Warmup time from standby is around 10-15 seconds (which beat my old Dell that took up to 30 seconds to warmup).

As other reviewers have said, it is not the quietest laser printer on the market, but the noise is not offensive either.

Faxing can be performed manually or digitally using the Brother PC Fax software. Simply create a document and then print to the Brother PC Fax. The software will maintain an address book which can assign individual accounts as well as groups for mass-faxing.

In conclusion, I would highly recommend this printer for a home office situation. With a monthly duty cycle of 10,000 pages, it can handle virtually anything you can throw at it. The fact that it can print and scan 30PPM makes it a dependable and fast workhorse. Though this machine does not automatically produce duplex copies, the software guides you through the steps to manually print two sided copies.

Brother has done it again with an excellent multifunction center. My experience with their B&W laser printers has been nothing but positive. They are durable, dependable and rarely, if ever, jam.