On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 07:56:58PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
However the MFC3345CN and MFC5840CN. are inkjets so are rather different. Does anyone have any experience with these two (or similar) Brother printers? They both offer:- 20ppm B&W, 15ppm colour inkjet printing (take the speeds with a pinch of salt, isn't really important). Fax Scanner (MFC3345CN sheet feed, MFC5840CN flat bed) Photo printing with photo card readers Copier function Automatic Document Feeder
Not had any direct experience with either of those models, personally I would avoid the sheet feeding version as there WILL be a day when you want to scan/fax a book or brochure page.
I have a flatbed scanner anyway and I'm not proposing to get rid of it as it has a slide and negative scanner attachment which I use occasionally. Thus the sheetfeed scanner of the all-in-one is only a minor disadvantage (i.e. copying from books will have to be by using the scanner and PC).
What I'm particularly interested in is:- Paper handling reliability and space used by paper in and out. Quality of printing (compared with HP 840C for example) Linux compatibility
In my experience the best you can probably hope for is printing support with almost any MFP, you may get some degree of scan support but in most cases fax from PC is out. I have seen a HP 5510 working on a linux box but I do not know what steps were taken to get it there (the HP 5510 is a budget "circa £130" printer,scanner,fax....not bad, a bit plastic fantastic but for the money it's not bad)
The HP all-in-ones mostly support some sort of PCL as printers so, presumably, you can just tell Linux it's a generic PCLx printer and you're working. This is one big plus for the HP all-in-ones (I've posted another query on this problem, q.v.)
Thanks for the feedback.