I'm thinking of buying an 'all-in-one' printer to save space in our home office and some of the Brother models seem to offer all we want at a reasonable price. In particular we're interested in the MFC3345CN and the MFC5840CN.
I've not had particularly good experience with Brother printers, we had an HL1060 laser for quite a while and it was never really quite as good as it should have been. The HP1150 laser we replaced it with is much better and more trouble-free.
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
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
On Tuesday 11 January 2005 9:44 am, Chris Green wrote:
I've not had particularly good experience with Brother printers, we had an HL1060 laser for quite a while and it was never really quite as good as it should have been. The HP1150 laser we replaced it with is much better and more trouble-free.
Me neither, generally I find their Windows software to be buggy and quite lacking and I am not over impressed with the hardware either. It's a pity because they make some really nice looking low profile models.
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.
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)
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.
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Chris Green -
Wayne Stallwood