Good product but with a few minor flaws
Pros:
great price, good scanner, OK printer, & multi-functionality in one small machine
Cons:
limited functionality of the copier, printer not photo quality, fax difficult to setup
The Bottom Line:
An inexpensive solution to printing, copying, and scanning everyday things. But faxing is difficult, printing isn't photo-quality, and copying anything but normal-sized pieces of paper is almost impossible.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
Rather than buy a printer, scanner, fax machine, and copier separately we bought the all-in-one Brother to do the jobs of all four. We have had a Brother printer before and were pretty happy with it.
The scanner works well, even to scan large amounts of paper at one time. The scanning is even faster than we expected for such a small machine. The scanning software is easy to work with and organizes all scanned objects well.
The printer works as well as can be expected by an ink-jet printer - generally slow, but relatively good quality unless you're printing a picture. For pictures, the quality isn't bad and you can tell what the picture is, but it isn't great, it isn't photo quality, and (in my opinion) isn't good enough to display as a framed print.
We have never used the fax machine successfully so I can't say whether it functions well or not. It is very difficult to set up. We're both at least minimally technically savvy and have tried to set up the fax machine, but to no avail. So, unless you're an expert at fax machines and computers, don't expect to be able to use the fax machine very easily.
The copier copies things satisfactorily if you're using the document feeder. If you have to copy a page from book or something, you'll have problems; and therein lies my biggest complaint about this machine. Lift up the top of the machine to lay a book or paper flat on the screen to be copied and you'll find a plastic lip on one edge of the screen (where the top or bottom of a piece of paper goes) that protrudes up about 1 cm. - just enough to prevent that part of book or large piece of paper from copying well. Instead, that end will come out blurry in the copy. We can't find any discernible reason for the plastic lip and have tried to file it down, but it still causes problems.
A minor annoyance with this Brother: to change settings on the machine (e.g. to enlarge or shrink something on the copier) requires an annoying set of beeps (rather loud, too) when you push buttons.
Love: how it scans, prints, and copies (we have never been able to figure out the fax machine) in one handy little machine.
Hate: how difficult/impossible it is to copy anything but normal sized pieces of paper.
