I'm a plumbing design engineer that works from my home office. One night (I had a project due the next morning), my regular printer, my old
HP 2500CM decided it did not want to pick up the paper anymore. So off I go to the nearest office supply store to look for a new printer. I found an HP9800 that would handle my 11x17 printing, but that would not have been a good printer for the rest of documents I need to print on a daily basis. So I started looking at some of the multifunction machines. Hewlett Packard is the industry standard, but I have found that on their lower priced printers they are really starting to get cheap in their materials. The Brother MFC 8460 was at a good price point ($349.00) and offered everything I was looking for... including a flat bed scanner.
Here are the features that Brother lists
High-speed printing and copying. Experience impressive print and copy speeds of up to 30 pages per minute. Produce professional-looking documents at up to 1200x1200 dpi.
I have never timed the printing, but it is fast. I have printed 60-100 page documents in just a few minutes. The print que is a little slow even with 32mb of RAM, but once it's processed the pages come out faster than I can grab them. On a 5 point rating with 0 being the lowest and 5 being the highest... I give the print speed a 4 out 5. Would be higher except the print que is a bit slow as I mentioned.
Ethernet, USB and parallel interfaces‡. Gives you the option to install the MFC on a network for multiple users or via USB or Parallel for one user. I do have this set up as a network printer for the other computers in the house. Process was very quick and easy, plus it saves my parellel port for my other printer and does not tie up a USB port. This features gets 5 out 5 points because it took less than 1/2 hour to get it set up on the network... and I'm not real network savvy.
Legal-size document glass. Ample room for placing documents on the platen for scanning or copying up to legal-size documents.Legal size doesn't mean much to me personally, all my work is 8.5x11, 11x17 or 13x19. If I do need to scan some drawing mark-ups and e-mail them I fold my 11x17 sheet in half and scan in each half. Scanner works perfectly, but not ideal for my situation so I only give in 3 out 5 points.
50-page auto document feeder‡. A quick and easy way to copy, fax or scan multi-page documents.I think most people know what an auto document feeder is. I've only used this a few times, copied all pages, no double feeds or jams so I give it a 5 out 5 points.
Large, expandable paper capacity. Features a 250-sheet paper tray adjustable for letter or legal size paper, a 50-sheet multi-purpose tray plus an optional 2nd 250-sheet paper tray‡ to increase your total paper capacity to 550 sheets.Did not purchase an additional paper tray, but this is one of the reasons I choose this printer over others in the same price range. Most printers in the $350-$400 range only had a 100 sheet feeder. I guess I'm lazy... I hate adding paper so the extra capacity was a big plus. 5 out 5 points.
High yield replacement toner cartridge‡. You get more for your money while lowering your cost per page. This is where things can get complicated for lifelong "HP" users. With HP laser printers the toner, drum, etc all come in one cartridge... when the toner runs out you replace the cartridge and that's it. Brother (most other laser printer manufacturers not named HP or Canon) do things a bit differently. With the brother printer the toner and drum are two separate items. The toner, according to Brother, will yield about 3,500 pages. The drum will yield about 25,000 pages. The toner will cost about $70.00 and the drum will cost about $190.00. So you really have to look at your print usage to determine if this is a good value. For me I print about 1500-2000 pages a month, so I will only need to replace the drum once every 1-1/2 to 2 years. Both the toner and the drum are easy to replace, you will not need a tech person to come out and change your drum. This feature gets 4 out 5 points because the HP and Canon cartridges are a lot less to think about.
Flatbed color scanning. Scan documents directly to your e-mail application or to a single PDF file using the ADF at up to 19200x19200 dpi (interpolated).Scanning is easy on both the flat bed and ADF (auto document feeder). I've never used the 19200x19200 dpi feature, but I have scanned items at 1200x1200 dpi(a very high quality scan) and it took approximately 30 seconds to scan a page which, to me, is an acceptable time frame for that type of quality. Since I prefer to not have paper copies of documents the ability to scan to PDF is great. For example rather than keeping my bill (electric, water, etc) stubs in a file folder, I scan the documents to a PDF file, save the PDF in the appropriate folder on my computer and then burn those folders to a CD at the end of each year. Really saves space by not having to keep file folders of bills. Scanner gets 5 out of 5 points. I also do not use the supplied software... I just use the "Microsoft camera and scanner wizard" and have never had a single problem.
User-friendly, intuitive 5-line LCD. With up to 22 large characters per line and a backlit, the LCD is easy to read and scroll through menu options.The backlit feature is nice, but I haven't really noticed any intuitiveness from the display. Gets a 3 out 5 points... it's functional but does not seem to be any better or worse than any other display I have seen.
Another feature not mentioned by Brother, but that I have found excellent is the manual duplex. Let's face it, paper can get expensive and most of the time when I print something it is to mark-up... then I make the corrections electronically and send the file electronically. Because of that 90% of what I print gets thrown into the recycle container. I didn't really see the need to spend the extra money to get an auto duplexing printer. But duplexing on the Brother is very easy. Just change the settings in properties to manual duplex... select how you want it printed and hit print. It will print the even pages (I believe) and then you will get a pop up window showing the proper side and direction to place the printed pages to finish the duplex printing. Perhaps all printers do this now, but I find it very useful. This feature gets 5 out 5 points.
I do not know what most people look for in a printer or all in one machine. For me, I wanted something fast, reliable, and easy to set up, I don't want to have to read a 500 page manual so I can use it. The Brother MFC 8460 is fast... it's been reliable for the 5 months I have had it, and I have yet to open the user manual.
