Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I've had this for two months (now several months, see note at bottom), the first part being additional thoughts, with newer at the bottom. If you're considering this printer there are things that I think you might want to know. Note: All of my comments are based on both setting up and using this on a wired ethernet connection.
(Update: This review was written based on installation on an XP system, but I downloaded the Windows 7 64-bit software and it installed fine. I haven't yet seen any issues with it on Win 7. Two weeks into this, it's working fine on Win 7 and XP.)
Pros:
1) Physical impressions: This is an attractive unit, mostly shiny black and matte charcoal. The color LCD screen is pleasant, and the buttons (for general use, more on setup later) are straightforward.
2) Interface: Pretty, and fairly easy to follow. There are some needlessly obtuse icons which, given the space available, don't need to be that way, but all in all it's not hard to use. Fun thing: My unit wanted a firmware update, and while doing the update you get a bit of an audio and visual extravaganza, for what reason I don't know.
3) Print Quality: The printing is good quality. Text is very good for an ink-jet, even to Courier at 8 pts, which is small as the driver lets you go. Photos are about par for the course on regular ink-jet paper. Also, if allowed to dry completely, it was more resistant to smearing (with a wet finger) than most ink-jet inks.
4) Setup (Wired Ethernet): I found this very quick to do, but then I'm used to setting up network printers so knew exactly what I wanted to do. Suggestion: If you want to assign a static IP address to the printer, use the network menu on the printer itself to assign the numbers before starting the installation and to tell it that you want it to use a static IP address, as the install is a bit more straightforward.
5) Faxing: works fine (haven't tried color faxing, don't have a unit that will handle that on the other end) from both PC and printer itself and is pretty quick. (Important as the 'little brother' to this machine has a much slower fax modem.)
Cons:
1) Physical Impressions: This unit feels a bit delicate to me. When removing all of the green tabs and such I felt as though I could very easily break things, and I've never felt that before. When using it I continued to feel as though I could break things, for instance: When opening the lid to place something on the platen, the right hinge seems to want to come off; the paper tray is a bit 'complex' as it has to handle different types/sizes of paper, and it is very flimsy. (Note that I have owned 3 other Brother printers and have never felt this way.)
2) Interface: The menus to setup things are about the same level of complexity as most of these units or as a digital camera. That's fine except that sometimes going back a level just can't be done and you have to exit the menu system and come back in. Annoying, but once you've got things set up who really cares. Another amusing thing: You can select between about 4 'wallpapers' for the LCD, and while they are pleasant enough, they are very multi-colored and make it harder to actually see the information. Oh, and there are a couple of things that just don't work: For instance, the option for how many seconds the backlight should stay on has 4 options: 10, 20, 30 seconds and 'off'. One expects that the 'off' setting would mean just to leave the backlight on, but that doesn't seem to work.
3) Scanning: While easy enough to do from the PC (even over the network, which is sometimes difficult with products in this class) the scanning software is pretty basic, and lacks things I always had on even inexpensive dedicated scanners like de-screening mode. Not a big deal, but you'll need to do more of the work in a graphics program than you would otherwise.
4) Setup (Wired Network): At first, though all seemed fine, the software on the PC kept thinking that the printer was off-line, though the printer didn't think so. Eventually just cycling through the printer booting a couple of times fixed things.
5) Copier: (NOTE CHANGE OF FEELING ABOU THIS AT END OF PARAGRAPH) WARNING: I would never buy this if you intend to use it as a stand-alone copier, even if only lightly. Why? I put a page of B&W double-spaced text and it took it between 1.5 and 2 minutes to copy. I honestly thought that that device had gotten 'stuck' and was going to power it off. But eventually the copy came out. What's strange is that if you do the copy from the PC it works much better. In that case, it seems clear that the Brother software is scanning the image to the PC, then sending it out as a print, and it happens in about half the time. And this is with the copy set to Normal and B&W. (UPDATE: I'm leaving this here in case it happens to someone else, but I need to say that after the first couple of copies, things changed and this problem disappeared. It's still not a really fast copier, but 30 seconds for a typical B&W page is workable.)
6)Flash drive support: This printer supports capture of photos from flash cards such as CF, SD, etc. This works, but in a very cumbersome manner: Other printers I've had that allowed one to read from flash cards (CF, SD, etc) mounted the card with a drive letter, so that one could access it using a standard Windows Explorer interface. Instead, you must start the Brother Control Center, which treats is in an 'ftp-like' manner. Does it work? Yes it does, but it feels a little crude and awkward compared to the competition.WOULD I BUY THIS? Depends on the price: The price on amazon typically varies between $99 and $129. At $99 it's very competitive, but at $129 I'm not sure. The longer I have it the more I like it, with the caveat that one has to be very careful with the paper tray.
TWO MONTHS: My plan was to use my little B&W Brother laser for all B&W printing (or when I didn't care about the color) and use this for photos, faxing, etc. However, while the warm-up time on the laser isn't bad, I find myself using this when I don't feel like waiting for that, and it's OK.
UPDATE ABOUT CLEANING. First, I've had this thing a couple of months and have printed about 24 pages. At various times (I leave it on all of the time, but it's on a network and so isn't affected by turning a computer on and off) it has done what I think is a quick clean. Maybe it was, maybe not - the event only took about 5 seconds.) So today, out of the clear blue sky, it started a real cleaning: It was incredibly loud, and took (I swear) at least a minute to complete. I have had ink jet printers off and on since the late 80's, and I've never seen such an involved process.
Please note that I wasn't starting a print job or doing anything else. I assume that it has some sort of scheduling algorithm that does a cleaning at certain intervals if it's turned on. This seems to me a waste (as cleaning uses ink, and I could probably cause this not to happen by leaving the unit off, but that kinds of defeats the purpose of the fax machine capability.SCANNER NOTE: The light for the scanner is very bright: If there is an image on the other side of what you're scanning, it will 'bleed through' to the scan. I've had two other dedicated scanners and this doesn't happen. This won't be an issue for very thick paper or paper with nothing on the other side of it, but it blew my hopes of dumping my stand-alone scanner.
LATEST NOTE: I recently had to do a lot of faxing out for tax stuff, and I have to say that I'm impressed with how well it handled the faxing. There were two things I specifically noticed: 1) The document feeder works well *BUT* you have to make sure you push the paper firmly in or the document feeder doesn't work. The trick is to first push the papers against it until "ADF" appears on the LCD, and then start the faxing. It reads all of the pages into memory and faxes them. 2) The speed is fine, esp given that I was using the "fine" setting. This is one advantage over the 'smaller brother' of the 495 which has a modem that is half as fast as this. My point to this note is that I was impressed that this thing worked just as well as our much more expensive dedicated business fax machine does for sending.
I've upgraded this from 3 stars to 4 as it's rather grown on me.
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Brother MFC-495CW Inkjet Color Multifunction Center with Wireless Networking for the Small Office/Home Office
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