Brother MFC-8440 Laser Multifunction – Customer Reviews
Great functionality & reliability
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Excellent product, well worth the money! The Cons I've listed are in fact just minor irritations to me, but are certainly worth consideration to anyone purchasing this product.
Pros:
* Faxing quality is fast and clear.
* Scanner quality is very good. Document scanning is fast with great clarity.
* Copy quality is impressive. Documents are almost as good as the original, and with the document feeder you can just walk away and come back when the job is complete.
Cons:
* I've hooked up my answering machine through the MFC. Due to it's answering every call to check for a fax, it defeats the caller-ID function of the telephone to which it has been connected.
* Power sucker! This thing uses alot of power to do it's job. So whenever I send a print-job to the MFC, the lights dim momentarily. Also, it draws too much power to be connected through my 1500-Watt UPS.
* Printed/copied documents come out in the recessed bay, which can be irritating trying to fish out smaller paper sizes.9/6/2006 12:00 AM | Rating:
This is not a color printer yet they don't say it in their marketing and advertise it as a full-function all-in-one
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This machine works great except the fact it's not a color printer. I read the whole product description on 5 sites and at least a dozen reviews while comparison shopping for the best price and it was not indicated on any that it is a black and white. The ad says it is full-function printer and I think the color function is an important one. So I'm going to lose a chunk of money (on selling it and the shipping cost) and a bunch of time.
I'm more thorough than almost anyone I know. They need to put that in the central description.
Besides the fact it's not color, the machine is easy to operate, easy to set-up, a nice compact size, easy to see and press buttons, easy menus, and a nice look etc.8/24/2006 12:00 AM | Rating:
Our MFC-8440 has withstood some stress:
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My company bought this machine in the hopes that we could take our archived paper documents and convert them into usable digital files.
18,000+ scanned pages later, this machine is still working like the day we picked it up and it has yet to show us any problems.We use the software provided coupled with Adobe Acrobat Professional and we have an excellent workable product.
We use this machine for a network fax, copier and scanner and we REALLY use it.Hundreds of faxes out and in each day and frequent scanning.I think its been about a year now.
Its larger than some of the other MFC's on the market but that is the only really con I have for this product.8/2/2006 12:00 AM | Rating:
Does it all VERY well!
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I have owned several fax machines and several copiers and a couple scanners.This is the first all-in-one I have owned and it is better in all respects than each of the standalone products I have used in the past.
The document feeder works exceptionally well.In the past my experience has been that Xerox copiers and Panasonic and Sharp faxes have a tough time with mis-feeds, feeding several pages in one gulp and other such bad things.It was always next to impossible to feed pages that had previously been stapled--that would mean jams and errors.This Brother machine just yawns, takes what you feed it, and handles it flawlessy.
The toughest document feed test the machine has had has been feeding about 800 GBC punched sheets--you know, those booklets with the plastic thing through a series of big square holes.It's unfair to even ask a copier or fax to read such a mess but this machine doesn't mind and asks for more.Simply, one couldn't ask for a better automatic document feed system.
The copy quality is good and the fax transmission speed is outstanding saving you long-distance bills.I recently faxed 37 pages at about 8 seconds per page including some very dense pages.The machine first scans everything then loads it in memory then starts the phone call.This way you KNOW ahead of time that all pages were read and can leave the machine unattended with the confidence that the recipient is going to get the fax.
The color scanning is good and intuitive and you can manipulate the scanned images in a photo processor.The scanning function wasn't something I thought I needed but now that I have an easy-to-use scanner I have used it a few times.
If you don't like manuals, you'll love this machine.It comes with an excellent manual but is very intuitive to use so it's ready to use almost immediately.
When evaluating other machines pay particular attention to the size of the scanning flatbed--this one will do 8 1/2" x 14" input while a great many machines are limited to 11" length.If you have a legal document you're out of luck on making full size copies with competing smaller machines.
I've had this machine for a couple months and likely run at least 1,000 pages through it.It doesn't jam (unless you forget to first fan the paper in the printer side but even then it's pretty forgiving).I've run some really heavy 100# stock through the single sheet feeder without a problem.
I wasn't looking for a fax replacement but tossed the dedicated fax once I got this machine.Not only does it work better, it frees the space that a dedicated fax needs.
Perhaps a very important footnote is BUY THIS FROM AMAZON!I bought a refurbished unit and saved big-bucks but more importantly, the Amazon price and service are always the best.If for some reason you stray to other sites in your research be REALLY careful about shipping charges.This machine is big and heavy but Amazon treats you right on shipping costs while others with possibly lower machine prices will pop your eyes on the shipping.
Do I like this machine? YES!Do I like Amazon? ABSOLUTELY!Your search has ended for the perfect Fax or perfect Copier and you get a free Scanner thrown in.7/16/2006 12:00 AM | Rating:
very good hardware but poor software
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Given the price, the quality and performance of this multi-function printer is very good.Scanning speed, especially that for black-and-white document, is among the best.Document feeder works quite reliably, rarely jams up.
The following are the issues we had with this machine, most of them with regard to software:
(1) the native PDF converter is outright bad.For the same resolution, it results in a file size at least five times as much as Adobe Acrobat.For routine electronic document handling, we are used to Adobe Acrobat's file size of about 30k-50k per page at 200 dpi.Because these documents need to be stored in large quantity and e-mailed routinely, even a 50% increase of the size would be burdensome, not to even mention five times.Apparently, software engineers of Brother did a terrible job on this. Fortunately, we figured out a fairly reasonable workflow by using Adobe Acrobat with the printer in tandem to solve this oversize problem. If you don't have the rather expensive Adobe Acrobat, you might be out of luck.
(2) the interface is decidedly crude. And no update has been released since its original release.It just lacks some of the refined details, which in an office setting significantly affect efficiency and workflow.For example, every time when a scan is started, it defaults to the choice of "color scanning" at A4 size.It does not remember your last setting.We do most of our scanning with "black-and-white" at letter size.That means we will have to change the selection every time when we do scan. How difficult is it to have a feature to just remember the last setting?Again, software engineers at Brother did a very poor job.This seems trivial, but if you are using the printer on a regular basis in an office setting, it significantly affects efficience and productivity.It is such a big issue that we would absolutely be willing to pay twice as much for a multi-function laser printer just to get a better workflow.
(3) the bypass feeder has poor paper alignment. The printed material is in most cases seriously misaligned on the paper, making the bypass feeder basically useless for printing checks or formal documents such as letterheads. That means for that type of work you will always need to use the main paper tray.This is quite inconvenient because normally you would stock the main paper tray with regular paper and use the bypass feeder to print envelopes, checks, and letterheads.Because the printer has only one paper tray, the poor bypass feeder has a significant negative impact on the workflow.
We would not buy it again.However, if you don't find the above issues a problem, this printer is a great workhorse.4/6/2006 12:00 AM | Rating:
