Brother MFC-5200c Multifunction – Customer Reviews

I have had my brother for about 2 years and 6 months ago I had the same problem with the print head as some others have had.It stopped printing magenta so I kept using it as most of what I copy and receive as faxes are black ink now the black is gone.Not worth the money I spent.Aside from this problem the machine has always been slow and I had to clean the heads way to often.

10/4/2005 12:00 AM | Rating:

I should say up front that I'm reviewing the Brother MFC-5440CN, which is very close to the MFC5200c, but it's not quite the same model.However, there's enough overlap that my comments are still germane.

I've been in the market for a multifunction scanner/FAX/copier/printer that can speak Ethernet on a heterogeneous LAN.My primary computer is an Apple Macintosh running Mac OS X 10.3.5.So far I've tried the Hewlett Packard HP PSC 2510 and the Brother MFC-5440CN.Neither is worth owning.

I bought the Brother MFC-5440CN two days ago (2004-10-10) after returning a Hewlett Packard HP PSC 2510.(After struggling with Hewlett Packard's obsequious but useless technical support from March 2004 through September 2004, I finally asked if I could return the unit directly to Hewlett Packard for a refund.In early October I returned the unit.The Hewlett Packard HP PSC 2510 is all but useless with Mac OS X because of a myriad of show-stopping bugs ranging from the bundled application software down to the broken wireless Ethernet implementation.)

Right out of the box, the Brother MFC-5440CN seems to be a more "serious" unit than the HP PSC 2510.It supports a finer-grained FAX resolution than the HP PSC 2510, and it seems slightly less cheesy in construction, but I have no reliability or performance data to support that impression.

I've printed a couple of black-and-white pages so far.The print quality is less than ideal.You can see light horizontal lines in the otherwise black ink when you print a 2"x2" black square.Other than that, it seems all right for printing simple things like business letters with no graphics.I haven't tried to print pictures or anything especially colorful.

The Brother MFC-5440CN has an automatic document feeder which produces scans that are almost as good as what the integrated flatbed scanner gives you.(It's not _quite_ as good.You can detect some "choppiness" in the document images generated via the automatic document feeder, reflecting the jerky movement of the paper transport.)The automatic document feeder employs a narrow scan window rather than the full flatbed scan area.

The Brother MFC-5440CN is terrible at scanning anything other than plain old dark-text-on-white-background documents.For example, a yellow credit card receipt that showed up with no problems on the HP PSC 2510 would be virtually unreadable when scanned by the Brother MFC-5440CN.Playing around with the brightness and contrast controls only seemed to make it worse.Even getting dark-text-on-white-background documents to show up acceptably was a challenge: the Brother MFC-5440CN tends to lighten everything to the point where text is hard to read.I had to pull down the brightness and adjust the contrast to a fairly extreme setting just to make text look decent.

The Brother MFC-5440CN comes with Presto! PageManager 4.0 software (abbreviated "PPM4").PPM4 is product made by NewSoft, a company based in Taipei, Taiwan.(See URL: http://www.newsoftinc.com).For some reason, Brother bundles PPM4 even though NewSoft, as of 2004-10-10, is already up to Version 6 and doesn't mention anything earlier than Version 4.8 on their website.They make no mention whatsoever of Apple Macintosh support on their website.It appears that PPM4 is dead software.

PPM4 has serious problems.Not as serious as the debilitating bugs associated with the garbage that Hewlett-Packard ships with their HP PSC 2510, but dysfunctional enough that you have to make special concessions to it when it's running.

First of all, its user interface doesn't adhere to Mac OS X usability guidelines.It has a nonstandard file directory tree widget (apparently from a third-party toolkit) that doesn't even allow you to select multiple documents (let alone directories) at the same time.This is a real pain if you're trying to delete multiple items at the same time.For example, if you've just scanned in 50 pages via the automatic document feeder, and you decided that you don't want any of them, you have to delete every scan file, one by one.The program provides no way to let you delete them all at once.Also, menu items such as "Delete Document" have no corresponding accelerator keys mapped to them.This lack of attention to detail is prevalent throughout PPM4 and raises serious questions about competence.

All scans performed under the control of PPM4 are deposited in a system-wide directory ("/Applications/Presto! PageManager 4/My Pagemanager/Inbox/").This tells me that the people who wrote the software weren't properly acquainted with the requirements of multi-user operating systems.

Once you scan more than about three documents from the automatic document feeder, PPM4 becomes unresponsive, as it takes forever to finish processing all of the files that have just been scanned in.No progress bar, no nothing.(PPM4 is obviously a single-threaded application.Incompetence aside, there's no excuse for writing an application like this in a single-threaded manner when you expect to encounter long stretches of processing.)There's some horrific inefficiency inside PPM4 that makes that application instance unusable from that point onward.The only workaround I know of is to kill the PageManager process and move all of the generated TIFF files from the "/Applications/Presto! PageManager 4/My Pagemanager/Inbox/" directory into your destination directory of choice.

This workaround exposes yet another design flaw in PPM4.PPM4 appears to make very naive assumption that it is the only agent that will ever modify the "/Applications/Presto! PageManager 4/My Pagemanager/Inbox/" directory.The PPM4 GUI doesn't update when you modify that directory; there's no "refresh" button either.Somehow it keeps some mapping between filenames in that directory and the thumbnail sketches that are shown in association with each of the filenames.This association is very easily corrupted.Expect to see the wrong thumbnail showing up for any given graphic file.(I'm not sure that the corruption results only from users modifying "/Applications/Presto! PageManager 4/My Pagemanager/Inbox/" or not, but at any rate, the application shouldn't act this way, and the fact that it does is further evidence that the authors were rank amateurs."Finder" can cope with users modifying the underlying filesystem; so should PPM4.)

One other bug in PPM4 is that the main system Menu Bar doesn't always update when you give PPM4 the main application focus.The Menu Bar may remain bound to whatever previous application had the focus (such as Finder).When this happens, PPM4 is basically dead in the water.You have to go to a command-line tool (such as Terminal) and kill the process yourself.

Finally, they claim that you can bypass the TWAIN mechanism when scanning, but in practice this often leads to dialogue boxes with bizarre error messages popping up when you initiate a scan.

Furthermore, using different page manager software isn't going to improve the mediocre scan quality.

Finally, Brother's tech support is bad.They're only open on weekdays, and even then it's not 24-hour support.The FAQs contain zingers like this:

Date: 23/09/2004
ID: faq000314_000
TITLE: I'm using Mac OS X. How can I uninstall the drivers?
DESCRIPTION: To solve this problem, please delete the installed drivers and reinstall them.

(To their credit, they do give you some useful information after that, but it's obvious that they're sloppier than they should be.)

Brother USA's website (http://www.brother-usa.com) is a mess.If you search Brother's "Support Options" page with the keyword "driver", you won't even run across the page mentioned above.I found it somewhere _else_ on Brother USA's website!Their website is a mess.(NewSoft's website is also far from perfect.I didn't look very deeply at it, but two things that caught my eye right away were the abundance of interesting variations on the English language and the avoidance of anything related to Apple, Macintoshes, or Mac OS X.)

I'm going to return my Brother MFC-5440CN because the scanning is poor and the software, while not as pathologically dysfunctional as that of the HP PSC 2510, is still bad.

10/10/2004 12:00 AM | Rating: