Brother MFC-7840W Laser Multi-Function Center with Wireless and Ethernet Network Interfaces

Done with inkjets. So happy to have a good laser again. Chose Brother because price and quality now better than HP. It's quiet and gets used all day, everyday. Never jams, even the top and bottom paper feeders which was a huge problem with HP products. Reliable WiFi. Simple set up. Reliable faxes. Compact desktop size, but sturdy.

This is a very nice printer and I agree with the other reviewers positive feedback. But there is one problem I have found for those who print forms and envelopes via the manual feeder. When the printer is in sleep mode and you put a piece of paper in the manual feeder the printer wakes up and does a small grab of the paper. Unfortunately this small grab puts the paper off center so if you are printing on form paper it is a real nuisance. A solution may be to wake it up first by printing something else, then put in your form paper and print before it goes to sleep again, but again not the best solution. Also the lack of ability to put multiple envelopes in the manual feeder I find is a weakness. All my older LaserJets could at least handle 5-6 envelopes in the manual feeder. After reading many reviews though I find that trying to find a MFP that can handle envelopes is a major problem in itself and this printer is no different. I also noticed the toner that came with the printer did not last for nearly as long as advertised, it started showing toner low very very soon!

Works as expected.

Toner forces you to replace it after making a certain no of copies. Even when it clearly can make further copies. Appears to be a money making idea by Brother.

Extremely easy to setup. Small device that packs a lot of feature. Very happy with the printer.

My HP LaserJet 3055 (also a networked, muti-function printer) broke about a month ago, and I chose this model as a replacement. I use it primarily as a printer, occasionally as a scanner or fax. I have a dedicated copy machine, so don't use that feature too much. I haven't yet used the automatic document feeder too much, but it worked well on the one 20 page document I scanned. I'd expect that this kind of flat ADF would work well -- as opposed to the vertical type which is known to be jam prone.

The printer, scanner and fax all work well, but as noted by another reviewer (B. Bassett 9/10/08), the power requirements are unusually high during printing. I have a 20 amp circuit coming into my study and no previous printer or copier (all laser based) caused my UPS to click over to battery, but this one does every time I print. It only squeals its warning for a fraction of a second, but it typically happens several times during the print cycle, including once well after the printing is done. Not a huge annoyance, but one I didn't expect and enough to drop at least one star in my rating. I'm not sure if I'd have given it 3 or 4 stars otherwise, but suspect that 3 is what I'd have given it due to the general difficulty of installing networked printers (see below).

The average power consumption is good. I have a power meter and test all new devices like this. Over 10 days of light usage it averaged 7.3 watts which is close to the instantaneous reading when it's in standby mode. The fan stays on longer than I'd like after even a short printing job (I hate fan noise), but that's only a minor annoyance compared to the UPS squeals.

Another reviewer complained about Brother's quality control and said he'd stick with HP. Well, my HP printer was only two years old when it broke and a similar unit I'd bought my daughter failed after just one year. So, I'm not sure HP's QC is any better (or as good as) Brother's.

I had no difficulty getting the networking feature to work with my Macs, but that may have been because I spent a lot of time figuring it out two years ago when I got the HP. As a warning: Setting up a networked printer is not as simple as it sounds. At least a significant fraction of the people I've talked with about it found it to be a major pain. That's a general comment on networked printers, not specific to this model.