BROTHER MFC-8860DN TONER CARTRIDGE

Brother MFC-8860DN Review

Overview:

The Brother MFC-8860DN truly is the quintisential Brother black and white multifunctional unit. It comes complete with all the standard hardware seen commonly in Brother MFCs, as well as a duplexing unit, 50 page automatic document feeder, and a fast print speed. Buyers of this well rounded device will not be disappointed.

Pros:

The Brother MFC-8860DN not only prints and copies at speeds of up to 30 pages per minute, it can produce text and imagery are resolutions of up to 1200 x 1200 dots per inch, making it as fast as it is high quality. With the help of the unit’s built in 50 page automatic document feeder, multiple sources of input can be loaded automatically for extra high quality scans, copies, and faxes.

With an LCD screen that has 5 lines with 22 characters per line, the guessing games are tossed out for clear, easy to understand menus. The screen is also backlit so it is as easy to operate in the dark or bright sunlight as it is in a regularly lit space.

A standard paper tray that holds up to 250 sheets of 20lb letter or legal sized paper is accompanied by a 50 sheet multipurpose tray that is perfect for automatically loading envelopes, as well as other special media types. One additional 250 sheet tray can be added to the setup for a grand total of 550 sheets of potential paper storage and up to three trays total.

Along with USB 2.0 and Parallel ports, the Brother MFC-8860DN is equipped with an Ethernet interface that allows an entire network to connect to the device. This network server is the perfect solution for the office that requires a semi heavy volume black and white document printer to supplement other devices already present such as color inkjets. With it’s maximum monthly duty cycle of 20,000 pages and recommended duty cycle of 500 to 3,500 pages per month, the unit is hard to overwork in a small office environment, even on a network.

Fax functionality is made possible by the printer’s Super G3 33.6 Kbps fax modem which is capable of transmitting a single page of fax data in about 2 seconds. Other than a call waiting/handset feature, the fax functionality on this machine is fully loaded. It features up to 600 pages of fax page memory as well as duplex fax support. This means that incoming faxes can be printed to both sides of the page which can ultimately reduce paper usage by as much as half.

The built in duplex feature is also fully compatible with printing and copying, though the automatic document feeder included is not equipped with reversing technology so double sided input will have to be flipped over by hand.

Cons:

The standard memory of only 32 MBs is a little low for a device of the Brother MFC-8860DN’s caliber. It is expandable up to a grand total of no more than 544MBs, but this memory boost can be prohibitively expensive. The unit also, for some reason, is not compatible with call waiting, meaning that a connected handset may not be ideally compatible with the device.