Brother All-in-one Prints Charmingly

Whether you have a small office or a home office, Brother has a line of printers it thinks will serve your needs well. And it just might. I've reviewed a series of these printers over the past few years and have been impressed by their quality and affordability – though of course the affordability of the initial expense pales once you're faced with replacing toner or inkjet cartridges. This isn't a Brother thing, however; it's the nature of the beast regardless of what brand you buy. Among the Brothers I've reviewed are color laser printers and all-in-ones, as well as a nice little inkjet all-in-one that fit really nicely onto the desktop. I even played with a small label printer that really comes in handy.

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They've all performed as advertised and offered good print quality for the price.The latest unit to cross my home office threshold is the $449 U.S. MFC-9120CN, a multi-function unit that, via LED technology, allows for a smaller footprint than the earlier, conventional color laser all-in-ones of theirs that I've tried. This, of course, is a good thing because the new model not only takes up less space in the office, it's easier – at a net weight of 50.5 lbs (compared with the 72.6 lbs of the last laser Brother MFC I tried) – to lift into that place in the first, er, place. Brother says this new series of color printers and all-in-ones sets "a new performance benchmark" by cranking out professional quality printing (color or monochrome) at up to 17 pages per minute, which it claims is the fastest color print speed in their respective market segments. The segments of which Brother speaks is the small and medium-sized business market, which is certainly an area with a big footprint of its own these days.  The series includes two color printers (the HL-3000 Series) and the three color all-in-ones (the MFC-9000 Series) – including the MFC-9320CW that adds built-in wireless network interfacing and a USB Direct Interface (which lets you print from or scan to a USB Flash memory drive or Pictbridge enabled digital camera) to the mix. I love the wireless networking aspect, and missed the lack of it on the MFC-9120CN because it limited me to wired network or conventional USB, not that it was a huge deal in my home office. But wireless networking increases the choices of where you can locate the unit – when I tried one a while ago I stuck it down in the basement, nicely out of the way where I wouldn't be tripping over it in my office all the time. The downside was that I got plenty of exercise running downstairs to retrieve my prints…Setup is very easy, and Brother walks you right through it with their support materials. The toughest part is finding all the tape thingies to pull off of it. Installing the four toner cartridges is straightforward; they all slide easily into their respective slots. The advantage of an all-in-one unit is that you get printer, scanner/copier and fax all in one – though if one part packs it in you've lost them all. I never fax any more, but love the convenience of a scanner/copier and printer together. The MFC-9120CN also comes with a 35 sheet document feeder on its lid that's great for scanning or copying multiple pages. It works well, too.Brother says the feeder is great for "unattended copying and scanning", but in my experience the instant you walk away from it something jams or multiple pages go through at once, so you have to redo the scan anyway. On the other hand, standing over the unit, watching it feed, doesn't change this fact, so you might as well go and enjoy that coffee anyway.On the other other hand, if you're working in an office where you have to share the unit, standing over it to ensure your job went according to plan may save you from going to the back of the line again if the scan screws up…The MFC has an adjustable legal/letter size, 250-sheet paper capacity and a manual feed mode for envelopes or specialty stuff. As for Brother's claim of up to 17 pages per minute, as with most units like these, it's best to focus on the "up to" part since, like miles per gallon in your car, your mileage may vary. Not to dump on the Brother unnecessarily – I didn't measure the speed of its performance (my stopwatch is in the shop), but having used many such units over the years I found its speed more than adequate regardless of the published spec. The 9120 claims resolution of up to 600 x 2400 dpi, "using Brother’s LED print technology"; I printed a wide variety of file types, from Acrobat files and text documents to high resolution graphics and digital photos and I thought the unit's print quality was just fine. I didn't have a large enough magnifying glass to actually count the pixels, though. Brother says that, with the software suite it includes, you can send Super G3 faxes either from the all-in-one itself (which is great if you need to fire off something you didn't create yourself) or your computer (if you did). I'll take them at their word. The software adds faxing choices to your printer dialog boxes for easy access right from your document, and you can supposedly store up to 600 pages in the unit's memory. As far as scanning is concerned, Brother claims a resolution (Interpolated) of up to 19,200 dpi and the software offers an abundance of "scan-to" features – for OCR (optical character recognition – which takes a scanned image of a page of text and converts it to editable text), to an email or to an image file. The suite works well, though I prefer scanning directly from whatever application I'm using – for example, Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, etc., because it's always nice to cut out the middle man. Brother recommends a monthly workload of 300 to 1,500 pages for the MFC-9120CN. It's hard to get excited about a printer or an all-in-one and this one is no exception. But its combination of good printing and scanning quality coupled with a smaller footprint and lighter weight make it a compelling choice when looking to replace that aging behemoth you may have now. Copyright 2010 Jim Bray