Product ReviewsPrinters
Multi-function printer sales continue to grow at the expense of single-function printers and it's easy to see why. For not much more desk-space than a printer, you can have a device that handles printing, scanning, copying and faxing, just about all the paper-based tasks you need in an office, particularly a small or home one. Brother has laid claim to a lot of this market and its latest, mid-range mono laser multi-function device, the MFC-7840W, combines everything into a very modest box, although currently not a particularly cheap one. The dark and light grey case is more PC than Mac, but it's more likely to sit in an office, not a design studio, so it shouldn't stand out too much. The design is conventional, with a 35-sheet auto document feeder (ADF) on top of an A4 flatbed scanner. To the front of this is the control panel and underneath is a mono laser engine, with both a 250-sheet paper tray and a single-sheet feed slot for special media. The control panel is well laid out, with a central, menu-navigation panel, two-line x 16-character, backlit LCD and three illuminated mode buttons for fax, scan and copy. To the right of this is a key pad for entering fax numbers and two large buttons to start and stop a job. To the left is a bank of eight, fast-dial numbers, along with fax and option buttons for functions such as copy enlargement and fax resolution. There are three different ways of connecting the machine: USB 2, Ethernet and wifi. Installing the Brother software gives you the option for each of these links, though the wireless connection does require you to cable the machine temporarily to your router, so it can pick up an IP address and other network parameters. Software installation is straightforward and includes Presto! PageManager to
Installation of the combined drum and toner cartridge is from the front of the MFC7840W, so there's no need to fiddle around with the scanner section hinged up, although it does hinge to cope with any paper-handling problems. The toner cartridge clips onto the drum unit, as the drum lasts for 12,000 pages, while toner is good for either 1500 or 2600 pages, depending on cartridge capacity. Brother claims 22ppm for the device, when printing in draft mode. When printing in normal mode, we got 13.6ppm, so the stated figure isn't out of order. We saw identical speeds printing plain text and text with graphics and produced a single-page copy in just 11 seconds, which is quick for this class of machine. The print quality doesn't suffer, either. Text is sharp and clear, both densely black in large characters and delicately precise in smaller ones. Greyscales are smooth and with very little banding, often the plague of mono lasers, and even photographic images come out cleanly. The only noticeable glitch is when copying greyscales printed by the same machine. Here, there are a number of odd moir??© patterns that give the tints a mottled appearance. Scanning from either the ADF or the platen is more than adequate for day-to-day use, with good levels of detail in mono and colour images. It's useful to have the ADF if you're going to use the machine's fax facilities, as it enables you to easily send multi-page faxes. Consumable costs are made up of the toner and drum units, and working out the cost per page, including both of these components, gives a figure of just over 2.8p. This compares well with other mono laser multi-function devices, most of which come in at more than 3p per sheet. The Brother MFC-7840W is a well-conceived machine, as intelligently realised as its original design. It's a simple but functional all-in-one printer with extras such as fax and wireless network compatibility, making it flexible to use in a variety of environments. The price quoted is Brother's SRP, which is likely to be anything up to £100 more than a typical Internet price, when this new launch is more readily available. By Simon Williams
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