Brother MFC-9840CDW
This is a color laser printer, scanner and fax, with duplexer and document feeder.
I purchased it in 2011 to replace my ancient HP 4MP ;-)
Update: in 2023 the paper handling finally gave up
First impressions
The box was huge, and seriously heavy.
It took a while to remove all the bits of tape, and packaging designed to prevent damage in shipping. Considering the weight (38Kg), this thing isn't going to get tossed about, but it isn't easy to put it down gently either, so the precautions were worth it. A nice touch is the plastic bag to put the waste tonner box in, should you need to transport the printer.
It makes quite a lot of noise when first powered up, and is pretty noisy when printing, but is quiet enough when idle.
Build quality seems good, and it is bleedingly obvious which tonner catridge goes where.
Clearing a paper jam [1] could be fun, since I'd have to rotate it on its bench (which it just fits on) to open the back access pannel, but otherwise it doesn't take up that much more space than the old printer.
| [1] | after 6 years now, we are yet to have a paper jam. |
Setup
The menu system is pretty easy to navigate, and it didn't take long to configure it to use DHCP at boot time to learn all it needed.
The default node name is BRNxxxxxx where xxxxxx is the last 6 hex digits of the MAC address. It seemed pretty keen on that name so I left it as is.
That was about all the setup needed. The preparation for the new printer is another story, but it all worked out.
Once on the network, the printer became visible to all the machines. The NetBSD boxes discovered it as an lpd:// device, and the Mac's as mDNS://. I changed the url used by NetBSD to ipp:// and it worked fine.
date
For some reason this thing insists on living in 2008. It would be better if it could use NTP - though I don't really care if it knows what the date is.
Printing
This is the primary function.
Warmup takes a while (and makes a bit of noise - like it's thinking of printing something), but not nearly as long as some of the printers at work.
Once past the warmup, printing is very quick, first page comes out within a small number of seconds, and Brother claim 21 ppm in color or black and white.
The print dialogue for OS/X provides knobs to control duplex'ing but not color, so I added some queues on the server to force black and white.
Print quality looks good and the color looks pretty much the same as the much more expensive printers we have at work. One of my kids has printed 100's of photos - the walls of her room are covered with them.
Copying
Couldn't be easier. Put pages in the document feeder, press the button.
Scanning
This could be easier. Firstly, every e-mail address needs an @, but the only way to enter that on the console is to hit the # button about a dozen times.
Actually I recently discovered that I didn't need the domain part, just sjg was sufficient!
More importantly, you need to setup the SMTP server address, and the manual tells you to see the docs on the CD, which tell you to use a web browser, which asks you for a username and password - which you don't know! I found the default admin account and password via google, but that shouldn't have been necessary.
Once you get past that though, scanning to e-mail works fine.
Fax
I don't care about this at all. I've not dealt with anyone in recent years who didn't prefer faxes to arrive via e-mail. It is a shame that 50% of the printed manual is devoted to faxing.
Summary
So after six years or more, and I don't know how many reams of paper, I would conclude that is is a very good choice for a home printer. It just works.
About the only complaint is that inputing e-mail addresses is tedious (especially since you have to do it every time). Print quality and speed are good. Toner is plentiful and reasonably priced.
Update: Leaking toner
As noted above, the printer has worked flawlessly for more than 6 years. I do not recall a single paper jam in all that time.
We recently had toner problems though. The last set of color toner cartridges were faulty, and leaked badly.
No amount of cleanup seemed to help, get the printer all clean, print one color page and again there was blue toner everywhere. The others leaked too but not as badly.
Eventually I got sick of this, and went to Brother to find a solution.
The solution is to replace the faulty cartridges. This did seem to make the problem go away.
Looks like I need to clean the printer a few more times to get rid of the last traces of blue toner, but there's no sign of further leakage.
I reported the faulty cartridges to Brother, who asked for details like serial numbers, copy of invoice etc. - provided. To rub salt into the wound, they said sorry but the cartridges were purchased more than 90 days ago so out of warrantee.
Personally, I order cartridges when I install a set, so they are always at least a year old when installed.
I politely pointed out that few if any of their customers would wait until out of toner to buy a new set, and that perhaps a 90 day warrantee is insufficient.
Given that a set of color cartridges is almost $200 it's hard to tolerate faulty ones - especially if you have to eat the cost.
Paper handling finally gave up
In 2023 (so 12 years old) the printer started failing with a useless error Unable to Print 32.
This boils down to something in the paper handling wearing out. Unfortunetely there are at least 3 parts which could be the root cause and replacing all of them will cost more than a new printer.
That's annoying as most of the thing is in as new condition ;-)
I've been limping along with a smaller B&W printer our daughter left here, so have not yet decided what to do with this one.
Sometimes it will power up - and then it can be used for scanning which is very handy, but more often than not it won't get past its self tests.
| Author: | sjg@crufty.net /* imagine something very witty here */ |
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