In Praise of the Brother MFC 7420
I’m hard on printers, they always end up going wrong within a very short time of me owning them. In the last 3 years I have had 3 Canon, 1 lexmark, 1 HP and 1 Brother Printer. Actually the Lexmark, HP and Brother have all been Muti Function Devices.
I use both Mac and PC, so I need full compatibility with both. I have plenty of room in my office but I don’t want to waste space by having a Fax, Printer & Scanner all on the desk, but I require all three devices to be top quality, oh and I dont want to spend too much money either!
I bought this Brother when my HP C5180 screwed up when printing labels and decided to say screwed up.
I don’t need to print colour, so this time I decided to buy a laser printer based multi function device. There was plenty of choices, but the Brother has cheap toner and easy availability of both the toner units and other consumables, and the fax and copier work without the computer being switched on. It has proper drivers and software for both the Pc and Mac.
I installed this on a PC first, the install was smooth and includes paperport, which is an amazing application. The scanner can stack and feed hundreds of documents and archive them as PDF files..great.
The Mac software is good, it does not include paperport but my Adobe Acrobat software (not Adobe Acrobat Reader) seems to do a good job or archiving documents.
I don’t use the supplied scanner software on my Mac, just the Twain driver. I can import a scan straight into Photoshop and edit it there.
The printer is great, the scanner is super, the fax is fabulous and plain paper faxes are very good if you are used to the old thermal paper rolls as I am.
This device just sits in the corner of my desk and gets on with the job, I can recommend it to anyone with a home office, small business, or just the requirement for a Fax, Scanner, Copier and Laser Printer. Don’t ask me the spec, I don’t even know the maximum resolution, how many pages per min or whatever but I know it does the job and that’s what counts.
