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Brother MFC 7840W

The Brother MFC-7840W is an attractive prospect for the small or home office, with a good all-round set of features. Priced to compete in that SOHO market it does perform well, and is worth the investment.

While there are many color laser multifunction devices on the market, they don’t come as cheaply as this monochrome MFC-7840W. Not everybody needs to print color, so this is an excellent alternative for those people. It is capable of printing, scanning, copying and faxing, and does them all with ease.

There are three ways of connecting the device, USB, Ethernet and WiFi, which is a good set of choices. The USB option is the easiest to set up, but offers slower transfer speeds than Ethernet or 802.11g. Networking the printer was easy, with it appearing in our workgroup as soon as we had connected it and switched it on.

The control panel is well designed and simple in operation. There are three large buttons that allows you to choose between copy, scan and fax and the bright LCD clearly shows you what you’re doing.

Output is good, with prints coming out at 22 pages per minute for monochrome at up to 2400 x 600dpi. The text was clear on all tests with clean edges and no bleeding. Grayscale was even and well distributed and reproduction was good overall. Scans were of a good quality, but the software leaves a little to be desired. The package is basic to say the least but you can get by.

Paper is held in a 250 sheet capacity drawer at the front. Toner can be changed quickly and efficiently with only a clip to remove. Replacement cartridges can produce 2600 pages, and replacement drums will last for 120000. While not the longest lasting consumables on the market, their relatively short life is reflected in the price. Retailers like quikshiptoner.com sells cartridges for $36 at the moment which is good value.

The fax is a standard affair, offering good quality matched with decent speed. The controls are simple and the control panel has the usual phone book, redial, resize and other options for normal use. Transmission was decently quick and print quality on received faxes was good.

For small businesses or workgroups who need a multifunction device for convenience rather than necessity will do well to consider the MFC-7840W. It has enough features, and produces documents of a quality suitable for almost any office environment. The consumables are available and affordable enough to make the cost of ownership low enough to be attractive to many buyers.

Source: http://hubpages.com/hub/Brother-MFC-7840W
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