Brother MFC-6490CW All-In-One InkJet Printer

We picked up the MFC-6490CW for our two-person branch office. This was a business purchase, so price was less of a factor than features. But, hey, the price wasn't bad, either.

First off, the unit's network connectivity could not be beat: Ethernet and WiFi — what more could you want?

The out of box experience contained a nice surprise: Brother prints the repacking instructions right there on the box flap. How many times have you had to repack a computer or electronic item, trying to figure out where that oddball-shaped piece of Styrofoam goes? This was a "why didn't I think of that" moment, causing me to wonder why all manufacturers don't do this. Nice touch, Brother.

Also, before we purchased this unit, I checked out the support section of the Brother web site. Now, every electronic item these days has firmware and/or drivers. One way I judge a manufacturer's commitment to their product, and their level of internal organization (or lack thereof), is by how often they release driver and firmware updates. If I go to their site and there are no updates, or just one from ages ago, forget it. However, the Brother site showed that there were regular releases of drivers and firmware, which shows me that they are on top of things. Put it this way: no software is bug free. While I do not expect that they'll still be releasing updates say, 10 years from now, the point is that there is always something to fix in software, so they'd darn well better be releasing updates every couple of months for at least the first few years of a product's life if they want my business.

The disappointment started, however, with the design of the paper trays. They feel flimsy and plasticy. Another minus is that you can't load a ream (500 sheets) of paper into any one tray, and you end up having to leave a couple hundred sheets lying around next to the printer every time you open a new ream. Come on, it's not like the paper tray isn't already there; you just need to make it an inch or so higher. Yeah, I know, that would cost a whole $2 or something in plastic per unit, which in today's management-by-spreadsheet environment means it gets the nix. (Gee, Brother, why stop at 150 sheets: you could save even more in plastic by only putting in a one sheet tray. I think someone ought to do a cost analysis of that, stat!) Oh, right, you want to make the capability to hold 500 sheets a feature so that you can soak me for a "business class" unit. Right. Gotcha.

Moving on, a big plus in this price range is that the unit prints on and scans ledger size (11 x 17) paper, which we need for some of the engineering work that we do. The caveat here is that the paper tray can only hold ledger paper if it is extended, which is rather ungainly.

The unit spits its papers out, by default, with the first sheet on the bottom and the first sheet on top. OK, no big deal for a document of a few pages...I can deal with it. However, there is a setting in the printer driver, "Reverse Order" or some such, that causes the printer to print the last sheet first, so that the sheets lie in the correct order in the output tray. Great! So I turn it on, and go to print a 20 page PDF. Unlike printing without this option, the hard drive on my PC starts churning, and 15 minutes later, I'm still waiting for the document to print. From my analysis, it seems like the driver has to buffer the entire print job so that it can send the last page first, whereas, when you print "normally", the first page is streamed to the printer immediately. I called support and, after a go-around with the tech trying to explain the problem, I finally clued him in. A few weeks later, a driver update appeared on Brother's site, but the problem still occurs.

In terms of the print quality: this is where the unit does not take home any awards. My 8 year old Canon i950 has better print quality than this unit. Text is fuzzy, even in high-quality mode. When using draft mode (which I do with all my ink jets to save on ink), where the i950 spits out somewhat less-dark documents with no discernible loss of quality, the vertical lines on this unit are printed with alternating "jaggies", to where the line isn't perfectly vertical.

Finally, I started noticing a faint horizontal line on printouts. I ran the test that prints a pattern whereby you can identify a clogged nozzle and, sure enough, one of the magenta nozzles was not firing. I ran a few cleaning cycles to no avail, and called support. Their answer was to have me run five cleaning cycles, or else they would not admit that I had a problem. Now, realize that each time you run a cleaning cycle, you use gobs of ink in the process. Sure enough, on the third cleaning with the support tech, one of the inks runs out. Great. Now I have to buy more ink and call support back, only to be told that I need to run five more cleaning cycles before they'll acknowledge my problem and let file for warranty support. Come on man! I mean, sure, if you are going to send me free ink, I'll sit here and run cleaning cycles all week, if that's what you want. Of course, unlike other ink jets I've worked with, there is no documented or readily obvious mechanism by which you can get to the print head to, say, remove it and run an alcohol-soaked Q-tip over it to at least try to resolve the problem. And I'm an engineer...it's not like I haven't tried. No, I have to carry this behemoth of a printer to a support place 10 miles away, so that they can do it. Forget it. I'll live with the missing horizontal line.

Things I have not tried:
Faxing. Come on, this is 2010, not 1995, does anyone send faxes any more?
Wireless connectivity. For security purposes, we do not use wireless in the office.