Brother MFC-7420 All-In-One Laser Printer
Out of stock |
Similar in Printers
- Black Print Speed: 20 ppm
- Output Type: Monochrome Printer
- Technology (Detailed): Laser
- Printer Type: All-In-One Printer
- All-in-One Functions: Copier Fax Machine Scanner
- Max Resolution (BW): 2400 x 600 dpi
- Overview
-
Reviews
-
Compare Prices
User ReviewRead All Reviews »
Great for document printing but very poor envelope handling
Pros
Super cheap cost/page, high print quality, fast
Cons
Very poor envelope handling, cheap build quality, some jams, scanner has problems with WinXP
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
If you just need a laser printer/fax for documents and for faxing, snap this up, but if you print envelopes frequently, keep looking
When my HP Officejet 6110's fax functions stopped working, I started looking around for another all-in-one (AIO) multifunction printer and since I already had a very nice Canon photo printer, I started looking harder at a laser unit. I spotted this on sale for $150 at Staples, had a $25 off $150 coupon and picked it up about a year ago. Overall, I'm about evenly divided on liking and disliking this unit, as it certainly has fast, high quality text printing and its per-page cost is dirt cheap, maybe the cheapest on the market, but it has several problems, one of which is very significant for me and probably for most other people using this in a home office or small business office.
Setup and Features:
This AIO has about the same functions as any other AIO: printer, fax, copier and scanner. Like all of the better units, it has both a document feeder (which holds about 30 pages and has worked almost perfectly, with maybe two jams out of 200+ uses) and you can lift up the cover to lay the item to be scanned or copied flat on the glass, meaning you can scan or copy a book, not just a piece of paper through a feed slot.
Setup is also very straightforward - you unpack, load software off disk, plug in to your computer (have to buy your own USB printer cable, though - none is included, but you can get one for under $5 off eBay that will work as well as the $30 ones Best Buy or the office stores sell), plug in a telephone cable for fax use (one is included) and start printing.
The manual is pretty well written and illustrated. It's easy enough to use the menus that I've only referred to the manual perhaps two or three times, but it's quite decent.
Performance and functionality:
This AIO prints fast, probably about 15 pages of text per minute. Print quality is excellent. You cannot see pixellation in the text unless you use a magnifying glass. In grad school back in the early 90's I was on a student journal and was involved in selecting a camera-ready high definition laser printer for submitting copy directly to our publishers without having to have them specially printed and this Brother's text quality is as good as the $2,000+ specialty unit we bought back then.
It is also fast to scan documents in the sheet feeder to fax - I would estimate that a four page fax goes from loading to transmitting to printing out the transmission report in about a minute 15 seconds. The fax functions and menus are straightforward and simple enough to use without consulting the manual.
Feeding documents into the feeder for copying is slower, but I think you can get about 5, maybe 6ppm copy speed. Copy quality is not up to what you get from a modern photocopier, but is much better than what an inkjet AIO will do in its copy setting and is certainly acceptable for keeping business records and sending copies of documents to less-sophisticated clients. I would equate the copy quality with a typical photocopier from the late 1980's. Given the incredibly low cost per page if you refill the toner cartridges (see below), it can be pretty economical to use this AIO for moderate copying use in a small office.
Unfortunately, I cannot report on the scanner functionality, as I have not had occasion to use that feature yet. Although the printer is monochromatic, the scanner function is in color. I'll update when/if I use the scanner features.
Pros:
- High quality text printing
- Photocopy function is quite good
- Printer and fax functions are fast
- Toner is ridiculously cheap if you refill - I bought a two-pack of toner refills off eBay for around $18 shipped (2x2500 pages), which included the $3 gear to convert the non-refillable starter toner cartridge that comes with the printer into a regular, refillable one.
Cons:
- Envelope handling is horrible. The guides for manual feeding, which slide horizontally to adjust for width of paper or envelope, do not stay in place and when they slide wider, your envelope goes in crooked and your address and return address print crooked. When the rollers grab the front of the envelope to pull it in, they exert some amount of sideways force, rather than strictly inward force, torqueing the envelope crooked. Even holding the guides and manually trying to hold the envelope straight when feeding it through the slot, I'm lucky if I get two out of three envelopes with the address printed perfectly level. I tried to stick a couple of strips of tape to keep the guides from sliding wider and that worked for a while but then the guides eventually dislodged the tape. I'm thinking about putting in a removable screw to hold the guides in place. If anyone has a better suggestion, please advise. If your MFC-7420 doesn't have this problem, well, congratulations, but quite of few of the online owner reviews of this AIO have complained about the same problem.
- Paper jams are more common than they should be - probably about once every 40 print jobs.
- Build quality is kind of shoddy. After about the fourth or fifth time opening it up to remove a paper jam, my unit does not close evenly - it's crooked and open on one side by about 3mm.
Conclusion:
This laser AIO can sometimes be had refurbished for a terrific price from Staples.com (you can look for sales on it at the excellent bargain hunters' website http://www.fatwallet.com) and I've seen it for as low as around $50 after rebates and coupons. For that sort of price, it's hard to go too wrong if you decide to go for it with this Brother. However, if you print a lot of envelopes (even just half a dozen or so a day) I'd go with something else with a better envelope feed - the saved aggravation will be worth it in the long run. Also, for about the price I paid, $150, there are now network AIO units out that can either be connected via wired network cables or wirelessly, so that you can use this AIO to print from multiple computers in your house or office. I'd look for one of those, instead, if I had to do it over.
UPDATE: At the request of several members, I gave a shot at getting the scanner function to work. Unfortunately, Brother included driver/software disks for Win Vista and for the Mac, but I've got Win XP. I tried to download the XP software off Brother's website, but after installing it, it did not work. My computer does not recognize the MFC-7420 as a scanner and nothing that I attempted to scan with it made it upstream to my PC. However, immediately thereafter, I was able to print with it, so the USB connection was not to blame. I haven't needed to scan anything, so it's not worth wasting an hour or more of my time calling Brother tech support to try to fix it. If my needs change and I give it another try, I'll come back and update this review again accordingly.
Setup and Features:
This AIO has about the same functions as any other AIO: printer, fax, copier and scanner. Like all of the better units, it has both a document feeder (which holds about 30 pages and has worked almost perfectly, with maybe two jams out of 200+ uses) and you can lift up the cover to lay the item to be scanned or copied flat on the glass, meaning you can scan or copy a book, not just a piece of paper through a feed slot.
Setup is also very straightforward - you unpack, load software off disk, plug in to your computer (have to buy your own USB printer cable, though - none is included, but you can get one for under $5 off eBay that will work as well as the $30 ones Best Buy or the office stores sell), plug in a telephone cable for fax use (one is included) and start printing.
The manual is pretty well written and illustrated. It's easy enough to use the menus that I've only referred to the manual perhaps two or three times, but it's quite decent.
Performance and functionality:
This AIO prints fast, probably about 15 pages of text per minute. Print quality is excellent. You cannot see pixellation in the text unless you use a magnifying glass. In grad school back in the early 90's I was on a student journal and was involved in selecting a camera-ready high definition laser printer for submitting copy directly to our publishers without having to have them specially printed and this Brother's text quality is as good as the $2,000+ specialty unit we bought back then.
It is also fast to scan documents in the sheet feeder to fax - I would estimate that a four page fax goes from loading to transmitting to printing out the transmission report in about a minute 15 seconds. The fax functions and menus are straightforward and simple enough to use without consulting the manual.
Feeding documents into the feeder for copying is slower, but I think you can get about 5, maybe 6ppm copy speed. Copy quality is not up to what you get from a modern photocopier, but is much better than what an inkjet AIO will do in its copy setting and is certainly acceptable for keeping business records and sending copies of documents to less-sophisticated clients. I would equate the copy quality with a typical photocopier from the late 1980's. Given the incredibly low cost per page if you refill the toner cartridges (see below), it can be pretty economical to use this AIO for moderate copying use in a small office.
Unfortunately, I cannot report on the scanner functionality, as I have not had occasion to use that feature yet. Although the printer is monochromatic, the scanner function is in color. I'll update when/if I use the scanner features.
Pros:
- High quality text printing
- Photocopy function is quite good
- Printer and fax functions are fast
- Toner is ridiculously cheap if you refill - I bought a two-pack of toner refills off eBay for around $18 shipped (2x2500 pages), which included the $3 gear to convert the non-refillable starter toner cartridge that comes with the printer into a regular, refillable one.
Cons:
- Envelope handling is horrible. The guides for manual feeding, which slide horizontally to adjust for width of paper or envelope, do not stay in place and when they slide wider, your envelope goes in crooked and your address and return address print crooked. When the rollers grab the front of the envelope to pull it in, they exert some amount of sideways force, rather than strictly inward force, torqueing the envelope crooked. Even holding the guides and manually trying to hold the envelope straight when feeding it through the slot, I'm lucky if I get two out of three envelopes with the address printed perfectly level. I tried to stick a couple of strips of tape to keep the guides from sliding wider and that worked for a while but then the guides eventually dislodged the tape. I'm thinking about putting in a removable screw to hold the guides in place. If anyone has a better suggestion, please advise. If your MFC-7420 doesn't have this problem, well, congratulations, but quite of few of the online owner reviews of this AIO have complained about the same problem.
- Paper jams are more common than they should be - probably about once every 40 print jobs.
- Build quality is kind of shoddy. After about the fourth or fifth time opening it up to remove a paper jam, my unit does not close evenly - it's crooked and open on one side by about 3mm.
Conclusion:
This laser AIO can sometimes be had refurbished for a terrific price from Staples.com (you can look for sales on it at the excellent bargain hunters' website http://www.fatwallet.com) and I've seen it for as low as around $50 after rebates and coupons. For that sort of price, it's hard to go too wrong if you decide to go for it with this Brother. However, if you print a lot of envelopes (even just half a dozen or so a day) I'd go with something else with a better envelope feed - the saved aggravation will be worth it in the long run. Also, for about the price I paid, $150, there are now network AIO units out that can either be connected via wired network cables or wirelessly, so that you can use this AIO to print from multiple computers in your house or office. I'd look for one of those, instead, if I had to do it over.
UPDATE: At the request of several members, I gave a shot at getting the scanner function to work. Unfortunately, Brother included driver/software disks for Win Vista and for the Mac, but I've got Win XP. I tried to download the XP software off Brother's website, but after installing it, it did not work. My computer does not recognize the MFC-7420 as a scanner and nothing that I attempted to scan with it made it upstream to my PC. However, immediately thereafter, I was able to print with it, so the USB connection was not to blame. I haven't needed to scan anything, so it's not worth wasting an hour or more of my time calling Brother tech support to try to fix it. If my needs change and I give it another try, I'll come back and update this review again accordingly.
