Brother MFC-7820N 5-in-1 Network Monochrome Laser Multifunction Center
by Brother Printer
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List Price: Our Price: $199.00 You Save: $50.99 (20%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Brother MFC-7820N 5-in-1 Network Monochrome Laser Multifunction Center
Customer Review: Best Bang for the Buck
Summary: 4 Stars
It prints very fast. It has a document feeder for use with faxing and copying.
It's got an Ethernet port. I've got it connected to my home network. Awesome!
It has a separate drum and toner cartridge, which means you pay less for refills.
The faxes work nicely. It has all the functions of a standard $300+ fax machine. That alone with the copying and printing make this an outstanding value.
It does seem unusually noise for a laser printer though. It also eats a lot of electricity. My computer with it's 500W power supply is connected to the same surge protector as this printer and a lamp. The lamp flickers when the printer starts up and starts printing. That only happens with the printer. The lamp doesn't flinch I start the computer.
I'm also not thrilled with the "page curl" you get with pages it prints, but I can live with it. It's not that much of a curl to be a bother.
The scans aren't too great. They aren't awful but I've seen better from an inexpensive stand-alone HP scanner from a number of years ago.
Fortunately I rarely scan, so it won't be a big deal.
In fact that's the best reason to buy a machine like this. If you need it's capabilities, but not very often, then it makes much more sense to get an All-in-one unit.
Overall I'd highly recommend this to anyone who fits the "All-in-one Profile".
What does that mean? It means you need a color scanner and a monochrome fax machine, laser printer and copier. However you don't need any of them that much.
You do get better quality when you buy separates hardware, but for the price this can't be beat.
If you're going to do a lot of two more of these functions, then go with separates hardware.
For all-in-ones though, Brother has very good stuff. I was eying an HP with identical features, but it cost $150.00 more and the reviews weren't as good as for this Brother model.
Oh and much to my surprise, Brother writes Open Source Linux drivers for this! What more could I ask for? :-)
Customer Review: Great MFC all-round
Summary: 5 Stars
I'll second many of the reviews on this thread. Overall, it's the best functionality out there for price. Great print quality. Superior network-based scanning capabilities including the PaperPort software it comes with. The only real negative is the printer feels really flimsy and plasticky - the paper tray and open-up drawers. Feels like it's going to break some day (but hasn't yet).
For those who run into troubles reaching their 7820N when it's IP address changes... I ran into a problem with my 7820N today which other people may hit so I figured I'd post it here where there's tons of other good 7820N info. I just installed a new router with DHCP server that uses a different IP address range than the old router I replaced. This of course caused my Brother 7820N IP address to change. The strange thing is not only did the IP address change, but the Brother 7820N factory node name (which is advertised into WINS I believe, allowing all 4 of my Windows XP PCs reach it via node name) also changed as the Brother took on an new IP address. It changed from "BRN_046922" (this is my Brother-generated unique factory node name...yours will likely differ) to "dhcppc3". Not sure where this new "dhcppc3" name came from...potentially assigned by my new router. But with all 4 PCs already thinking my Brother printer and scanner and fax server were "BRN_046922", you can imagine the pain of manually having to reconfigure every print, scan, and fax driver in 4 PCs. I found instead I could just reset the node name on the 7820N itself to fix the problem. I logged into 7820N Web interface using it's new raw IP address, looked at Network Configuration main pane, clicked on "Node Name", changed "dhcppc3" to "BRN_046922" and pressed submit. That's it. Now the printer is again visible to Brother's status monitor program and reachable again via the printer driver, the PaperPort scan driver, etc.
Took me a couple hours to figure out what went wrong. Hope this saves someone else some debugging time...
-Andy
Customer Review: My first laser printer
Summary: 4 Stars
I received Brother MFC-7820N last night. We're a Mac-only household and wanted a multi-function printer that supported Mac OS X. Another reason I went with Brother was that my dad has used this brand for years and has been happy.
The MFC-7820N out of the box experience was superb. I installed the driver on my Mac runing OS X 10.3.9 with no problem. Plugged in the USB cable directly to my 15" PowerBook AI, brought up the Printer Utility and added the Brother printer to my printer list as expected. Then I unplugged it from my laptop and plugged it into the USB port of my Airport Extreme. Went back to the Printer Utility and selected Rendezvous and viola, there appeared the Brother MFC-7820N. I can print from my wireless Mac from anywhere in the house now.
Copies on the flat bed is what you'd expect. I tried scanning but had to connect USB directly to my Mac in order for the image to be recognized by a TWAIN application (Photoshop, Preview, etc.) I believe I can get the scan to work wirelessly if I connect the printer via a network (ethernet) cable to my Airport but haven't tried that yet. The scan was good. The color was slightly off but on par with scanner-only machines I've used.
Printing envelopes is a breeze. I've owned only inkjet printers that required a guessing game as to how to feed an envelope. The MFC-7820N has a slider in the manual feed that shrinks to the size of the envelope's width; put in the envelope edge and it grabs it from you.
In general the machine felt solid. One thing; do push in the toner catridge until it snaps/settles into its correct position before trying to close the access door. The door hinge is not strong enough to have the door push in the cartridge to its correct position and I think if I had conitnued to do this bad things would have happened to the door. After properly setting the cartridge the door closed flawlessly.
I have not used the fax feature yet. I'll try to update as I use it more.
Customer Review: Brother MFC-7820N 5-in-1 Network Monochrome Laser Multifunction Center
Summary: 5 Stars
This product is replacing both of my old Brother fax machine and old Cannon laser copier plus giving me the scanner that I always wanted but did not have the space. The 7820N is really a MFC that I bought it for! I am still using my 4 year old Okidata color laser printer. I've used this product for about 2 weeks now. Easy to setup. I setup for wireless network and installed the software on both laptops (XP & Vista). It came with different CDs for differet OS, just pick the right CD and it will guide you thru. Only need to buy the lan cable. Better & more functions under Vista OS.
Pros: Good copy quality, auto feeder, fast printing from sleep mode, good scanner & software for computer fax or email after scanning. Very good wireless computer interface esp for scanning & faxing. It works great with my existing Winfax Pro software, too; I just scan the pages into the Winfax program and choose one of my custom cover letter and fax. However, if you use the flat top scanner, it will not allow you to combine multiple single scanned pages in one file; each scan is one file unless using the autofeeder. Can scan color copies then use color printer to print color copies. The fax resolution can be preset at fine, s fine or photo as the default. Printed 33 pages for tax return in a hurry and pages stayed nice and neat in output tray (you need to flip up the paper holder in short or long position). No curly paper either not like the other review.
Con: the autofeeder feeds the paper slightly crooked every time which is acceptable for faxing but not for copying important documents, plus it will avoid 1/6" from the edges in scan or copy.
Summary:
I got it for only $[...] at Amazon's special offer (I see the price is now even lower!). Awesome deal, great product, all-in-one saves space! I love it! I just hope it's reliable like my previous fax machine. Overall, I'll have to give it a 5 star for the very reasonable price.
Customer Review: A compromise machine - not recommended for Macs
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought this to replace a venerable Apple LaserWriter in hopes that I would get good quality printing, faxing, scanning, and perhaps some OCR. It does some of these things OK, and others not at all, despite the promises. Photocopies come out OK - as long as you don't require much subtllty in shadings, and as long as you're not trying to copy originals with light colors. It does fax OK, although sometimes it's hard to figure out if a fax went through OK. I mostly fax from my desktop, and only occasionally from hard copy. When I fax from my desktop, I have to turn this machine off, or else it intercepts my OUTGOING fax as if it were an INCOMING fax, even though I've firmly instructed it not to answer incoming faxes.
As for printing, it does an OK job, but it's neither a TrueType nor a PostScript machine. It is, instead, an emulator, and sometimes you get something close to what you want, and sometimes you get something that looks suspiciously like Courier.
Scanning is very hit-or-miss. Sometimes you get an acceptable scan, sometimes the scan doesn't come out worth a damn, and sometimes the software just balks at doing anything and says "There's a problem. Please restart your machine." Since this fixes nothing, you wind up swearing at the machine instead of getting any work done.
OCR is a complete waste of time. To put it bluntly, the software for Macs that is bundled with the machine isn't even an honest attempt, and it seems clear that Brother really doesn't care because it's so clunky, and incompetent. I suspect that they just bought any old piece of software that had "Mac" and "OCR" in the product description, purely so they could say they had it. Don't even think of trying to use it.
I will continue to use this machine for a while for copying, faxing, and printing, but it's a compromise machine that does nothing very well. Not Recommended.