Customer Reviews

Brother MFC-5860cn Color Photo Inkjet All-in-One Flatbed with Networking with 2nd paper tray

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

From the specs, this Brother multi-function printer has a lot going for it. In the home or workplace, it falls far short.

I use this printer in a busy home office. After two months of heavy use, here are my thoughts and obervations on it:

Printer: The specs say up to 30 ppm (pages per minute) b&w, 25ppm color. After it warms up, I'd say it never went above 10 ppm even in b&w. Even on its highest quality, it disappoints. Text is clearly legible, but not something I'd feel good about showing a client. Color is woefully slow, and lacks both richness and clarity.

Scanner: From a mechanical perspective, both the ADF and the flatbed actually work quite nicely. However, the old version of Paperport that it includes is slow, and creates HUGE files. OCR quality isn't worth using. I purchased ReadIRIS separately, and have been delighted with its speed and accuracy on this MFC.

Fax: Works well. Could use more menu detail.

Summary: If your most important need is a printer, look elsewhere. If you need a backup printer, but a decent scanner, this is pretty good, once you get better software.

In my businesses I print invoices and shipping labels concurrently and needed an affordable network printer with 2 paper trays so I did not have to change paper all the time. While searching for a network printer with dual paper trays I saw that owners of the Brother MFC_5860cn gave the printer very high ratings on cost, reliability, ease of use and actual English speaking live support. The only rating that was lower than the competition was print quality compared to the HP that cost $300 dollars more. I bought the printer and use it heavily for a busy home based business. The Brother MFC-5860cn has handled the job superbly. It is affordable to buy ink and I can now print invoices, sales letters, and labels from any of the workstations in the network. The fax has performed flawlessly on our VOIP phone system, and the excellent scanner and Color/B&W copier with 35 sheet feeder is a bonus that would be hard to do without once you've used it. I only use the OCR for mailing list/labels and it has worked fine. I only print to my HP for photos and presentation quality materials since it cost twice as much for ink, and only has one tray, and the HP software is still very buggy after numerous calls to HP support always starting with "mohwor prease" and ending with no resolution to the 25 copies of HPBIOD running in task manager after I printing with this printer. I have found the Brother MFC 5860cn to be a great solution for my business.

I've been looking for a new printer for a while, and finally settled on this one. Fairly satistfied with the result. The printer is solidly built, print quality is very good to excellent, networking was extremely easy, fax and copy work well, and the 250 sheet second paper tray is great. Also, the Mac support is superior -which after many years of dealing with sub-par and bloated HP OS X drivers is a welcome change. Criticisms: a little slow; there is no built-in color LCD for previewing pictures when printing directly from a memory card (you have to print an index sheet and then manually key-in the number of the pic you want to print); and photo quality is okay but not great. (visible banding and colors look dull). Overall though, great printer.

UPDATE 3/3/08: well, after close to a year of reasonable performance, my first serious paper jam damaged the print head alignment, and I discovered (much to my dismay) that this machine is essentially not user-serviceable. Print head problems, while covered by the 1 year warranty, necessitate taking the machine in person to a local service center. This is a BIG letdown and a real pain in the a** to boot. My other comment would be that I'm now pretty frustrated by the firmware/UI, it is poorly thought out and more often than I'd like ends up in a hung state where you can't turn the machine off or even reset it because you're stuck in some error message which is only shown on the machine itself. Also, as others commented, the second tray is great, but driver support for it is limited.

In summary, I think Brother makes better fax machines than printers. Next time (which may be soon) I'm going back to HP or Canon.

Great working machine. Prints quickly in full color with good detail, great faxes, easy to scan documents. 4 stars because the tricky paper tray selection. I can't seem to set the computer up to automatically switch to the correct paper tray between applications so it will not print a letter size document on a legal size page, etc. Other than that, great machine.

I bought the MFC5860CN based on the Brother description which states it prints 30ppm color and 25ppm B&W. It prints closer to 4ppm. I called support and quickly got passed between 3 people (they at least speak English). However, they indicated to get that speed, the page being printed should have only 5% coverage (would that be 2.5 lines of text on a normal 8.5x11 page?), and the printer setting should be on "fast" (which unfortunately prints black text in a faint grey tone) and I should not begin timing until the first page completed (I timed from the start of actual printing of the first page). I don't know if other vendor's use these restrictive critera, but it seems like false advertising to me. Otherwise, its performance is average.

Next time I will stick with HP which performed well for me in the past.

This ink-jet is absolutely wonderful as far as a copier, printer, fax and/or scanner. The printer is somewhat slow. The first real issue I have is with the top paper tray. The paper is not wanting to pull out of the tray properly. I had to make sure the paper was in the tray just right and then the paper would pull to print. The other issue I have is if you want to run your computer dial-up service through the same phone line as the Brother, if there are any issues in regards to printing (such as having to add more paper, delete a job, etc.;), you have to unhook the phone line to resolve them if you are on-line. It's odd and has caused me to lose a few things I am working on-line because of having to unhook the line. Most people do not live in the boonies as I do and have DSL or Broadband so this may not be an issue with you. Otherwise, I am EXTREMELY happy with this Brother as it stores many different jobs at once and allows me to work much more efficiently. The second paper tray comes in very handy when I print legal paper...I just designate the other tray and do not have to change out the paper everytime.

Arived timely, perfect condition. Performs flawlesly once set up and familiarized. Mine is partly shared use in a small, 4 person real estate office. Love the two trays for automatic letter & legal size printing without changing paper, a feature hard to find in this price range. The four segregated color print cartridges are inexpensive to purchase and give decent quantity printing. Print quality is excellent. For my business I mostly use "fast normal" setting to conserve ink. I definitely recommend this machine for home, home office and light office use.

The concept and user layout of this machine is great BUT it jams every other time it prints. It has the worst paper path I have ever encountered. I've tried multiple types of paper - but it still jams. It is hard to tell if it simply pulls too many sheets or partially pulls a sheet, crumples it, then goes after another and another until you have 4 or 5 sheets jammed in the path.

The trays have so many crevices that they are hard to load smoothly as well. You have to slide the paper in (not just lay it in because the top of the tray flips rather than removes), but the slots in the bottom and sides catch edges and crumple the sheet. There is no clear method of stacking and fanning the paper, and the back of the tray is angled so that you are never sure whether it is in the right position.

Don't waste your money or time trying to deal with this sucker!

I don't understand why everyone here posts saying this is only a "so-so" printer. I have this printer on our home network. Every computer can print to it, fax to it, and use it as a scanner. Now I do not have to get each of my kids a printer, they can all access this one. We've had it for 3 years now and it works great. The only problems we've had are paper jams when they try to use very thin paper and labels. Otherwise it works great.

2010 update: The Microsoft Windows 7 drivers for the MFC-5860CN is only for network printing and compatibility is limited. Well there are no Windows 7 drivers to use the network scanner and network faxing for the MFC-8960CN. As a workaround, we installed the MFC-5490CN drivers from Brother (not Microsoft), available on the Brother website, and now we can have all of those network functions from our Windows 7 64-bit computers. The only thing is the printer is now listed as MFC-5490CN on the computer (not a big deal). We can now even see the ink status on our Windows 7 computers.

Brother MFC-5490CN Professional Series Color Inkjet All-in-One with Ethernet Networking

I've had no luck connecting this printer wirelessly. Oh yeah, I got it to work once! Then for no reason it would not connect. I spent several days trying to troubleshoot both on my own and with tech support. Finally bought ethernet cable and it STILL WOULDNT WORK. Turns out the machine had to be totally replaced.
It's only been 4 months and I've wasted hundreds of dollars of my time trying to get the machine to do basic printing from our computers.
YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.
DON'T PAY A PENNY FOR THIS MACHINE. It really costs hundreds of dollars in wasted time!