Customer Reviews

Brother MFC-620CN Network Color Inkjet Printer, Copier, Scanner, Fax

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

MFC-620CN is not a 3 or 4 in 1. It's a 7 in 1! I bought this small multifunction to replace my 7 years old Brother MFC-1970MC. The old Brother still works fine but just I want more functionalities. I would say Brother's quality is very good. OK, I own the 620 for about 10 days and installed it into home networking. I didn't do USB install. Here are some of my opinions,

1. print: work fine on network print. Quality is very good for both text and picture. It prints fast compared with my other 2 inkjet printers.

2. scan: work fine with single page mode and feeder. It's a little bit dark but that's not serious. However, I found if it scans from a feeder, the top and bottom 5mm will be cut away. It's a flatbed scanner if single page mode used.

3. copier: I didn't use this function so don't know.

4. fax: just as good as my previous MFC-1970MC. Same as scan, this is a flatbed fax machine.

5. PC-fax: works fine as a typical PC fax. You 'print' the document to the PC Fax iocn in printer list and it faxes out.

6. answer machine: 30 minutes is good enough for me.

7. phone: I have used the phone receiver several times. It's clear but with a cord so I cannot move too far from the multifunction. I would appreciate if Brother put a mute function to the phone.

8. flash memory reader: I thought it can be a network storage but I was wrong. It only accesses pictures by using a web address browsing.

To me, MFC-620CN does worth the money. It's inexpensive but you could use it as network printer/scanner/fax. The phone/fax function can tell an incoming is a phone call or fax. And it comes with an answer machine (how many all-in-ones have answer machine?) The size is small. The function is more than enough. Really convenient for a home office.

A magnificent allrounder, but note that if you want to scan a page from a book, with the lid open, you need to put white paper over absolutely every part of the glass that's not covered by the book, otherwise the whole scan comes out totally black, so it's somewhat of a pain -- and nothing is said about this in the instructions.

We've only had this for about a month, but so far so good. Black & white text comes out looking like a laser printer and the speed isn't too far behind one either. Color looks great, but obviously you wouldn't want to use this to print photos. The user's manual is probably the biggest flaw but once you figure out how to use the thing, that becomes irrelevant. For the price, you can't beat it.

I bought my MFC-620CN fax machine about 10 months ago. I use it only as a fax machine (it's not hooked up to my computer). I have two major problems with this machine:

1. It prints extremely slow, even when it's printing just black ink.

2. It's wasteful with regard to ink cartridges! Yesterday, after receiving one page of a 3-page fax, the LCD said the black ink cartridge was empty and that the other three cartridges were all low! Ok, so I lift the top and pop out the black cartridge and low and behold, there's still ink in there!!! Plenty of ink. I check the other three cartridges and they are all at least 1/3 full (if they come completely filled when new--more if not completely full when new)! I tried reinserting the cartridges and unplugging it so it could reset, but no go. It will not print until I replace 4 perfectly good ink cartridges. I even went to the Brother website for help...if I'm still having problems, I can take it into a local service center (the nearest one being 19 miles away!). With gas prices what they are, what a waste! Oh, the cost of 4 new ink cartridges...$52.59!

Save your money...buy HP products. You decide when to change the cartridge, not the manufacturer.

It's a great machine! No doubt about it! It works as expected as a scanner, copier and printer. However, you end up spending a lot of money to replace the obscenely expensive original Brother ink cartridges. Non-original ink cartridges were not a good option for me. I bought them twice from different vendors on the Amazon website and on both occasions they did not work. I stop using the printer and copier function of this machine for more than 2 years due to ink costs.

My wife bought me this printer several years ago, supposedly to replace our aging HP, but it has been nothing but trouble since it came out of the box. It sucks down rather expensive ink catridges at impressive speeds, so I am loathe to use it, prefering instead to do everyday printing with the HP it was supposed to replace. The cartridges are not only expensive, but I've been told by the various office stores that they are not refillable, and indeed, I've never been able to track down a refilling kit for it. Worse still, when I pull out the 'empty' cartridge to replace it, there is about a quarter of the ink still remaining, plainly visible, sloshing around at the bottom of the cartridge. Wait... It gets worse. If the printer decides that any one of the ink cartrides is empty, it will do absolutely nothing until the ink is replaced (the exception appears to be sending faxes, though I have had no success with any other function during an ink crisis). One fix I have found for this is to 'trick' the printer into using the rest of the ink by propping it up at an angle so the ink sensor sees there is still ink in the cartridge.

Of late, one of my ink heads (yellow) has become clogged. The self-cleaning function on the printer is unable to clear it, and there seems to be little support online regarding what to do if this happens.

To be fair, when the printer is working, the images are great. It has handy slots for several types of data cards, the scanner is decently fast. The answering machine is difficult to use, as it will not let you skip around in your messages and delete the ones you don't want, unless you listen to all messages in order. Also, you cannot--I am not making this up--work with messages at all during an ink crisis (I've often wondered if it is just my machine, but talking with others that have owned one, this seems to be normal).

My advice to anyone contemplating purchasing this POS, DON'T. Save up a little more and get something better--anything at all will do, as long as it doesn't have the Brother name stamped on it.

The specs are pure rubbish. It is painfully slow and print is fuzzy. It runs through ink cartridges like crazy. I have to change color cartridges even if i don't print a single color page.
I would love to take a solid baseball bat to it.
Go buy a Panasonic KX FLB 881 and see the difference yourself.

I've had the Brother MFC-620CN about three years. I have only two complaints with it, really. One, for the home office, it can be a shortcoming that it offers only one phone line. And two, it can be extremely tricky to hit the dial-tone button just right to click over for call waiting, or for three-way calling. In general, because of this, three-way calling has been unavailable, and answering call waiting usually drops the first call.

Maybe, if it had mattered enough to me, I would've practiced the art of clicking over with this phone. I know I've tested and practiced it at least a little before. In any case, I remember one period, after I had had the machine at least a year, where it spontaneously seemed to work normally in this regard, but before long relapsed. Recently, after over three years of having the machine, I think I've discovered -- but haven't much tested yet -- that if I tap the dial-tone button extremely fast, so fast that some phones wouldn't even register the tap, then it works.

I give the machine four stars because it combines five machines -- printer, copier, scanner, fax machine, phone -- into one machine that is small, sleek, and good-looking but not trendy, the most appealing all-in-one package (this and Brother's similar models) that I've seen on the market. It even has a media-card reader that, versus the one on my PC, communicates with the computer very slowly, yet that's been handy a few times.

It is a minor nuisance that, when one ink runs out, it can't print or copy at all. Also, when printing/copying went unused for about six months, a couple of the color inks got clogged, and, despite my using the built-in head-cleaning utility, the clogging remains over a year since: I now, as practical matter, can print only grayscale. And it can't print transparencies, which it printed well at first, but then began to smudge because it couldn't hold the sheet steady amid the side-to-side swaying from the print-head motions. (Early on, I actually had got the machine warranted for this problem, but the supposedly repaired machine was returned to me with the very same symptom.)

The sequence of buttons to press for the numerous commands -- like pulling up the caller-ID log -- are much too much to remember beyond a few commands that are most used. If one keeps the manual near the desk, though, then some of the advanced options might be useful, and easy to implement.

I notice some things that other reviews indicated as shortcomings, which I myself don't understand:

1) There is in fact a mute button for the phone: the Hold button, which, until pressed again, mutes both incoming and outgoing sounds while a caller is still on the line -- unless, by saying mute button, the reviewer meant something different.

2) I've scanned many pages from books, and have never had the problem that one review says of having to cover the whole glass with white sheets in order to keep the scan from turning out plain black: I lay an open book on the glass, scan, and it comes out fine.

3) Mine never printed slowly, except one time recently, the first time printing after the machine had fallen a couple of feet onto the floor. Every effort failed to fix the slow printing, until I just unplugged it and plugged it back in, what returned the printing to normal speed.

4) The machine does, however, waste some ink: it says an ink is empty when, in fact, a little of it -- not a lot but enough to be slightly irritated about -- remains in the cartridge. I now use generic inks, though, and the cost is low. (Incidentally, I started using generic ink only after the clogging occurred.)

Great machine, does it all. I had a little trouble figuring out the directions but once it was set up it has worked super.

I did have to give it 4 stars because it really does a lot for the price and size. The telephone answering machine and phone were nice to have right on my desk. At least one message every day was cut off though. The printer seemed to work just fine, but I had a lot of trouble with the ink--saying it was empty when it wasn't, or that the cover was open when it wasn't. The cyan and magenta print heads just stopped working one day so I switched to greyscale. Now that the yellow is out it will not print at all. It has slots for all sizes of flash and memory cards on the front, that was really nice for my digital camera (for downloading to PC). The copier/scanner worked either as a flatbed or multisheet feeder. The menu was hard to figure out. I kept the pdf of the manual on my desktop. The copy center on the PC never worked right, but I just used the TWAIN support in my programs to import the scans. Even though I had a lot of problems with this printer, I'll miss it.