Customer Reviews

Brother MFC-8220 Laser Multifunction Center

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I just bought the mfc8220 after almost seven years with an older brother mfc 4350. It was still going strong, but the drum needed to be replaced, and prices have dropped so much it made sense to upgrade.

The printer is wicked fast. The industrial design is top notch. Print quality is good. Paper handling is good. It integrates with my favorite scanned doc management applciation, paperport.

If you want a laser, instead of inkjets that are slower and cost much more to run over time, and you don't need an integrated flatbed scanner, this is the one to get.

Brad

UPDATE: Feb 2010: It's been almost 5 years now. I ended up buying two. After 4 years, we wore out the one at our preschool which served as our main printer. The second one has had much lighter duty at home. Still working great. Based on this experience, we've become diehard Brother fans and now own a 6490 and 8460.

ORIGINAL REVIEW: I've had mine for 10 months now and it's been very reliable; not one problem with it. It's quick to print out the first page, the display is a monochrome LCD with a backlight so you can see in dark spaces (say, if you keep it under a counter), no paper jams, no nonsense.

Also, if you're an Apple owner the drivers are already included with OS X; truly plug n print. What's a real treat is to combine it with an Apple Airport Express and use Apple's Bonjour software to easily convert it to a wireless network printer. Bonjour is available for both OS X and Windows computers, and is a breeze to install.

I highly recommend if you're in the market for a multifuntion monochrome laser printer machine that is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS.

The print quality is decent, but not as good as my old HP 6p.
The print speed is very good, though paper handling is pretty poor. It's copier function is really pretty good for small jobs.
It reports paper jams when there are none, the ADF often drags more than one piece of paper through the scanner, and the envelope/special paper feeder only accepts one lousy piece of paper at a time.
There's also a persistent "register me" popup when Windows loads, which doesn't give up, even after you've pressed "already registered/don't register" several times.
Installation under Linux was very easy (much easier than installing in Windows, even with the provided driver cd). Print speed under Linux is a bit odd, each page takes quite some time to print, though I haven't tried switching to any of the several other drivers for the printer that are part of a normal SuSE 9.x installation.
With Vonage, I'm not able to send or receive faxes a lot of the time, and, with certain machines on the other end, couldn't ever transmit or receive. To be fair, it probably is Vonage's fault.
Finally, there's an idiotic feature to the main paper tray that doesn't allow you to re-insert the empty tray unless you load more paper (or press a tab). It's the sort of unexpected, poorly designed user interface quirk that shouldn't exist in products that cost more than a few dollars.

Our HP 4-in-one unit kept jamming and we were losing business. We asked out local computer repairman to replace the HP with a unit that provide better service and he brought us this Brother MFC-8220. What difference! This is a workhorse. The straight paper path is the main benefit as we have had no jams. These truckers bring all kinds of paperwork in to be faxed and this is important to us.

We have had 2 brothers MFC machines the latest was MFC-8220 the one before was the same, I am not sure it had the same number but both worked well as a fax and laser printer for 2 years before a plastic gear broke. Both machines had the same problem in about the same length of time.

I have about 5 of these at my work and they all perform well, even though they are used very heavily throughout the day. They seem to last about 3 years before they puke, as I've replaced 3 of the 5 within that time frame. Like I said, they are under continual use throughout the day.

I echo the findings of the other owner whose machine had a broken plastic gear after 2 years. Worked great, then nothing-to expensive for repair.

We use this as a dedicated fax. Our 3rd unit as we wear them out every 2-3 years. 50,000 page duty cycle is about average.

THIS IS THE ANSWER. I SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT THIS YEARS AGO. I HAVE BOUGHT ENOUGH INK CARTIDGES TO PAY FOR THIS MACHING MANY TIMES OVER. VERY PLEASED.

LOTS of paper jams - my old 4550 worked better. I like the paper tray beneath, it collects less dust, none the less I think that might have something to do with my paper jams.

If I needed to use it a lot I would not want it at all.

The front door would not open, when given extra effort it broke off the half moon part, seems to work better without it. Did I mention LOTS of paper jams?

When it came the plastic on the back was broke - does not seem to bother operation.

I am James Elmer :-)