107 of 113 people found the following review helpful:
The PERFECT solution
I've been looking for a large format all in one scanner for quite a while now. It is so disappointing to have so many large all-in-one printers that still have a tiny scan plate.
this one has a monster 11x17 inch scan surface!
i already was in line to buy at office depot when i saw that it also has wifi! then when i got home i noticed it has...
42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
Nice idea but poor color saturation
In testing this printer I discovered that the sharpness greatly diminishes when enlarging past 130%. Color saturation in general copies is poor for reds (looks very faded) and yellow wasn't very bright. The paper tray capacity is great but the top piece is very flimsy. Wonderful printing in black and white at 100%. This would be an excellent printer for someone needing...
This review is from: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Color Inkjet Wireless All-in-One Printer (Electronics)
I've been looking for a large format all in one scanner for quite a while now. It is so disappointing to have so many large all-in-one printers that still have a tiny scan plate.
this one has a monster 11x17 inch scan surface!
i already was in line to buy at office depot when i saw that it also has wifi! then when i got home i noticed it has memory card readers and color lcd display. it just keeps getting better!
tried out the scanner, quality is great...and FAST! i'm glad this is a Brother too, i've never been impressed with any HP product, and they seem to dominate the industry now :(
so far, i couldn't be happier...and i assume with a 2 year warranty that i should stay happy :-) the only thing i could possibly think of to take it to the next level would be a laser version
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This review is from: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Color Inkjet Wireless All-in-One Printer (Electronics)
I use AutoCAD at work and occasionally at home. My hubby and I jumped when we saw this printer: just had to get it! The print is as good as on the 11x17 HP inkjet at work, and this 11x17 scanner is a better size than any of the workplace ones (although I haven't used that function yet).
Hubby managed to hook up the 6490 to our home wifi without help, and no, he didn't set our wifi up originally, and no, he doesn't really understand how wifi works. In fact, hubby is visually handicapped! I'd rate ease of installation to wifi as 5 stars. The only glitch we had was that we didn't know we had a firewall, but the install disc talked us though that step too.
So now I'm sitting in bed typing on my Dell 1520 XP and sending to the printer in the other room. I don't know how it goes through ink, but will post back if I have an issue about that or anything else in the future.
Edit added 9-6-08: We just changed the first ink cartridge. I've been printing mainly with black, but also did about 300 very small (2"x3") photos with lots of sky. We managed 700 copies on the first black cartridge as far as I can tell. Cyan is at 50% and magenta and yellow don't really show as being low yet. The machine has been beeping for the last week warning us black was low, but only today did it quit printing due to lack of ink. The last page it did was as good as the first, so I have to wonder exactly how low that ink was when it quit on us. At any rate: we had no wasted prints from low ink and it was nice enough to tell us it had stopped. Can't say that with the HP at work!
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This review is from: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Color Inkjet Wireless All-in-One Printer (Electronics)
I didn't actually buy the printer from Amazon. I bought this hulking device at Office Depot because it came with a $100 rebate. But the overall list price is definitely worth it. I mostly got it because it has a large area scanner that I need for my pencil work.
Listing the features would be useless since there is already a description of what it does above. So i'll go over the pros and cons.
Pros
-Very large scanner. Largest i've seen at an affordable price and common availability.
-LCD screen. Decent resolution and overall the right size.
-Interface. It is very easy to navigate through menus and do what you want.
-Wi-Fi. Truly a god-sent. We have 4 computers at home hooked up to this puppy.
-Large print outs. 11x17. Woo!
-Fast scanning at multiple resolutions.
Cons
-Software. The package comes bundled with a picture and scanning software. It is overall very slow and I had to reinstall it a couple times because of how unstable it was. This was however on a mac. It might work fine on windows. But it's not mandatory to have it, and if your serious about your work you use other software anyway.
-Print quality. Not the best in the world i'll admit. Colors aren't as saturated as I would have liked. I don't know if it not being a laser printer has anything to do with it.
-Big and bulky. Consider your home or office space before spending your hard earned cash on this one. It's not a space saver, i'll tell you that much.
-The text on the LCD screen can a times be very small. Not a problem for me, but can sometimes be a problem for older people. (my parents)
-Printing process can take a while over a wi-fi network. Not painfully long, but enough to take notice.
Not applicable
-Fax function because I have yet to use it.
For me there were three major factors in making this purchase. Scanning in large sketches, printing large documents, and wi-fi. If your only going to print on standard 8.5x11 then go for something cheaper. But for an artist like me who needs a larger scanner and appreciates all the extra stuff that comes with it, I could not think of anything better for the price.
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This review is from: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Color Inkjet Wireless All-in-One Printer (Electronics)
I have had this printer for a couple of weeks now and overall I'm very pleased. I'm not big fan of inkjet printers, and the fact that it wasn't a laser printer was my #1 hesitation before purchasing this model. I sat on the fence -- until Amazon.com had it on sale for just under $200, that is, shipped free to my door. Then how could I say no?
If what you really want is a printer to output a lot of text documents for business, etc., you probably still want to look into laser printers. This model's big advantage, however, is that it can both print and scan tabloid-size documents (11x17" or A3). If you want that capability, you won't find a laser model for less than ten times the cost of the MFC-6490CW.
Bear in mind, this printer really is very big. It's almost as big as a heavy-duty office printer. It won't share a desk with your monitor and keyboard comfortably, and if you use a laptop it will loom over you like a monolith -- so make sure you have space for it.
Setup was easy enough, although you may need to be a little savvy to successfully share the printer with several PCs over a network. (I found it was safest to assign a static IP address to the printer and manually configure each PC to search for it at that address, rather than relying on the automatic setup.)
Another reviewer said you can't use wireless and wired networking at the same time. To clarify, the printer will only use one network interface at a time -- if you enable the wireless networking on the printer it will disable the Ethernet and vice versa. But it makes no difference; the point is to use whichever interface is most convenient for you. If you plug the printer directly into the Ethernet port on a wireless router, you WILL still be able to access the printer from wireless devices. Likewise, you won't need to buy a wireless card for your desktop PC if you set up the printer on WiFi. Your wireless router will automatically bridge the wired and wireless networks. The printer is just giving you options.
As for print quality, sorry folks, text output is NOT as good as a laser. It's not as fast, it's not as sharp, it's not as dark, it's not as crisp -- bottom line, a laser printer is going to yield nicer-looking text documents.
The again, text quality is very readable, and normal-quality output on plain paper is quick enough for my needs. I realized that most of my prints are for my own files, or for me to mark up with a pen. Who am I trying to impress? Those of us who can still remember the days of dot-matrix printers should have no complaints. I would consider prints at normal quality mode to be fully acceptable for business use. The text becomes very sharp indeed if you use high-quality inkjet paper and one of the printer's photo modes, but that's too slow and expensive to be practical.
I was pleasantly surprised by the graphics output, which I found to be rich, smooth, and clear. Outputting photos to plain paper showed noticeable banding, but that's to be expected. On the other hand, I printed out a document that had lots of areas of flat color and lots of gradients onto high-quality 36 pound matte inkjet paper, and on that job I noticed ZERO, repeat ZERO banding in either the gradients or the flat areas. If anything, the colors came out a little too dark and saturated, but I suspect that I used an overly optimistic print mode for the particular paper stock I had on hand. I have yet to try printing photographs at maximum quality onto glossy photo stocks, but I have no reason to doubt the quality of the output.
Brother's "Innobella" inks seem to be a considerable improvement on those of the last inkjet printer I owned. I printed out a page of text on plain paper and on 36-pound inkjet paper, then threw a bunch of water onto the pages. The plain-paper sheet did seem to blur a bit, but not as much as I expected. Black ink seemed to survive the test well, while colors bled quite a lot. On the heavy ink jet paper, however, there was almost no change once the inks dried. I would actually include the sheet that got wet in with other pages in a presentation; it survived that well. Laser printers still have the advantage if you plan to take your prints out in the rain, but prints from this inkjet are no sissies.
As others have noted, the printer isn't smart enough to know which kind of paper is in which tray. You need to configure it yourself, either on the panel on the front of the printer or via the configuration software. That's a small price to pay, however, and an example of the many minor compromises that Brother has made to keep the price of this printer at rock bottom. More annoying is the fact that there's no easy way to feed a single envelope without emptying out a paper tray.
There is no automatic duplex scanning, copying, or printing, but I have never owned a printer that would do these things. Unlike others, the automatic document feeder (ADF) worked smoothly for me.
The scanner was a treat. I had a low-cost tabloid scanner already (Mustek A3 USB) but this Brother scanner is far better. It's fast, even when scanning over the network. And it's clever -- you don't even have to initiate a scan on your PC. You can put a document onto the scanner, push the button, and have the scanner send the output TO your computer. On a network, you can even pick WHICH computer to send the scan to. The included OCR software read a two-page document with zero errors. The only minus I've noticed is that the scanner drivers don't come with any kind of descreening filters, so you'll need third-party software to clean up scans from magazines or other four-color images.
On the whole, there are probably better choices if all you want to do is print letter-sized pages, but if you're in the market for tabloid printing or scanning, this device really can't be beat. Don't let the low price fool you -- the MFC-6490CW is anything but "cheap." My one caveat might be that its plastic construction is too fragile for a high-volume office environment, but you can't have everything. I believe this printer would serve any small business well.
One more note: Brother has actually included high-capacity inkjet cartridges with this printer, rather than the half-full cartridges you get from some manufacturers. A complete set of all four replacement cartridges goes for $50. "Compatible" off-brand cartridges for this printer are readily available at a significant discount, though you may sacrifice print quality if you go that route. Look for that word, "compatible," so you're sure you know what you're getting.
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This review is from: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Color Inkjet Wireless All-in-One Printer (Electronics)
As others have said, this is a good machine. I run a small engineering company and needed to scan and print color 11x17s. There are some significant limitations which Brother overlooked, and I'll share those Ive found with you. I gave it 4 stars because, even with its limitations, there is nothing with the big scan capability out there, and for many things it does a good job:
1. You can't scan a full size sheet - it will only scan a normal "printable" area. That means that if you have anything full-bleed to scan, or have details which bleed into a 1/6-1/4" margin, it won't scan. You can fool the scanner on smaller sizes, but on an 11x17, you simply can't scan the edges of the sheet. It doesn't appear to be a hardware limitation - the twain driver automatically sets the margins based on your "scan size". BTW - this is a critical flaw in the machine if you want to scan 4x6 prints - who wants the scanner to crop your images down, or for you to jerryrig the machine to offset the print from the corner of the glass, then scan a 4-1/3x6-1/3 area, then have to bring the photo into editing software to recrop (or to have to manually set the crop area on each scan in the Twain driver?). Yuk.
2. If you scan from the ADF to the computer, you cannot let it auto-select the scan size. If you've ever had a mixed document (letter+ledger, as if often with engineering reports), you have to scan the two sizes separately. This is also a software limitation because if you choose to scan to FTP from the ADF, it will scan letter as letter, and ledger and ledger, and put them all in a nice single PDF for you
3. When scanning to FTP, you can scan at several resolutions of color (300,600,...), but when scanning to B&W, you can only scan at 100 or 200dpi. What genius figured you would never need to scan B&W at higher than a fax resolution? Anyone who archives their physical files will want at least 300dpi, and preferably 400 (G4 fax) or 600dpi. Sadly, there are no cheap/free packages to downsample pdfs to 1 bit.
4. The ADF sucks. There it is. I've been through two machines thinking it might be a faulty pick-up roller. Nope, even with fresh, unused copier paper it will want to take an occasional double sheet. Again, if you're archiving papers, you don't want to find 4 or 5 sheets in a 50 page document missing. You have to babysit the machine and hold the stack, letting it feed just one sheet. Again, this isn't just with comb bound papers or previously stapled or dogeared ones, this is with freshly printed and even completely unprinted, good quality 20lb copier paper.
With the exception of #4, the shortcomings are all software/firmware limitations, but with Brother's reputation I wouldn't expect any updates to this machine. Honestly, at this price point Brother could put a serious hurt on Xerox and HP document management systems for small businesses, but not until they correct their significant lack of foresight in the scanning option arena.
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This review is from: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Color Inkjet Wireless All-in-One Printer (Electronics)
In testing this printer I discovered that the sharpness greatly diminishes when enlarging past 130%. Color saturation in general copies is poor for reds (looks very faded) and yellow wasn't very bright. The paper tray capacity is great but the top piece is very flimsy. Wonderful printing in black and white at 100%. This would be an excellent printer for someone needing larger sized copies in black and white or with small amounts of color. Not very good as a photo printer. The wireless works fine too. If you need sharp enlargements and better color saturation (photos and copies) I would go with one of the HP printers with 9600 dpi.
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This review is from: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Color Inkjet Wireless All-in-One Printer (Electronics)
I had this machine for 2 whole weeks when it just powered off and NEVER turned on again. Problem with Brother is you either get a great product or a lemon!!
So I called them and emailed them, "tried plugging it in different outlets," and at their request took it to the service center (30 miles away). The service center ordered new parts, then ordered more parts when those didn't solve it. Then I waited several weeks while the part (a power pack!) was on backorder. When it came in, and the machine STILL did not power on, is when the real fun with BROTHER began!
Every time I or the service center rep called BROTHER, we would get all kinds of different answers, lies, stall tactics...
My absolute favorite, however, happened after BROTHER insisted that I speak with them again (as if the service center did not know what they were talking about) and explaining to them that the machine is completely dead with a black screen, they wanted me to "print trouble shooting reports from the machine and fax it to them from the machine" that DOES NOT TURN ON!!!
BRILLIANT!!
So, since I originally contacted them on November 24th, and here it is December 31st.....I STILL DON'T HAVE MY PRODUCT OR MY MONEY!!!!
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This review is from: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Color Inkjet Wireless All-in-One Printer (Electronics)
The good:
* This printer is one of the best I've owned so far!
* It prints quickly, and the colors are good.
* Setup was easy and fast; my three Macs and one Dell PC all print to (and scan from) it wirelessly.
* I can select any of my computers -- including my Macs -- from the printer LCD and scan to it.
* I can "print" any document as a fax to a phone number, and that works well.
* The 11x17 paper size is GREAT for the kinds of documents I print.
* I can see supply levels from my Macs...wirelessly.
* I can't stress enough how impressed I am with the wireless support for this printer in the Mac drivers. I've tried a variety of Airport Express units and dedicated WiFi printer hubs with other printers (HP, Epson, and Canon) in the past, and they either didn't work, or only had partial functionality. This is the first one that does everything on both the Mac and Windows XP without compromise.
The bad:
* It doesn't print double-sided without having to manually flip the paper over; I thought I read somewhere it would, but it doesn't. One of the benefits of 11x17 paper is to print 4-panel "booklets" and this manual step slows that down.
* The Auto Document Feeder only seems to work when faxing; I haven't been able to figure out how to use it for scanning. Perhaps it doesn't, or I just don't know how to make it work...
The unknown:
* I've read about how quickly the ink runs out on this printer, but I haven't experienced that yet. I'll let you know if this is a problem after I've had the printer long enough to find out.
All in all, I'm VERY happy with this printer purchase.
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This review is from: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Color Inkjet Wireless All-in-One Printer (Electronics)
I've returned this printer and replaced with a HP Photosmart all-in-one, and cannot recommend this machine unless the 11x17 printing is the key selling feature:
- Photo quality is poor -- whether from a scan or a file, the picture printed did not look like the original. Color was wrong, tones flattened, etc. Far worse than the printer we are replacing
- Photo software is poor -- weird and poorly supported 3rd party software. Limited features and I was never able to figure out how to do basic things on it
- Even basic text on paper printing seems muddy and very "wet"
- Brother support is weak -- other than telling me that I should go buy their paper to see if it improves quality, or return and try a second machine, they were able to offer no troubleshooting support, and didn't seem to care that I was frustrated
The price seemed too good to be true for the features offered, and now I know why! After lugging this huge and flawed machine around and wasting hours trying to get it to perform, I'm unlikely to buy anything that Brother makes in the future.
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This review is from: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Color Inkjet Wireless All-in-One Printer (Electronics)
Purchased this to print 11x17 from CAD application and have not been disappointed. Extremely fine lines on prints so detail is wonderful even when large sheet sizes are scaled to fit on smaller paper sizes. Needed brother support due to a networking issue. Support was great; we had to assign a permanent IP address for the printer. Now there are no problems.
Gave four stars instead of 5 only because I haven't figured out why the printer doesn't autoselect the correct paper tray for different page sizes being printed. Plan to call support, but anticipate it is a setting I've missed.
Haven't used the scanning.
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