Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 187
 Get ready for Junk Faxes July 27, 2005
KLAEL (Salt Lake City, Utah)
18 out of 28 found this review helpful
The machine has worked great and has many advanced features that go above and beyond many other fax machines (in addition to its multifunction abilities). However, as soon as we registered the fax with Brother, we started getting a lot of junk faxes. We called Brother and they denied selling our information to marketers and said there is nothing they can do. However, we have had a fax number and other machines for quite some time without any problems. Now, we get junk faxes ringing at our home at 2:00 am and throughout the day (just days after registering this new machine with Brother).
 Good All around printer September 12, 2005
M. Haroldsen (UT, USA)
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
I've purchased 80 of these printers and have been quite happy with them. They are a great business solution and provide better speeds, and much better reliability than the HP all-in-one printers. The use of laserjet tech. improves the problems with jamming and ink drips that you get with inkjet printers.
The biggest downfalls to these MFC's are short-life drums, and a drastically different result with how long toner lasts compared to Brother's claims. They claim up to 6,000 pages when we find that it is actually 2-3,000 at 5% coverage.
Great printer for the price and the best all-in-one we've used over the last few years.
 Great printer August 15, 2005
C. Nandor (Arlington, WA USA)
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
I have a Canon inkjet that blows because it uses up a lot of color ink *even when I only print in B&W*. And it won't print at all without color ink carts that have ink in them.
So I started looking into lasers. I found little that looked very good under $200, but there were a few.
Then a friend of mine said he had the MFC-8840DN, and loved it. After reading reviews and looking around, I found the MFC-7820N was basically the same thing, but around a couple hundred less, for $300.
As the name implies, it's multifunction: print, fax, copy, and (color) scan. It's also networkable: it lives on its own on the network, and has a web server to configure it etc. Also, it does all of the functions over the network, including scanning. It has a paper feeder, so I can put in a whole bunch of papers into the feeder, then scan from my PowerBook wirelessly.
You can send faxes from the computer too, by selecting "fax" instead of "paper" in the print dialog. The one thing you can't do with the Mac software that you can do with the PC software is *receive* faxes. So I'd have to print them out and then scan them to the computer. Or, just receive them with my computer in the first place, like I've always done to now.
Impressive multi-function laser printer! April 20, 2006
Jory K. Prum (Fairfax, CA USA)
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
I want to share my experiences using a new printer today.
I know, I know. it sounds dull. But I was so impressed with this unit that I thought you all would like to know about it.
The unit is a Brother MFC-7820N B&W multi-function laser printer/copier/fax/scanner and is $[...] at Staples & Office Depot, with a $[...] rebate until Saturday.
I picked up the unit for the following reasons:
* I needed a new printer and a new fax machine and have been in need of a copier for the studio.
* I hate inkjets and will only purchase a laser printer for B&W usage.
* I should not have to replace ink/toner for less than 1000 pages.
* It reportedly has decent Mac support (10.2.4 and up through Tiger).
* It has built-in network support.
* It's inexpensive.
I brought the printer back to my studio and set it up. It's all one piece, so physical setup is easy. Pull it from the box, put it on a table, remove the clear tape, plastic coverings, and paper spacers, install the toner cartridge, plug it in & blow it up!
Configuration on the Mac was a little less easy. I rarely use CDs that come with peripherals, since they tend to be 1.0 versions that have likely been updated since. I went to the Brother website and looked for the drivers. After about 10 minutes of searching and not understanding what I was missing, I realized that Safari wasn't displaying the "Download" button, but switching over to Firefox solved that issue. I D/Led the four DMGs from the support site and installed them on my laptop (under 10.3.9).
Once I rebooted, I wasted about 30 sheets trying to get the printer to print out my taxes. It kept having problems which looked like driver issues. It turns out that I had selected the BRScript driver, but the CUPS driver was better and more reliable.
Here's how I config'd the printer:
* I first went through the menus on the unit's front panel and set it up for DHCP on the network. I also named it and set a few other minor settings.
* I went to Print Center and added a new printer. I used the Internet Printing Protocol and chose the printer via Rendezvous (Bonjour)! It came up with some bizarrely-named print queue, but it has printed flawlessly from then on.
So, the printer prints. That's cool. And I tried the copier function and that works, too.
One of today's tasks was to print contracts and W-9s that had been sent to me by clients and fax them back. Now that I have a printer, I can do that! But I started playing a bit with the ControlCenter software that Brother provides and discovered that I could setup my machine to be named as a recipient for scanning! (Scanning over the network!? Who would have guessed?)
Unfortunately, I did run into a snag using the network scanning from my laptop. I have two other TWAIN drivers installed on the laptop (Epson & Canon) and the ControlCenter software kept trying to use the Epson TWAIN driver instead of its own. Instead, I installed the Brother software on an iMac G4 that resides in the studio, which is available for client use and configured the ControlCenter. When I went back to the MFC and selected Scan-to-file, the iMac came right up in the list and I successfully scanned the document (to a PDF, as I configured it)!
To make this even cooler, the MFC's scanner can make use of the 35-page Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) that is present for the fax machine and will auto-scan all those documents into a single PDF for you. Can this get _any_ cooler!?
Actually, it can. The fax machine can also collect faxes to memory rather than to paper and send them to your computer! I haven't tried this functionality, as I didn't use the fax at all, nor do I need that feature (since I have an eFax).
One more killer thing: the unit supports Rendezvous (Bonjour) and can even be addressed directly from a web browser. Nearly all the configuration can be done in that window, although I found that setting the time & date from the browser still didn't set the front panel's time & date (which defaulted to the year 2084!). The web browser config center _does_ show exactly what the front panel's display is showing, though, which is way cool for me, since the unit lives in my machine room, with 3 doors between the unit and any computers.
Overall, I'm extremely impressed with this unit. Years ago I probably wouldn't have considered a Brother printer, as they didn't support the Mac and were making pretty cheap crap. But my dad got a similar MFC from Brother and has loved it.
I figured it was worthwhile to pass along just how killer this unit is.
 Worked for a year May 22, 2007
polishedstaple
17 out of 20 found this review helpful
I was very disappointed with this printer. It worked fine for about a year and a half and then it started to click and paper jam. We took it in the have it serviced and the Brother repair center said it was the drum. We spent $150.00 on a new drum and got it home, plugged it back in and it still clicked and paper jammed all the time. We sent it back to the repair center and they had it for two weeks. They finally found the real problem, one of the paper tray gears malfunctioned, they fixed it and we used it for about 2 months and now it clicks and winds and it paper jams. I would not spend my hard earned money on this product. It was not very reliable and it was frustrating to have spent ~300.00 and have it work for a year. I will probably never buy another Brother product again.
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