Brother MFC-L8900CDW Business Color Laser All-in-One Printer, Advanced Duplex & Wireless Networking, Business Printing, Flexible Network Connectivity, Mobile Device Printing & Scanning

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Avoid this machine and this seller. First off, it was registered to a different person when I bought it, it was probably returned and not refurbished. So Brother wont honor the warranty. Secondly, it will not stay online. I would normally write this off as an anomaly, but this is the second same unit that does the same thing. And, we have multiple printers and multiple PCs in our office, and this is the only printer that refuses to stay online. After several hours with Brother support on the phone, they could not resolve the problem, while refusing to honor the warranty because it was registered with some dude named Anthony in NY.

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20171130: as usual, the Brother product worked out of the box. This is the new color laser version on the old black and white workhorse. It arrived in the afternoon. It took me longer to take it out of all the packing material than it did to get it connected and working. To put the printer in service I had to: 1) plug it in to power 2) connect the ethernet cable 3) turn it on 4) select the printer in the pull down option on the Mac print dialogue I know, so much effort to get it working. ;-) I have no idea what a windows-based experience might be like - but for a Mac it was super easy. 20171201: update. 1st day of use, as expected, printer went right to work, producing beautiful color copies. I will update this review if I have anything more to add - but my last Brother printer lasted several years so it may be a while before I have more to add (the old MFC8950 is still working, I just moved it to another office) 20171209: downgrading to a 3. :-( After days of research and checking every setting, the printer will not print duplex. My near spotless experience with Brother has been tarnished. I will continue my effort to resolve the problem, and post what I find. 20171213: Still working on the problem of no duplex printing. In the mean time, for all other uses, it has been great. I printed a color photo on plain paper, came out very crisp, good color. 20180115: downgrading this to two starts. Still no luck getting this thing to duplex print. Ive checked the machine physically, thinking maybe something was pushed in all the way. Ive read the instructions, which say it is all up to the software, it just has to ask. Ive tried reading the comments in the Brother support. Next step, try phone support.

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This came with colored ink and I was only able to print for less that 300 pages. It won’t even allow me to print black & white without replacing color toner. Rip off

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Brother has always been a great printer making company. Ive bought many other brands and Brothers have somehow managed to outlast the bigger names if theres such a thing. Brother has no competition for this market or sized models. Our office has owned many other brands and the Brothers seems to out last them all. Their toners are also very reasonable prices too. You can scan and select your PC to save it there. Private printing, does not print until you enter you code. Lots of nice features and to many to list. Make sure you install the software correctly on the server and workstations and youll be fine. Were very happy with this business model MFCL8900CDW.

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Amazing printer and scanner. Print quality is awesome, but what really sold us are two things: (1) easily defined a custom button for "Scan to Dropbox" and "Scan and email to <our sons school email account>", (2) super fast and wonderful scanning - both sides in one pass, and very reliable feeding even of pages I folded up and then unfolded and loaded for printing. The menus are easy to use, but the killer ability is to save custom set up (like scanning to a particular Dropbox folder, or scanning to a particular email address). This was an unexpected bonus that we love - our custom definitions are the key choices on the home screen now. My spouse thought that the scanner failed when it pulled all the pages through so fast and without flipping them over - it is AMAZING to realize that it scanned both sides perfectly and created a PDF in our Dropbox. This printer is a hit around our house - it is easy to use all our household devices... we have used it from Windows 10, MacOS, Linux, iPhones and Android phones - without any issues. We left it available to anyone on our WiFi - so people who drop by print things from their phones while talking with us in the kitchen! We highly recommend this printer - we have owned it for a month now, and printed and scanned hundreds of pages without issue.

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We love this machine, very fast and easy to operate. We are not very techie lol and if we can set it up and run it anyone can!

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I know someone else wrote a review saying they spent hours and could not find a way to reset the toner on this printer unlike ALL previous Brother printers but Im here to tell you two things: First, trust me when I say my Kung-Fu is STRONG... and second, there IS a way to reset the toner and save yourself a BUNCH of money by getting more bang for your buck and here are the steps you need to take: 1. Open the front toner door on the printer that would allow you to replace the toner but dont pull the toner tray out (unless you just want to for fun...but its not necessary) 2. Press the back and cancel buttons (top and bottom buttons of the three buttons on the right) at the EXACT same time quickly (and repeatedly if necessary) and then let off (it will almost certainly take at LEAST a couple of tries and if you get to anything other than the reset screen start over). Do NOT hold the buttons down as it will definitely NOT bring up the reset screen that way. You MUST be on the "open door" message, if you accidentally back out of it, just touch the message again in the top left corner to go back to the "Open Door" screen. 3. At this point, the reset screen should pop up and you just need to select the correct toner cartidge that you need to reset (K. = black, C = Cyan, etc.) and keep in mind that each one has THREE options for regular, high yield, and super high yield toner cartridges. 4. Click yes to reset. 5. Click back button and wait for printer to reset. It takes a minute or two just like when you turn the printer off and on. 6. Print...and you print like theres NO tomorrow!! You are *super* welcome for the money that I just saved you as inevitably the "replace toner" screen will come up when it hits a specific page count even though theres still PLENTY of toner in there and there is NO other way to get past it than either doing what I just described or replacing it with a new toner cartridge. Also, I HIGHLY recommend after researching the poop out of all three toner cartridge possibilities for each color that you go with the "Super High Yield" cartridges and save even more money buying all four as a pack. If you break it down by cost per page for each of the three sizes, then it makes the most sense and you wont be replacing toner *nearly* as often. Yes, in order to buy all four cartridges it will cost more than the printer (unless you find a good deal) but they will last three times longer than the standard cartridge even though they are physically the SAME size. Its all about how much toner is INSIDE the cartridge... If this helped you then please push, smash, or lightly press the "Helpful" button for the fun of it b/c really...its the right thing to do...or not. Its ALL good either way. :-)

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This printer/scanner uniit appears to be good at first, but then you will discover that it scans documents in a different size than everyone else in the world. "Letter" is 8.5" x 11" right? Not according to Brother. When you scan a "letter" size document, the resulting PDF/Word/jpeg is actually only 8.24" x 10.76". Thats right - the scan is NO LONGER 8.5" x 11". Why is this a problem? When you try to upload letter size documents to websites, this Brother-scanned-document is no longer letter sized and is rejected. I contacted Brother and explained the problem and their tech support literally told me "there is nothing Brother can do about that." I asked why every other company in the world can make a scanned letter document actually be letter sized, and the agent said "I cant speak for other companies, but there is nothing that Brother can do." I will never buy another Brother again and I suggest you do the same.

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January 2019 Update: Genuine Brother toner cartridges are only warranted for 90 days. If one fails outside that period, Brother provides no recourse other than to replace the toner cartridge, regardless of toner left in cartridge. The printer has begun spilling blue toner across pages. A call to Brother had me enter the printers service menu and read statuses of the printer. The telephone support technician determined the toner cartridge was defective and must be replaced. He informed me Brother would do nothing to replace the 90% remaining life in the $178 toner cartridge, as it was more than 90 days old. Original review: This machine makes a lot of promises and lives up to most of them. I needed a new multi-function machine. My inkjet-based Epson was no longer cutting it. The ink cartridges were a pain, with nozzles drying up. The world had moved forward, and the Epson couldn’t scan directly to Google Drive. I was doing the USB drive shuffle to move files. A new machine would have to be laser. Color was a must. It had to scan and print duplex. The consumables had to be reasonably priced. Most importantly, it had to support web services like scanning to Google Drive, Dropbox, Box. It had to support cloud printing like Google Cloud Print. Preview: It does, but is not perfect. The Brother MFC-L8900CDW had just been released. Specwise, it met my needs. It’s a color laser printer with a duplex ADF scanner. The consumables are individually replaceable, and it supported web scanning and printing. It was also available on Amazon, so I knew I wouldn’t be stuck with it if I was disappointed. The machine is solid and attractive. The build quality is typical of other Brother products. The design is minimal and clean. Setup was mostly simple. Pull it out of the box, remove a few strips of tape, plug it in and start printing. Print and scan quality are great, but that’s expected by now. The machine is appropriately fast and quiet. I’ve printed 350 pages. To date, not one has jammed. Cloud services work, but with some difficulties. Here’s where Brother could make some improvements. Sure, the services are there. Finding and enabling them is tough. Scanning to Google Drive is not so great. Enabling Cloud Print isn’t a simple matter. First, it isn’t well documented. It can’t be done from the control panel. You have to sign on to the web interface. You have to go to Network tab, then to the Protocol section, where you’ll find the Google Cloud Print protocol setup information. Not obvious, and not simple. Once you’ve set it up, however, cloud printing works perfectly. Scanning to Google Drive was one of the main reasons I needed a new MFC. Scanning works, but has a few flaws. Many days, I’m scanning a few documents, each with a few pages. Getting through each document involves pressing a button, waiting for a “Connecting…” message, then pressing another button, waiting for another “Connecting…” message. Worse, once the document has been scanned, it then uploads the document, page by page. The upload is slow, taking 5-10 seconds per page. You’re blocked from doing anything else (like scanning your next document) during this time. I’m tempted to walk away during scans, but cannot. If the scan doesn’t upload, I get no persistent error message. The error appears, then disappears, so I’m not sure if the scan completed. The only way to know for sure is to go to Google Drive and verify all scanned documents are present. Reaching out to Brother, I explained the scanning difficulties. Their tech support team responded like a large company. I was told this is the way it works, and nothing can be done. In the end, I chose to keep the Brother MFC-L8900CDW. Its benefits outweighed the scanning issues. I use it daily, and without further issue. I’m hopeful Brother will improve the documentation for web services setup. Before writing this review, I updated the machine to firmware version 1.05 I’m mostly hopeful they’ll revisit the scanning workflow and error reporting. It seems like a small issue on an otherwise fantastic machine.

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Two major issues I experienced with this printer: 1) The printer would arbitrarily add magenta to areas of the printout that did not exist in the source material. As an example see the attached image, which on the left is the zoomed in source PDF, and on the right is a scanned print from the printer. 2) Gradients seemed to frequently be shifted also to magenta. Our business slide backgrounds have a light to dark grey gradient on them, and the dark grey was being turned into an actual purplish color. I tested the above using the latest firmware for the printer, and latest drivers for the printer across multiple operating systems (OSX, Windows 7, 10), and across multiple source printing programs (Acrobat, Photoshop, etc).

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