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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I had a black-and-white laser printer for the past ten years and it was time to move on. After comparing various multifuction color laser printers I decided to purchase MFC L8900CDW and so far I am very pleased with my decision. PROS: 1. Set up was very easy. I have multiple computers at home: Windows, Chrome OS, Android phones and tablets. I connected all of them through Wi-Fi and all my family members can print with ease from each computer. Just out of curiosity, I tried using ethernet cable connection and also direct USB cable through a local machine. They all work seamlessly. 2. Print quality is superb for office text/images purpose. And picture quality is good enough for me: I printed out my daughters picture on a glossy paper, put it in a frame and placed it on my desk. 3. Print speed is very fast. Its comparable to a corporate multifunction printer I use at work. 4. My wife is a teacher and she scans I lot of texts and pictures. The scan speed is extremely fast compared to my last printer. 5. The duplex printing is fast and smooth. So far no jams or malfunctions with regular cheap office paper. 6. Based on the calculation of cost of toner/page capacity, it looks like this one of the most economical printers for operational cost out there but time will tell... CONS: 1. It requires a little more time to print out powerpoint files with a lot of images than plain text files. 2. It takes up quite a bit of desk space for home usage. Overall, Im very happy with my new printer and hope it lasts many years to come.

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Advise against purchasing this. Has a lot of potential but the software is poorly put together from a control/ ux perspective. You cant do what you want. I had to contact support, letter sized documents dont scan properly through the ADF, and I am sorry to report that my ADF issue remains unresolved. Its not the only issue. The print quality is ok...not great. The ADF cropping is extreme to the point where the ADF is pointless. Scanning from unit to mac does not work, using the software crashes my mac, tried on several machines. Windows 10 was better, but there are not enough options to get the ADF to work properly even on Windows. Its frustrating because the hardware is obviously capable of doing the job but their software is so poor that it just does not work. I find it so wasteful...

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Big negative for me: the printer utilizes color toner to print in black & white (really!). We wondered why we were running through colored ink so fast. Ended up with Brother customer service, who told us that selecting B&W in the print dialogue box does not change this setting; in order to truly just utilize the black toner for B&W, we had to go into the driver settings (control panel > hardware and sound > devices and printers > select printer > printing preferences > color/mono and set the printer to mono). Then, if we want to print in color, we have to go back through the process and change the driver setting again. This seems ridiculous. Its obvious this is a racket to sell more (expensive) color toner. Ive been a big fan of Brother machines up until now. I would not buy this printer again.

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This is an initial review. I bought this to upgrade from a Xerox Phaser 3260. I have a micro business (consulting and healthcare practice) with a home office, a lot of work on the road, and I also maintain a second location. I do not have very high printing needs - I print maybe 100-200 sheets per month or less, with occasional spikes into the 200-500 range. To explain why I bought this, one of my lines of work involves substantial document review, and some of my customers provide documents in print. I also generate paper documents, and my goal is to use a "scan and can" approach, scanning everything and then having it shredded. The cost of this was competitive to buying a high quality scanner that could do duplex ADF of >50 pages per run, and so I bought this as an upgrade to the Xerox to get color laser printing at home, but basically for the scanner. First impression is very positive. This is heavy, it is definitely a two person job to move or install it. Removing the packaging takes 10-15 minutes. From there, connecting to Wifi is very easy from the touchscreen. Connecting to OneDrive for Business uses a computer (one grants the connection from a web browser and then enters a numeric code onto the printer), and from there, it can scan directly to a folder on the OneDrive (or other consumer or business cloud services, SharePoint, etc) with ease. Others have noted that there is a substantial wait between scanning the document to the devices memory (which is fast) and uploading it - 70 page documents take about 10 minutes to upload for me. The device cannot do other scanning jobs during this, but will respond to print requests. An unexpected bonus is that it does OCR straight from the device, so an additional step of running it through OCR on the PC side is not needed. This is the thing I wanted most and it does this very nicely. Overall, this itself is well worth the purchase cost, because on a Saturday afternoon while getting some work done, I am working through hundreds of pages of documents that are clogging up my home office. The other initial impression is that it is zero-configuration on Windows 10 (1803) - it just showed right up in my list of printers and I could print to it without having to install or do anything. Update #1: In addition to the "easy" stacks of 8.5x11 records I wanted to scan in, I have some workbook kinds of documents that I also want to scan. This is a mix of paper stock, with some booklets that I cut in half with a paper cutter, about 30-50 sheets double sided. After separating all of this into individual sheets, of all the varying content, the ADF handles it with aplomb except one item that is made of a very thin front sheet separated from a cardstock thickness back - this single document is not handled by the ADF so I have to take it out and use the flatbed scanner on this (or another scanner). The device really shines here. When scanned to searchable document, it auto rotates individual pages inside the PDF. The one downside is that a home page shortcut can be made, but this suppresses some feature choices (so skip blank pages is not an option). One other note that I hadnt encountered with the "easier" ADF scans is that if a scan jams midway, the device behavior is confusing - it continues to sheet feed through the rest of the pages, but then it does not upload anything. Im very happy with this, overall - Im still focusing on the scanning capabilities, but I didnt see as much review content about that so I wanted to share my experience.

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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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