Brother Printer MFCL2740DW Wireless Monochrome Printer with Scanner, Copier & Fax (Certified Refurbished)

I bought this printer for a small office environment. I wanted the printer to be a standalone network printer. Everything worked great until I wanted to use the scan-to-email function. While this printer does have scan-to-email, its not what I expected. In order to use the scan-to email function thats included with this printer, the machine uses the email program on your PC and opens an email on your PC with the scan as an attachment. Its not what most office workers are accustomed to. Most office workers will be accustomed to going to a machine, scanning a document and having the machine email the document to them. It doesnt have built-in outgoing email UNLESS YOU DOWNLOAD THE INTERNET FAX UTILITY FROM THE BROTHER WEBSITE. You need to go to the support page for the model MFC-L2740DW printer and download the "Internet FAX* / Scan to E-mail Server/ Fax to Server*/ LDAP* Install Tool". Once you do that your machine will have a new icon and you can scan to email like most users are accustomed to. The website for the download is http://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadend.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=mfcl2740dw_us_eu_as&os=93&dlid=dlf004627_000&flang=4&type3=78

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I used to have an Epson GT-1500 scanner for office use. After serving me 4 years, it becomes incompatible with the latest Widows 10 update. I dont know whether its Epsons fault or Microsofts. Anyways, I decided to buy a new scanner. One function that the GT-1500 lacks is the automatic 1-pass 2-sided scanning. I scan and digitize as many paperwork as I could, so this is a critical and convenient function to have. Thats one of the reasons I chose this Brother all-in-one machine. Since 99% of the time I scan my documents into B&W in PDF, I first tested this function after I set up the machine. Using the default settings for B&W scanning, the initial results were disappointing to say the least. The quality is nowhere near the the scan quality with the GT-1500. I actually requested a return. Then I decided to play more with the settings. It turns out that to get satisfactory results, one has to tweak the settings a lot. At the end, I found out that the best setting for B&W scanning that works for me is to adjust image quality by dialing down both the brightness and contrast all the way to the lowest at -50%! Turn on "remove bleeding" as well and set the level to lowest. In Saving setting, set the PDF quality to the highest, and turn on Compression if you want to save file size. Another disappointment is that two more important features are missing: one is to quickly scan and preview the document then crop the area to scan; the other one is to enhance colors of different channels of red, blue, and green. I thought functions like these are pretty basic but they are missing on this machine. Anyways, using the above settings, I am able to get similar scan qualities as with my GT-1500. On the positive side, I like it that I can set up scan workflow and add it as a button on the home screen. And also the 1-pass 2-sided scanning/copying really speeds things up, although occasionally light smearing or ghosting happens. Scan resolution could be up to 1200x1200, so its useful in case I need to super fine details. Printing and copying work as expected, nothing too exciting here. Didnt test the fax function. Who still uses fax these days anyways? All in all, this is an OK machine for the price of $189+tax that I paid. No scan preview means I will have to crop the document in Acrobat, and no color enhance mode only adds small inconvenience at times since I only need that occasionally. Ive only had it for a few days so I cant really talk about how reliable it will be in the years to come and how good the customer support of Brother is. After thinking carefully about it, I decided to cancel the return and keep it instead. I still have a month to change my mind though, in case it went south!

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