Brother Wireless All-in-One Inkjet Printer, MFC-J491DW, Multi-Function Color Printer, Duplex Printing, Mobile Printing,Amazon Dash Replenishment Enabled

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Dont buy this printer, and I recommend reading up on any other brand, period. It only exists to covertly suck up your unused ink, and disable the entire machine whenever it wants until you feed in another cartridge. This is not just an exaggeration by disgruntled commenters. The reviews on this printer seemed, overall, to be positive when we first bought it. Immediately after purchase, the bad business practices started rolling in hard. There are surely many reviews with this information, but the more the better. 1. This printer periodically sucks up ink as part of its "maintenance schedule." Even if you print nothing, it will be empty in a few months. Where this ink actually goes is a mystery. 2. The printer will not print (!) once it has seemingly arbitrarily decided that it is out of ink to do so. Who knows how many more pages worth of ink are still in the cartridge. Everything still prints solid blacks up until this point. The machine has decided you must now buy more ink. 3. We have printed, maybe, an initial test image with any color ink, and now some months later the cyan and magenta inks are "low", and the yellow is "out." At that point, a B&W-only mode activates, unless of course four weeks goes by, or you unplug the printer (like I did, trying to bypass its belligerence. The machine actually wouldnt even "allow" me to turn it off), or you select the wrong paper type, or drop too many f-bombs in its direction. At that point, you cannot even print in black and white until the color cartridge is replaced. (We dont currently have any, as we never use color prints. We do, however have plenty of black ink on hand, and really need these 20 pages printed out.) This particular episode was the big reminder that I have been forgetting to leave a review on Amazon. I very much wish I had known these quirks before we bought the printer. They are not feature-driven, but indicative of the very worst example Ive seen of predatory business practices now infamous and seemingly ubiquitous in the printer market - how to force customers to buy more ink more often. We will not be buying any more Brother products.

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So the instructions tell you how to set it up, and then it prints a test page. Ours showed nothing on the cyan test, so we followed the instructions for it to clean the print head and get the same result. Two more times. On a brand new printer. We call Brother, they say the starter print cartridge is probably empty from us cleaning the print head three times. How much does it waste when you clean it? How tiny are the starter cartridges? They tell us to buy a new print cartridge for it. Why would I buy print cartridges for a printer that hasnt proved to work yet? We ask them to send us another starter cartridge so we can verify it works. No dice. Never got to the point of actually testing anything else on it. Were initiating a return to Amazon. At least they are dependable. We opted for Brother due to poor results from HP in the last few years. Dont know where well go now.

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Do yourself a favor and buy something else. This thing may print really well but Ill probably never know. Ive stopped my 3 hour plus setup (Im not that stupid for it to take that long) to write this. Now Im trying to figure out how to reduce a copy to 50% of the original. The printer controls ( and the setup program) are the least intuitive of any that I have ever seen. The custom settings are there but it keeps reverting to 100%. You cant input a 5 and an 0 if the 100 wont delete with the X button, which is all that is available to change the size on the teensy screen. The online Users manuals instructions are not clear. Just arrgh!!!! Save yourself the stress. (I have a very expensive computerized Brother sewing machine and love it...evidently this is a different...waaaaay different... branch of the company. ) .

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We received a dud, and fought with it for 2 months. Should have returned it, but being stubborn I dealt with it and finally gave up on it only after the return period was elapsed. I just replaced it with a much more capable, robust (but expensive) non-Brother LaserJet instead and couldnt be happier Once setup, the printer would print for about one day and then give a "4F" error the next time a print job was submitted. Documentation says to look for jams for a "4F" error, and to cycle power to the unit if that doesnt work. Inevitably, I would crawl under the desk to unplug the printer to reset it and get past the "4F" error (there were no jams). Once the "4F" error was cleared, the next print would always come out as a blank white page - even when less than 1 week old! To fix that - several print head cleanings were required before the printer would (finally) print the document. Oh - and since the cleanings consumed a lot of extra ink. All of this with a new printer. I expect clogged heads eventually, but not within the first week! After 2 months, black was clogged so bad no amount of print head cleaning from the printer maintenance menu would fix it. Needless to say, I dont plan on purchasing another Brother for quite some time.

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My old but useful Cannon printer was starting to have problems and since I wanted a printer that I could hide away in a closet not attached to the laptops in my home with wires I went searching for wireless printers. I dont print often so I didnt need a lot of features that will barely be used, just a reliable printer that works great wirelessly, compact, lightweight and that the replacement cartridges wont be too expensive. Thats when I found this one and after reading a lot of great reviews decided to go for it. It performs great, I already have printed more than 500 pages and the quality in both black and white and color prints is amazing. Compared to my old Cannon its really quiet and fast and thats at normal quality and print settings. I placed it in a pull drawer style platform inside a closet which has concrete walls and it works flawlessly from anywhere at home. Still I havent replaced the cartridges so I cant comment on that but overall Im really satisfied. I put some pics on how it looks in the closet its hidden.

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UPDATE, AS PROMISED: Due to weekend we could not get support from Brother, but we DID from Amazon! Amazon techs actually stuck by us for more than an hour to get the printer up and running the way we needed it to. Solely because of their knowledge and assistance, a one star review became a 5 star. Thank you, Amazon!! We had an HP 6500 connected to a home network. Windows 7 computers. It died. We specifically wanted a printer that we could connect to home network (ethernet to cable modem), and searched for printers that would work. This one popped up. Great idea to get away from overpriced HP ink. BUT! No ethernet connection. Wireless connection might be possible, but instructions are to connect computer to modem via USB cable. Great, except our 1 year old cable modem does not have a USB port. OK, so alternative is to set up manually. Except printer cannot be set up on network before installing ink cartridges, but I dont want to open the ink, in case this does not work for home networking, and I have to return it. Literature all talks about printing from mobile devices, which we never need to do. We want to print from 2 different computers. It is possible this might work, but no way to find out without installing ink; cannot go to "Setup" or "Wifi" or even power off--must install ink FIRST! Tech support only available on weekdays, no Saturdays. Bah. If I solve this problem and it works, I will update.

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The printer has a built in feature that will shut down the printer and make it inoperable if ANY ink is out. You cannot print in Black and White if the Yellow ink is out for example. This feature may be great for Brother because it will force the customer to replace all inks, but it is a horrible feature for the customer. Ruined my morning because I had to go to a print shop to print because even though my black and white ink are 90% full, the printer cant print a word document. The feature renders the printer useless and makes this a one star purchase.

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Between the kids needing school forms printed off and me wanting to work from paper on drafts for my classes we were looking for a printer that wouldnt break the bank. 50 bucks for a Brother color printer seemed to for the bill and so far its been solid. Wireless lets me print from my surface anywhere, and w/ the app I can print from my phone too. Pictures dont look perfect but word docs and forms are good, and it can handle color graphs or charts if Im trying to summarize data visually. If you want something plain to do a job this is it.

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I needed a printer for large volumes of printing, but also wanted to have the ability to scan, copy, print double sided, etc. this was the printer that I selected simply because it offered the most options for what I wanted and the price is extremely reasonable. So far, my absolute favorite feature is the automatic double printing. I’ve saved so much paper simply because it can print double sided without me having to bother with trying to flip the paper over and figure out the right way to feed it in. This has been a life saver lol. Also, you can print directly from your phone without having to save a file to the cloud in order to access it on your computer and then print. That’s a lovely feature. As long as you have WiFi, you can basically print anything without any trouble. I haven’t tried out the scanning or copying just yet, but I’m sure I will as there are a few documents I need to keep copies of. I’ve printed about 150 pages with it so far and have not had any issues. Also, the printer comes with ink (which is great) and I’m still using the same ink cartridges that initially came with the printer, although I did order extras simply because I knew I’d be printing so much. The only downfall I’ve found so far is that it’s a little slow, but that’s to be expected because it’s an inkjet printer. Laser printers print as much quicker speeds, but for the price and features that this device included, I’m completely alright with the printing speed. It gets the job done and it saves me a lot of hassle I’ve experienced with other printers.

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I received it the printer 1/16/19 and so far its been printing great. Ive printed so far using the starter ink and will update my review how long this last for me in pages. I havent encountered issues with it so far but I also havent used the wifi, the scanner, and the fax with it yet and instead used only a USB connection. This review is currently only for what I used so far. I will also update as this semester goes on when I use these other features since this is primarily going to be used for college and my desktop will be next to it. Any issues with reliability I will also report and update my review. The printing speeds have been fast. From the other reviews Ive read about slow printing speeds, I personally havent encountered slow printing speeds and its maybe because I followed another reviewers recommendation of downloading the drivers from the brothers support site directly. Download the drivers and start the software setup which I did. I didnt hookup the printer when it asks you to until I was finished the following the setup paper guide that came with the printer. I never use the CDs that come with products. Only after I finished, did I hookup the USB connection. I downloaded the extra software by Brothers as well for extra features. After I finished going through the software setup, there was a couple of updates and a firmware update to the printer which Ive encountered. Usually when Im done printing I turn it off. The primarily printing paper Im using with this printer is the HP Bright White 24 for reference.

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