Bob Feeser
I recently purchased the Brother DCPL2540DW so I feel like I am compelled to compare it to this Canon Image CLASS MF236n. With Amazons current "deal" the price is only 14 dollars apart with the Canon being only slightly more expensive. The regular price is half again as much as the Brother. However the Canon has faxing capabilities, but is not a true wireless. True wireless are standalone printers that only need to be plugged in the wall for power like the Brother printer does. You can make the Canon a wireless functioning printer though if you have it plugged into a hard wire Ethernet, and then use the wireless capabilities of your home router/network. I just like the flexibility of built in wireless with no need to hard wire the network into it. The fax feature exclusive in this shootout with the Canon only provides standby faxing, and allows you to use your PC to send a fax through it, but you cant receive a fax via PC. I have always been annoyed at printer fax machine eating up ink when they receive every single junk fax. However with the low cost of laser toner it doesnt become so much of an issue, and it is better than running a fax modem with a computer running all of the time in order to receive faxes. This brings up two issues. One is the cost of the toner, and the other is how much electricity the printer uses on standby. The toner from Canon of course is ideally engineered for the printer. There is an aftermarket toner currently coming in a dual pack that is way cheaper. After reading through the reviews I see that with the highly rated aftermarket toner they noticed that for printing a bar graph chart for example there was some unevenness in the full black areas, but regular text did not show such anomalies. Secondly the standby wattage is only 2W or less in energy saver mode, so having a printer in standby mode to receive faxes is an economical alternative. In max print speed the Canon comes in a 24ppm, and the Brother at 30. First page print on the Canon is 6 seconds and 8.5 seconds on the Brother. The print resolution on the Canon is 600 x 600 DPI and the Brother it is 2400 x 600. The same numbers apply to the scan resolution with the Canon at 600 x 600 and the Brother at 600 x 2400. The Brother software allows you to adjust the resolution level up to 2400 with several incremental steps in between so you can optimize the clarity of the scan and save on used storage space. By the way, and this is a biggee, I was using an expensive 25ppm IBM scanner to scan all of my invoices for the year in order to do my taxes. I got tired of storing all of the boxes of previous years going back at least 6 years. So I scanned, shredded, and backed up digitally. Well both of these printers have built in auto-document feeders that do the same thing, and do it superbly. So no need to go out and buy a specialty scanner to have this kind of capability. Mind blowing. The Canon has 256 MB (shared memory) and the Brother has 32 MB standard memory. The Canon boasts up to 15,000 pages per month, with a recommended monthly print volume of 500 to 2,000 pages. The Brother lists up to 10,000 pages per month with a recommended monthly print volume of 250 to 2,000 pages. The standby wattage on the Canon in sleep mode is only 2 watts, and 5.3 on the Brother. So in comparison between the two it really is a tossup depending on what your needs are. The Brother has true wireless so you can plug it into a wall outlet anywhere, not needed a wired Ethernet or USB connection the way the Canon does. The Brother also has a higher print and scanning resolution which is adjustable, but it only has 32 MB of memory whereas the Canon has 250. That is important if you plan on doing a lot of scanning, or printing a lot of backup print jobs. Currently they both are boasting about the same percentage of 5 star reviews using the comparable Canon since this model is a new release. The Brother at 58%, and the Canon at 59%. Of course if you need faxing capabilities the Canon is the only one between the two that has that.