Brother MFC-9840CDW - multifunction - color - laser price and reviews

We've had our Brother MFC-9840CDW up and running for about about a month as of this writing. I'm the kind of consumer who researches every major purchase to death, and replacing my seven-year old Brother monochrome laser all-in-one was no exception. I'm an American living in Hong Kong, btw, which is of consequence because there are a handful of Japanese brands that promote themselves as premium and are rarely or in insignificantly discounted here, Brother among them. So, not only did we decide on this model over similarly packaged all-in-ones from HP, Epson, Canon and Samsung, but we paid dearly for the privilege.

There have been enough other comments about the units size and weight to accurately give one the sense of the monster this piece of machinery is. I'm an extremely fit guy, but to get the Brother MFC-9840CDW out of the box you will need two people. (I am already concerned about the day we need to pack it up for our next move.) The finish, however, certainly matches its heft: once set up, this is a serious-looking addition to any home office.

I configured it to reside on our password-protected wireless network. (We're Mac people, so our wi-fi equipment consists of an Airport Extreme and an Apple Time Capsule, but the process should be pretty much the same regardless of the brand of wireless router you have.) My suggestion: skip the set-up application administered from a computer on your network. It's more cumbersome than helpful. Instead, follow the prompts right in the unit's display menu. Once the MFC tells you you're successfully on the network you'll need to direct each computer to see it. In the Mac world, it's a Bonjour function that takes a few seconds, followed by an automatic online search for the relevant driver.

Once the MFC-9840CDW is warmed up, prints pop out pretty quickly. But waiting for that first print can feel like forever. (Actually, it's never been more than about 45 seconds.)

The quality of the output is both a strength and a weakness of this device. If you are printing text and restrict the print to black and white only, text looks great -- certainly as good as any office laser printer. There is a high resolution mode you can toggle to increase the default 600dpi to a setting labelled 2400dpi. I have trouble seeing the difference.

Color (or colour as my spell checker here in HK wants me to write) is a mixed bag. Colour prints are not in the same league as those from a photo output service or a late-model ink jet printer. This has traditionally been a trade off when one chooses the speed of laser. However, I would go so far as to say that from the MFC-9840CDW in its default settings, colour output is even below average when compared with more expensive office (or Kinko's) grade laser equipment. There are a couple of work-arounds. The print dialogue box will allow you to choose "vivid" instead of the default colour saturation, as well as 2400dpi instead of 600dpi. There's also a box marked "enhanced black". "Vivid" helps, as does the increased resolution. "Enhanced black" seems to do little.

The look of black text within colour output from the MFC-9840CDW is a very seriously problem, one that even the Brother customer service folks here in Asia have admitted. Unless you've told the unit to print in black and white only, black text will be hit by all four colour inks. The result is a reduced crispness that is no longer ideal for business communication in my opinion. What's more, the current MFC-9840CDW firmware will print all PDF documents in colour, even if they are black and white only unless you manually toggle the auto colour-detection function to monochrome each time you print. This model has been out for well over a year; that Brother has not fixed this issue yet is galling.

Scanning is another issue in which there is a shortcoming on Brother's radar. Despite the impressive scanning resolution's in the machine's promotional literature, the software that comes with the MFC-9840CDW limits your scans to 1200dpi, hardly state-of-the-art. Again, my regional Brother customer service people have advised me to find a third-party software solution because Brother hasn't yet been able to crack this problem.

My bottom line: if you are reading this from a market such as the US or Australia, where the street price is about 30 percent off the steep recommended retail price, the MFC-9840CDW, flaws and all, is a decent option. If, on the other hand, you are in a part of the world where Brother controls its prices in an attempt to position themselves as something special, you may want to consider one of the less special alternatives out there.