Brother MFC-8220 Laser Multifunction Center

I just bought the mfc8220 after almost seven years with an older brother mfc 4350. It was still going strong, but the drum needed to be replaced, and prices have dropped so much it made sense to upgrade.

The printer is wicked fast. The industrial design is top notch. Print quality is good. Paper handling is good. It integrates with my favorite scanned doc management applciation, paperport.

If you want a laser, instead of inkjets that are slower and cost much more to run over time, and you don't need an integrated flatbed scanner, this is the one to get.

Brad

UPDATE: Feb 2010: It's been almost 5 years now. I ended up buying two. After 4 years, we wore out the one at our preschool which served as our main printer. The second one has had much lighter duty at home. Still working great. Based on this experience, we've become diehard Brother fans and now own a 6490 and 8460.

ORIGINAL REVIEW: I've had mine for 10 months now and it's been very reliable; not one problem with it. It's quick to print out the first page, the display is a monochrome LCD with a backlight so you can see in dark spaces (say, if you keep it under a counter), no paper jams, no nonsense.

Also, if you're an Apple owner the drivers are already included with OS X; truly plug n print. What's a real treat is to combine it with an Apple Airport Express and use Apple's Bonjour software to easily convert it to a wireless network printer. Bonjour is available for both OS X and Windows computers, and is a breeze to install.

I highly recommend...Read more

The print quality is decent, but not as good as my old HP 6p.
The print speed is very good, though paper handling is pretty poor. It's copier function is really pretty good for small jobs.
It reports paper jams when there are none, the ADF often drags more than one piece of paper through the scanner, and the envelope/special paper feeder only accepts one lousy piece of paper at a time.
There's also a persistent "register me" popup when Windows loads, which doesn't give up, even after you've pressed "already registered/don't register" several times.
Installation under Linux was very easy (much easier than installing in Windows, even with the provided driver cd). Print speed under Linux is a bit odd, each page takes quite some time to print, though I haven't tried switching to any of the several other drivers for the printer that are part of a normal SuSE 9.x installation.
With Vonage, I'm not able to send or receive faxes a lot of the time, and, with...Read more