Customer Rating: 
Summary: Choose Another Printer!
Comment: I thought I would be quite happy with this printer when I found it at a reasonable price. But with its splotchy printing, low drum capacity, and expensive drums, I found it cheaper to buy a HP 1012 than to keep this one running. Even the starter drum on the HP 1012 last longer than the DCP 1000 drums.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good inexpensive printer/copier
Comment: I work for a sole practitioner attorney. When the HP LaserJet III finally died at the office, we tried running the office on an Epson ink jet printer for several days. As that was completely inadequate, we looked around for an inexpensive laserprinter which would handle a duty cycle of about 3,000 pages per month. We decided on the DCP-1000 because it had a built in copier with sheet feeder, was reasonably fast, and was inexpensive. We have had it for about half a year, and the only thing I really dislike about the unit is the way it spits paper out the front without an adequate recepticle.
The printer is excellent for the size of our projects, which tend to be less than 30 pages, and has stood up to the paper output of our office, which includes four networked workstations. It is also nice to have a copier with a sheet feeder for small jobs so we don't have to run to the copier half way across the building we work in. The one drawback with the copier is that the automatic sheet-feed occasionally misfeeds, crumpling up the sheet to be copied.
Several reviewers have commented about the price of the replacement drums and the speed with which they and the toner cartridges are used up. The fact is that the toner refills are only about $30, which is less than half the price of the cartridges used on almost any other laser printer. So, the fact that you have to spend $120 on a drum every 20K copies or so is the trade-off. This means it is no more expensive per copy than just about any other laser printer.
It would cost at least an extra $150 to purchase any other printer/copier and get the same functionality. For around $300, you get print quality which is good enough to hand to a judge, a copier with a multisheet feeder which makes good 600 dpi quality copies, and a color scanner which is adequate for occasional use and for OCR. This makes it a very cost effective unit for a home or small office. The unit easily pays for itself very quickly. The owner of the building where we lease our office has a central copier. He charges 5 cents per copy made on the central copier. (Kinko's charges about 9 cents per copy!) The marginal cost with the Brother is about 2 cents per copy. Just on the difference in cost of copies, this unit paid for itself in less than 10,000 copies.
As an update, after a little more than a year and close to 100,000 pages printed, the sheet feeder broke. (We replaced the drum 4 times.) Rather than have it repaired, we purchased a Brother MFC-8440 because, while we were happy with the product, we wanted a heavier duty, faster machine with a built in fax. I have the DCP-1000 at home, and anticipte getting it repaired.
Afterthought: Brother includes ScanSoft PaperPort and OmniPage Pro with the printer. Paperport is a scanning and document management application which will allow you to scan, print, organize, view and save copies of documents in PDF format. It interfaces with most common document handling and word processing software. You can drop and drag the thumbnail of a scanned document into an icon of the wordprocessor or other document handling program and it will automatically convert the document to text or other graphic format for editing, emailing or viewing. It is a bit slow to load, but it is a wonderful visual document and software interface. Unfortunately, the version supplied by Brother does not save directly to PDF format, but instead uses a proprietary format. It is also virtually impossible to uninstall. I recommend downloading the printer drivers from Brother and purchasing a newer version of Paperport.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Drum problems? No way!
Comment: I've had this copier/printer for several months now and I find it to be a really cool and useful tool in my office. I can get really cheap compatible toner on the internet for it, so the cost of using it is therefore....cheap! Haven't had any problems with the drum. But the way I see it, I'm saving a lot with the cheap toner, so when the drum goes out, oh well. The machine functions really nicely. I love the document feeder. In fact, I like the whole package so much that I just ordered another via the web for $245.00 shipped. Drums can be found at databazaar.com for just $118.00. My opinion on the naysayers....you just got yours from a bad batch.
Customer Rating:
Summary: drum wears out
Comment: The other reviews are in sync with my observations. The drum wears out quick. Also, the toner cartridges wear out quick. I have a brother printer, and it is much better for me just to print duplicates on it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Short Drum Life
Comment: When I first started using this printer/copier/scanner, I thought it was a wonderful machine at a great price. But by the time I had almost used up my first toner cartridge, my printed pages contained white stripes, so I needed to replace the drum. Oh, Brother! The drum costs over half of what the entire printer does. Since the drum is considered a consumable, it is not covered under warranty. Maybe it would be cheaper to only use this machine as a copier/scanner, and get a separate laser printer to do my printing from the computer...
Summary: Choose Another Printer!
Comment: I thought I would be quite happy with this printer when I found it at a reasonable price. But with its splotchy printing, low drum capacity, and expensive drums, I found it cheaper to buy a HP 1012 than to keep this one running. Even the starter drum on the HP 1012 last longer than the DCP 1000 drums.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good inexpensive printer/copier
Comment: I work for a sole practitioner attorney. When the HP LaserJet III finally died at the office, we tried running the office on an Epson ink jet printer for several days. As that was completely inadequate, we looked around for an inexpensive laserprinter which would handle a duty cycle of about 3,000 pages per month. We decided on the DCP-1000 because it had a built in copier with sheet feeder, was reasonably fast, and was inexpensive. We have had it for about half a year, and the only thing I really dislike about the unit is the way it spits paper out the front without an adequate recepticle.
The printer is excellent for the size of our projects, which tend to be less than 30 pages, and has stood up to the paper output of our office, which includes four networked workstations. It is also nice to have a copier with a sheet feeder for small jobs so we don't have to run to the copier half way across the building we work in. The one drawback with the copier is that the automatic sheet-feed occasionally misfeeds, crumpling up the sheet to be copied.
Several reviewers have commented about the price of the replacement drums and the speed with which they and the toner cartridges are used up. The fact is that the toner refills are only about $30, which is less than half the price of the cartridges used on almost any other laser printer. So, the fact that you have to spend $120 on a drum every 20K copies or so is the trade-off. This means it is no more expensive per copy than just about any other laser printer.
It would cost at least an extra $150 to purchase any other printer/copier and get the same functionality. For around $300, you get print quality which is good enough to hand to a judge, a copier with a multisheet feeder which makes good 600 dpi quality copies, and a color scanner which is adequate for occasional use and for OCR. This makes it a very cost effective unit for a home or small office. The unit easily pays for itself very quickly. The owner of the building where we lease our office has a central copier. He charges 5 cents per copy made on the central copier. (Kinko's charges about 9 cents per copy!) The marginal cost with the Brother is about 2 cents per copy. Just on the difference in cost of copies, this unit paid for itself in less than 10,000 copies.
As an update, after a little more than a year and close to 100,000 pages printed, the sheet feeder broke. (We replaced the drum 4 times.) Rather than have it repaired, we purchased a Brother MFC-8440 because, while we were happy with the product, we wanted a heavier duty, faster machine with a built in fax. I have the DCP-1000 at home, and anticipte getting it repaired.
Afterthought: Brother includes ScanSoft PaperPort and OmniPage Pro with the printer. Paperport is a scanning and document management application which will allow you to scan, print, organize, view and save copies of documents in PDF format. It interfaces with most common document handling and word processing software. You can drop and drag the thumbnail of a scanned document into an icon of the wordprocessor or other document handling program and it will automatically convert the document to text or other graphic format for editing, emailing or viewing. It is a bit slow to load, but it is a wonderful visual document and software interface. Unfortunately, the version supplied by Brother does not save directly to PDF format, but instead uses a proprietary format. It is also virtually impossible to uninstall. I recommend downloading the printer drivers from Brother and purchasing a newer version of Paperport.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Drum problems? No way!
Comment: I've had this copier/printer for several months now and I find it to be a really cool and useful tool in my office. I can get really cheap compatible toner on the internet for it, so the cost of using it is therefore....cheap! Haven't had any problems with the drum. But the way I see it, I'm saving a lot with the cheap toner, so when the drum goes out, oh well. The machine functions really nicely. I love the document feeder. In fact, I like the whole package so much that I just ordered another via the web for $245.00 shipped. Drums can be found at databazaar.com for just $118.00. My opinion on the naysayers....you just got yours from a bad batch.
Customer Rating:
Summary: drum wears out
Comment: The other reviews are in sync with my observations. The drum wears out quick. Also, the toner cartridges wear out quick. I have a brother printer, and it is much better for me just to print duplicates on it.
I am not sure it is worth getting another drum. You could buy a new machine for just a little more than the drum costs.
Other than this problem, it is a nice machine.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Short Drum Life
Comment: When I first started using this printer/copier/scanner, I thought it was a wonderful machine at a great price. But by the time I had almost used up my first toner cartridge, my printed pages contained white stripes, so I needed to replace the drum. Oh, Brother! The drum costs over half of what the entire printer does. Since the drum is considered a consumable, it is not covered under warranty. Maybe it would be cheaper to only use this machine as a copier/scanner, and get a separate laser printer to do my printing from the computer...