Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good but not perfect.....
Comment: My wife needed this all-in-one to replace an overloaded HP 1012, an old and balky fax machine and a flatbed scanner. The main impetus was her business was requiring scanning of multiple sheets. We've had it for 2 months now and here's the results so far:
THE GOOD: Frees up a lot of desk space; Quick & easy initial set up; big paper tray; superfast printing, quiet operation (despite some earlier reviews to the contrary); fax and document scanning has been a breeze; even the duplex feature has worked perfectly the few times we've used it.
THE BAD: Our biggest grouse is the print output - when printing large jobs the output tray gets jammed up, eventually causing internal jams. It may be the cheapo paper we're using - after 40 sheets or so they seem to curl up and don't lie flat in the out tray - we have to constantly empty the output tray every 5 or 6 sheets otherwise it shoots sheets onto the floor or jams. Also as noted in other reviews, it will print envelopes for us but they tend to come out curled and wrinkled - we'll be doing envelopes (not a high priority for us) in our InkJet. Document scanning is great, but some initial attempts to scan 4x6 photo prints were spoiled by stripes or "plaid" artifacts - solution so far has been to resurrect the old flatbed. And lastly, we went and got the top-of-the line with wireless capability in the hope that my wife could print direct from her laptop. I was unable to follow the setup instructions in the manual first time through - will try again when I'm in the mood - would probably be easy for a halfways competent IT guy.
Bottom line: vast improvement on what we had been using, for about the same aggregate price. Only intractable issue is the small and confined output tray, and that might be less of an issue if we upgraded our paper.
Customer Rating:
Summary: High-quality duplex printing and copying
Comment: I was considering purchasing a $7,000 reconditioned "floor model" Canon copier (that would have required adding a 20-amp electrical line at an additional cost of about $1,000) when a friend suggested that I look at the $600 (MSRP) Brother MFC8870DW.
I was pleased to find that the quality of copies made with the Brother multifunction unit is comparable to that of the Canon copier and superior to a floor-model Konica that I had used for some time.
As a copier and printer, the MFC8870DW is not quite as fast as its bigger brothers from Canon, Konica, etc., but it is fast enough for my purposes.
The Brother copier will not make 11x17-inch copies or copy on 110-pound card stock, both of which I need to do at times. However, for the difference in price, I can go to a copy center once in a while.
I am quite pleased with the PaperPort 9.0 SE software that is bundled with the copier, notwithstanding the very negative reviews for the current retail version (PaperPort 10) posted elsewhere on Amazon. I use it for enhancing (page de-skewing, removal of stray dots, and otherwise enhancing and printing multi-page docunent stands).
PaperPort has difficulty straightening pages that include drawings with prominent diagonal lines, for example, but I believe that any comparable program would have the same problem. It provides a simple method for manually straightening crooked pages, however. It also leaves more "stray dots" than it removes, and manually removing them can be tedious. However, it's my understanding that this is the state of the art at present.
PaperPort also provides a means of compressing large scanned files (to less than 10% of their original size) with no loss in quality that I can detect, and removing, replacing and rearranging pages of multi-page documents, and converting files to PDF format. It also provides some editing capabilities for PDF files. For many casual users, it will make the purchase of Adobe Acrobat unnecessary.
Properly installing PaperPort did require a 10-minute telephone call to Brother's customer support, but overall setting up the copier and installing the software was relatively painless.
I have owned the copier for about six weeks and have made more than 12,000 pages of copies and prints. To date I have used the the TN550 toner cartridge ( rated at 3,500 copies) that came with the unit and two TN580 cartidges (7,000 copies each). Obviously, I am getting about 70% of the estimated number of copies per toner cartridge.
The estimated capacity of a toner cartridge is based on average 5% coverage, which is the industry standard. I assume that my pages have somewhat higher than 5% coverage.
The DR520 drum unit died last night at 11,926 copies. It is rated at 25,000 copies, and it lasted for about half that number.
However, since I have purchased remanufacured toner cartridges from Meritline and a reconditioned drum unit through Amazon from Itonerink, my cost per copy is still below estimates based on Brother's estimated life of these products and the cost of new toner cartridges and drum units.
I have used the MFC as a scanner, printer and copier and am well pleased with its performance. I have not used it as fax machine, nor have I tested its wireless capabilities. (I have a large number of documents to scan, and I have been told by various IT people that wireless scanning simply doesn't work very well on any machine.)
This model includes true PostScript, which is a necessity since I use many Adobe PostScript fonts.
I don't often spend money on extended warranties, but because of my high volume of printing and copying, I purchased one from Brother. Brother offers one- and two-year warranties in two flavors -- "depot" (you take your copier to an authorized repair depot for repairs during the warranty period) and "replacement" (Brother sends you a reconditioned MFC, no questions asked, and you return the original MFC in the same box. Brother pays the return postage.) I purchased the two-year replacement warranty (which begins after the one-year limited warranty expires) for $138.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brother, what a machine!
Comment: I have been a long-time HP customer, both laser and ink jet. This Brother MFC-8870DW is head and shoulders above any HP printer or All-In-One that I have owned.
I have been using this machine for about a month in my business. Print quality is great. It worked first time, every time.
I previously had a HP 1170C All-In-One inkjet, which frankly, was a pain to use. The ink cartridges never lasted very long, it only worked with 24# paper, and I always had to make sure that I chose to print in black only (99.9% of what I print is B&W). That's no longer a problem with this laser printer.
The wireless connection was a snap to set up. Within 20 minutes it was connected to a sever, desktop and laptop - and I'm not a techie. Very cool.
I have had occasion to use all of the features, except the Fax (I have a dedicated fax). I have scanned to e-mail, copied single sided printing to double-sided copies, printed single and double side . . . and it is all wireless!
I researched a lot of laser printers and multifunction machines at local retailers and on the Internet. At the time, none of the standard retailers (Staples, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City) even had this machine in their line. I could not touch the quality and functionality of this machine anywhere else, not to mention the great deal that I got at Amazon.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Incredible flexibility and convenience - but not for high volume use.
Comment: The Brother MFC-8870DW does everything I need it to do - and then some. Given the rich feature set, the price is quite low. Given the lightweight plastic feel of the paper drawer and small input rollers I have some concerns about the build quality of the paper path (but we've had no problems at all with it so far). There's no end of flexibility about how you can hook it up and make it do all the many things that it does:
* fast laser printer with fine resolution and duplex (automatic print on both sides) capability. Enabling duplex by default saves a ton of paper.
* fax machine with a ton of flexible receive options to make it coexist with answering machines on a shared line and other methods (including a well behaved manual mode).
* digital sender for network fax servers including RightFax.
* connection flexibility with network printing, faxing, and scanning (yes, to PDF too) via ethernet - as well as local via USB, and wirelessly via WiFi.
* stand alone copy machine w/50 sheet automatic document feeder
* did I mention that in addition to document scanning (with OCR) it does color scanning too?
The workstation on the network are all running WindowsXP so I can't comment on other OS support - but the included software is well behaved and feature rich. You can initiate scan jobs from the workstation, for example as well as print, fax We're into our 4th month with it. My wife has printed out several copies of her dissertation on it and the page count is several thousand and we haven't even had a jam. Our old Brother laser printer (a 1040) still runs after 8 years. The unit sure feels lightweight and plasticky. I wouldn't put this into a high volume environment - but for my home office it's killer and I've been so happy with it so far.
Follow-up June 2008 - 8 months later. Unit has been perfectly reliable so far. No jams or any trouble of any kind so far.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Solid office machine
Comment: I have owned three different HP OfficeJet all-in-one. The Brother MFC-8870dw is the best yet.
PROS:
Fast printing. Excellent first page out speed with power saving turned off.
Good paper capacity.
Built in Ethernet networking works good. We do not use the wireless capability.
Excellent faxing. Scans the item before dialing number. So a paper jam doesn't waste a long distance fee.
The best document feeder i have used.
Duplexing works great.
CONS:
The software needs updating.
Mediocre first page out speed with power saving on.
Conclusion: This is a solid Small Business Machine. It may not be suitable for home use.
Summary: Good but not perfect.....
Comment: My wife needed this all-in-one to replace an overloaded HP 1012, an old and balky fax machine and a flatbed scanner. The main impetus was her business was requiring scanning of multiple sheets. We've had it for 2 months now and here's the results so far:
THE GOOD: Frees up a lot of desk space; Quick & easy initial set up; big paper tray; superfast printing, quiet operation (despite some earlier reviews to the contrary); fax and document scanning has been a breeze; even the duplex feature has worked perfectly the few times we've used it.
THE BAD: Our biggest grouse is the print output - when printing large jobs the output tray gets jammed up, eventually causing internal jams. It may be the cheapo paper we're using - after 40 sheets or so they seem to curl up and don't lie flat in the out tray - we have to constantly empty the output tray every 5 or 6 sheets otherwise it shoots sheets onto the floor or jams. Also as noted in other reviews, it will print envelopes for us but they tend to come out curled and wrinkled - we'll be doing envelopes (not a high priority for us) in our InkJet. Document scanning is great, but some initial attempts to scan 4x6 photo prints were spoiled by stripes or "plaid" artifacts - solution so far has been to resurrect the old flatbed. And lastly, we went and got the top-of-the line with wireless capability in the hope that my wife could print direct from her laptop. I was unable to follow the setup instructions in the manual first time through - will try again when I'm in the mood - would probably be easy for a halfways competent IT guy.
Bottom line: vast improvement on what we had been using, for about the same aggregate price. Only intractable issue is the small and confined output tray, and that might be less of an issue if we upgraded our paper.
Customer Rating:
Summary: High-quality duplex printing and copying
Comment: I was considering purchasing a $7,000 reconditioned "floor model" Canon copier (that would have required adding a 20-amp electrical line at an additional cost of about $1,000) when a friend suggested that I look at the $600 (MSRP) Brother MFC8870DW.
I was pleased to find that the quality of copies made with the Brother multifunction unit is comparable to that of the Canon copier and superior to a floor-model Konica that I had used for some time.
As a copier and printer, the MFC8870DW is not quite as fast as its bigger brothers from Canon, Konica, etc., but it is fast enough for my purposes.
The Brother copier will not make 11x17-inch copies or copy on 110-pound card stock, both of which I need to do at times. However, for the difference in price, I can go to a copy center once in a while.
I am quite pleased with the PaperPort 9.0 SE software that is bundled with the copier, notwithstanding the very negative reviews for the current retail version (PaperPort 10) posted elsewhere on Amazon. I use it for enhancing (page de-skewing, removal of stray dots, and otherwise enhancing and printing multi-page docunent stands).
PaperPort has difficulty straightening pages that include drawings with prominent diagonal lines, for example, but I believe that any comparable program would have the same problem. It provides a simple method for manually straightening crooked pages, however. It also leaves more "stray dots" than it removes, and manually removing them can be tedious. However, it's my understanding that this is the state of the art at present.
PaperPort also provides a means of compressing large scanned files (to less than 10% of their original size) with no loss in quality that I can detect, and removing, replacing and rearranging pages of multi-page documents, and converting files to PDF format. It also provides some editing capabilities for PDF files. For many casual users, it will make the purchase of Adobe Acrobat unnecessary.
Properly installing PaperPort did require a 10-minute telephone call to Brother's customer support, but overall setting up the copier and installing the software was relatively painless.
I have owned the copier for about six weeks and have made more than 12,000 pages of copies and prints. To date I have used the the TN550 toner cartridge ( rated at 3,500 copies) that came with the unit and two TN580 cartidges (7,000 copies each). Obviously, I am getting about 70% of the estimated number of copies per toner cartridge.
The estimated capacity of a toner cartridge is based on average 5% coverage, which is the industry standard. I assume that my pages have somewhat higher than 5% coverage.
The DR520 drum unit died last night at 11,926 copies. It is rated at 25,000 copies, and it lasted for about half that number.
However, since I have purchased remanufacured toner cartridges from Meritline and a reconditioned drum unit through Amazon from Itonerink, my cost per copy is still below estimates based on Brother's estimated life of these products and the cost of new toner cartridges and drum units.
I have used the MFC as a scanner, printer and copier and am well pleased with its performance. I have not used it as fax machine, nor have I tested its wireless capabilities. (I have a large number of documents to scan, and I have been told by various IT people that wireless scanning simply doesn't work very well on any machine.)
This model includes true PostScript, which is a necessity since I use many Adobe PostScript fonts.
I don't often spend money on extended warranties, but because of my high volume of printing and copying, I purchased one from Brother. Brother offers one- and two-year warranties in two flavors -- "depot" (you take your copier to an authorized repair depot for repairs during the warranty period) and "replacement" (Brother sends you a reconditioned MFC, no questions asked, and you return the original MFC in the same box. Brother pays the return postage.) I purchased the two-year replacement warranty (which begins after the one-year limited warranty expires) for $138.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brother, what a machine!
Comment: I have been a long-time HP customer, both laser and ink jet. This Brother MFC-8870DW is head and shoulders above any HP printer or All-In-One that I have owned.
I have been using this machine for about a month in my business. Print quality is great. It worked first time, every time.
I previously had a HP 1170C All-In-One inkjet, which frankly, was a pain to use. The ink cartridges never lasted very long, it only worked with 24# paper, and I always had to make sure that I chose to print in black only (99.9% of what I print is B&W). That's no longer a problem with this laser printer.
The wireless connection was a snap to set up. Within 20 minutes it was connected to a sever, desktop and laptop - and I'm not a techie. Very cool.
I have had occasion to use all of the features, except the Fax (I have a dedicated fax). I have scanned to e-mail, copied single sided printing to double-sided copies, printed single and double side . . . and it is all wireless!
I researched a lot of laser printers and multifunction machines at local retailers and on the Internet. At the time, none of the standard retailers (Staples, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City) even had this machine in their line. I could not touch the quality and functionality of this machine anywhere else, not to mention the great deal that I got at Amazon.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Incredible flexibility and convenience - but not for high volume use.
Comment: The Brother MFC-8870DW does everything I need it to do - and then some. Given the rich feature set, the price is quite low. Given the lightweight plastic feel of the paper drawer and small input rollers I have some concerns about the build quality of the paper path (but we've had no problems at all with it so far). There's no end of flexibility about how you can hook it up and make it do all the many things that it does:
* fast laser printer with fine resolution and duplex (automatic print on both sides) capability. Enabling duplex by default saves a ton of paper.
* fax machine with a ton of flexible receive options to make it coexist with answering machines on a shared line and other methods (including a well behaved manual mode).
* digital sender for network fax servers including RightFax.
* connection flexibility with network printing, faxing, and scanning (yes, to PDF too) via ethernet - as well as local via USB, and wirelessly via WiFi.
* stand alone copy machine w/50 sheet automatic document feeder
* did I mention that in addition to document scanning (with OCR) it does color scanning too?
The workstation on the network are all running WindowsXP so I can't comment on other OS support - but the included software is well behaved and feature rich. You can initiate scan jobs from the workstation, for example as well as print, fax We're into our 4th month with it. My wife has printed out several copies of her dissertation on it and the page count is several thousand and we haven't even had a jam. Our old Brother laser printer (a 1040) still runs after 8 years. The unit sure feels lightweight and plasticky. I wouldn't put this into a high volume environment - but for my home office it's killer and I've been so happy with it so far.
Follow-up June 2008 - 8 months later. Unit has been perfectly reliable so far. No jams or any trouble of any kind so far.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Solid office machine
Comment: I have owned three different HP OfficeJet all-in-one. The Brother MFC-8870dw is the best yet.
PROS:
Fast printing. Excellent first page out speed with power saving turned off.
Good paper capacity.
Built in Ethernet networking works good. We do not use the wireless capability.
Excellent faxing. Scans the item before dialing number. So a paper jam doesn't waste a long distance fee.
The best document feeder i have used.
Duplexing works great.
CONS:
The software needs updating.
Mediocre first page out speed with power saving on.
Conclusion: This is a solid Small Business Machine. It may not be suitable for home use.
Brother MFC-8870DW Wireless Flatbed Laser Multi-Function Center Reviews: Page 2 of 5
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