Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
65 of 66 people found the following review helpful.
Great features, great function, one caveat...
By R. Phillips
This is a large printer with lots of features that work well. I set this up on the wireless function to operate with my Mac. It only took one setup and I've experienced no problems with the range, which I did experience on my HP initially. Sending documents to print is a fast and easy task. It has an easy to use and good looking large touchscreen to take you through each menu. This is great and time saving when compared with other printers. Having the ability to print ledger photos without going to a printer store is fantastic and I used it to make several posters for our portfolio.
Now to the caveat, big or small depending on your needs. The print quality is not nearly as good as the HP. It's comparable to other brands, very similar to what Lexmark puts out, but could not compare in color quality to my HP. Yesterday, I needed to print out a color chart for our business products and I did a couple on the normal settings on my HP. Then my ink got low so I switched over to the Brother to make a couple on there. I decided to put it on the best quality settings because I wanted the colors to be very vibrant. It takes a good bit of time to print on the high quality setting so I was expecting a lot and was very disappointed when it was finished. The colors looked washed out or a bit faded when held side by side to what I had just printed on the HP and took 3 times as long to print. I took it without saying which was which and showed it to my husband who pointed to the HP document and said that it was so much better and that there was no comparison. As far as my color chart, the HP was very usable and the Brother not at all. To be fair, the Brother has settings for its color printer that you can manually enter. I'm just not adept enough to do that, to know which settings to set the colors on. But as far as default printing, you won't get top quality photo printing, you will get adequate printing. So, the bottom line is if you need high quality color printing, then this might not be the right printer for you. But if you are an occasional photo printer or primarily use it for office or business documents where vibrant color quality is not required, then this is a great, easy to use multi-function printer and you should give it a try.
32 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Good for a specialized purpose
By Gary Washer
After using this printer's predecessor (MFC-6490CW) for over a year, I can offer the following:
My requirements are very specific. I need ledger-size (11x17) scanning and printing...period. Just try to find an AIO at this price that will do that (unless you want to pay $600+?) Most of my documents are B&W, some with a small amount of color highlighting, and this printer works flawlessly for that purpose.
For color photos, make sure you use photo paper or the color is so washed out even at the custom maxed-out settings that I don't bother printing photos on plain paper.
The automatic document feeder, ADF, is somewhat flakey and skews the paper a bit too much for my finiky demands so I just limit myself to using the glass-top surface for most scanning.
I love the scan-to-file feature that doesn't require input from the PC and allows several file formats as the default, including PDF. If you are not picky about the document skewing of the ADF, this printer will scan a stack of originals and place the entire set into a single multi-page PDF file if you desire.
This printer uses replaceable ink "tanks" instead of ink/head cartridges and this makes it much easier to manage and refill if you choose. The printer asks if you have installed a new tank and then takes your word for it, unlike the HP I used previously that insisted on reporting an out-of-ink condition even after refilling. Since this printer's tanks have no electronics inside, there is no serial number to read and no way for the software to know if you have inserted an old cartridge.
I noticed over the last year that the user manual is somewhat incomplete and confusing/contradictory. Some features that were described in the manual did not function and some functions referenced on their web site were not properly described in the manual.
86 of 95 people found the following review helpful.
Very good if you need ledger printing. Not so good if you don't.
By Kevin Nicholls
After owning and reviewing both the excellent Canon Pixma MX850 Office All-In-One Inkjet Printer and the almost as-good Canon PIXMA MX860 Wireless All-In-One Photo Printer, Brother has to make an airtight case against Canon when they're looking to get twice as much money out of your wallet.
Unless printing on 11 x 17" (ledger) paper is a make-or-break need, Brother doesn't make a very good case against the less expensive Canon offerings.
Of course, this is Brother's flagship inkjet AIO offering, so they've thrown in a gimmicky touchscreen. Sure, it's kind of cool, but it doesn't really help accomplish much beyond jacking up the price. Is it missing from other AIO printers? Sure. Does it add any value? No.
Setting the printer up on MacOS X was quite painless, making for an unexpected treat. Setting the printer up in Windows was also simple, as expected. Wireless printing worked well all around, with very good range. And Brother's dual-tray paper handling is something that's sorely missing from all of Canon's offerings.
So, why all the Canon talk? Because comparatively speaking, the Brother MFC-6890cdw takes longer to print both text and photos (single sided and duplex), the photo quality isn't as good, the scanning speed is not as good, the document feeder acts screwy when you're not using 8.5 x 11" paper, and yet... it costs nearly twice as much.
A natural retort could be "But Brother is targeting small business users", which is normally true, but that simply doesn't wash when you take consumables in to consideration. Comparing the black ink between Canon and Brother (PGI-220BK vs. LC61BKS), you get rated yields of 350 pages vs. 450 pages. But when you dig a little deeper and compare the cost per page based on the cartridge cost, you end up with 4.6 cents per page on the Canon side and 5.5 cents per page on the Brother side (based on the retail price of both cartridges at a national office supply store). So while it's true that you're going through more cartridges on the Canon side, you're also paying less for them upfront and per page.
So at the end of the day, why would you buy this printer? To be honest, I don't really know. If you're heavy in to ledger sized documents, and need the occasional presentation printed, you don't have many alternatives. But if you don't need to print larger than 8.5 x 11" on a daily basis, get yourself the Canon Pixma MX860, enjoy the better quality and the hundreds of dollars you'll save.
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