Brother MFC-9840CDW Color Laser Multifunction Center with Wireless Interface and Duplex Reviews
ByBrother MFC-9840CDW Color Laser Multifunction Center with Wireless Interface and Duplex
- Multi-function device offers laser printing, copying, faxing, and scanning
- Built-in wireless 802.11b/g and wired Ethernet connections for easy networking
- Prints at maximum 21 ppm in black and white and color
- Scans at optical resolution of 1200 x 2400 dpi at 48-bit color depth
- Measures 20.9 x 20.5 x 21 inches (WxHxD)
The MFC-9840CDW is the ultimate color laser Multi-Function Center® business solution that offers superior quality color laser printing, faxing, copying and scanning? with built-in wireless and Ethernet network interfaces. It delivers superior quality color and black laser output at up to 21 pages per minute. It also features automatic duplex printing, copying, faxing and scanning?, a legal-size document glass and a 50-sheet auto document feeder. A USB direct interface allows you to print direct
Rating: 
(out of 144 reviews)
List Price: $ 999.00
Price: $ 618.46
HP CP2025N Color LaserJet Printer
- Give brochures and other marketing materials a competitive edge with the ImageREt 3600 color technology
- Customize documents to speak directly to your customers’ needs with the included marketing tools
- Print complex documents containing text, images and graphics with the powerful 540MHz processor and 128MB memory
- Avoid interruptions with proactive management: HP ToolboxFX gives you easy access to printer settings, status info and more
- Save paper: Instead of printing drafts, you can change the settings and immediately see how it affects the document
HP Color LaserJet CP2025n – Create print shop-quality marketing materials and documents in your office, fast, with this networked color laser printer. Get crisp text, realistic photos and stunning graphics using ext-generation HP ColorSphere toner. Enhances productivity, easy to use and affordable and print-shop quality color.
Rating: 
(out of 10 reviews)
List Price: $ 778.34
Price: Too low to display
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10 Comments
July 24th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
Review by Dan’s Review for Brother MFC-9840CDW Color Laser Multifunction Center with Wireless Interface and Duplex
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I have waited many many years for the perfect all in one COLOR LASER….and this is it + more! I bought mine from a local store and have had it about a week. It comes in a huge box, but don’t worry, this MFC is large but not too large compared to the other Brother mono laser all-in-ones (of which I have owned three over the years). The print quality is EXCELLENT and very fast for full color (21 pages per minute). My only initial concern was that it creased envelopes when printing on envelopes……but after consulting the manual there are fuser tension adjustment switches that solves that for perfect envelope printing (Settings, A, B and Envelope). I had compared many all-in-one color laser machines for many years (including recent ones from Xerox and HP). I was surprised that HP hadn’t come out with a great, feature rich one yet. Brother beat HP to the punch and it is a knockout for sure. I am replacing a higher end Minolta color laser with flatbed scanner, a Brother MFC mono, and an HP mono workhorse with this ONE MFC-9840CDW!!! I am very very picky with print quality but this one is great! Bonus features are built-in duplex scanning, duplex printing, and wireless network capability! The replacement supply costs are also very reasonable and lower than most of the other color laser brands. Brother truly has a winner on its hand with the MFC-9840CDW!!! Thank you Brother….I LOVE IT!
July 24th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Review by Julien Pierre for Brother MFC-9840CDW Color Laser Multifunction Center with Wireless Interface and Duplex
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I just got this machine to replace two others a month ago in my home office – an HP inkjet all-in-one 6310xi, and a Brother laser printer HL-1870n.
This new unit is superior in just about every way.
The print quality is much higher than on the HP. In B&W it is similar to the old brother laser.
The print speed is out of this world, especially for color. The inkjet could take minutes per page for letter-size photo prints. This one doesn’t seem to take any longer than for other prints, amazingly ! This is no doubt thanks to its 128 MB of memory. I was thinking about upgrading the RAM, but there just isn’t any need to do that at all !
Copies are also spectacular, just as fast as any photocopier. The HP all-in-one could take several minutes per page in the highest quality in color, and typically at least a minute even for high-quality black & white. And of course the quality is much better.
Scanning speed is also great. It is really measured in pages per minute, not minutes per page.
The ADF duplex scanning is invaluable.
The bundled software (Paperport) is also very reliable and far superior to the bloated crap that came with the HP.
Despite its size, this unit actually saves office space compared to having two separate inkjet color and black & white laser units.
Photo prints are very good. I have noticed some yellowing compared to the inkjet prints. But I am confident it’s possible to adjust this in software and make the photo prints just as good as the inkjet. I just haven’t had time to fiddle with it yet.
The unit is not perfect, but nearly so. There are a couple things that I wish were improved :
- The ADF is limited to A4/letter size. For legal size documents, you must use the glass scanner. This is my biggest regret about the machine. If I could I would give 4.99 stars because of it instead of 5.
- It weighs 85 lbs, actually 115 lbs with all the packaging. With the packaging, it was too large to fit through my stairs. I had to remove it all first. And if I didn’t have a roommate, I would not have been able to bring it to the 2nd floor. I wish there was a printer with all these features at less than 50 lbs packaged. Or perhaps Brother could deliver it in 2 separate parts to assembler (let’s say, printer unit and scanner unit) in 2 smaller boxes, so one person alone could move it and set it up.
- It doesn’t work with glossy inkjet photo paper. That paper just melts and half the sheets come out pink. I had to sell all my Costco photo paper with the HP inkjet, and buy new special laser photo paper (HP branded) that worked great. I wish I had known about this requirement before the purchase.
July 24th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Review by K. Franklin for Brother MFC-9840CDW Color Laser Multifunction Center with Wireless Interface and Duplex
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My wife is an em elementary school teacher, and she gets limited numbers of copies for each term. She also has a great deal of worksheets and other papers that take up a lot of room and make finding a particular worksheet very hard. We came up with a plan: All of her documents would be scanned into a PDF with management software, and she would be able to make copies for her classroom when she ran out at work. We wanted a color laser printer with network scanning and duplexing and had looked at all the different solutions but were bummed to find that many of the scanners only supported printing from Apple computers and not scanning to them. Some had the options to scan to e-mail, but the documentation on these features were very limited.
After looking around at an HP model and a Canon model we decided to look at what Brother had to offer. We were pleased when we saw the specs and features on this model. The best feature was its Mac support which was very extensive. In fact, this was the only model in our search that had equal support for both Mac computers and Windows computers.
I found that the software on the Mac and its Windows counterparts were written fairly well. On the Macs that run 10.5 we had to get an updated TWAIN driver for scanner control, but that was the only small issue we had. You can walk up to the scanner, scan to the computer in the other room over WiFi or even save a scan to your Flash drive by plugging it directly into the front. It is very handy. The scan quality was on par with what I expected. I wouldn’t use it for high-end photo scanning, but an occasional family picture scan here or there, especially for web distribution will be just fine with it.
The print quality was also very nice. Even on cheaper paper the colors were vibrant and not splotchy at all. Text was crisp and print times were more than acceptable. I was getting about 20ppm both in color and black and white once the unit was warmed up. Slightly slower than the 21ppm claim, but the pages were also more than 5% covered which is likely where they get that number.
Faxing is somewhat convoluted compared to other all-in-one devices. After a few blank test faxes though, the steps were easy enough to remember and it does a superb job for those occasional fax jobs that we require.
Pros:
*Great Mac and Windows Support
*Software is easy to use and works well
*Scanning quality is very high
*Many scanning options including direct to flash drive
*Great color printing
*Great B&W printing
*Wireless networking is very nice and works reasonably well
*Toner reasonably priced
*Real duplexing for scanning and printing
Cons:
*Faxing function is slightly convoluted
*Scan to email doesn’t seem to work with Gmail or Google Apps domains and the required authentication schemes
*Software and drivers don’t appear to be downloadable from Brother’s website, so hold onto those CDs that come with it
*All networking functions are off by default
*Some features lack thorough documentation and require a certain level of trial and error mixed with technical skill to complete successfully
*Color scanning can be slightly time consuming, especially over the wireless network to a computer
Overall thoughts:
Overall this printer was worth every penny. Hundreds cheaper than similar models, and it provides great Mac support. For simple printing from a Mac, no software or drivers needed to be installed. The software was only for scanning and other advanced features. My wife has scanned in hundreds of pages already. I must say, I truly love this printer.
July 24th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
Review by Stefan Brunner for Brother MFC-9840CDW Color Laser Multifunction Center with Wireless Interface and Duplex
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So many good things were already said. I just want to add a few things I learned while using the product over the last few months:
- Only one job can happen at the same time. While you print you cannot scan or fax no matter how much memory you have.
- Reviews often state that the printer has only medium color printing quality. The printer is great but the PCL driver is not. Use the Postscript driver instead, which is a little bit slower, and you get results, which I would say are similar to HP. The difference is amazing.
- Scanning works perfectly. I use it to do editing on print-outs and then scan it in, and send it back to the publisher. I also use it to archive hardcopy documents. It is very fast with 400 DPI b/w scanning. The feeder pulls the paper sometimes not totally straight.
- You can use standard notebook memory to increase memory. It eats old 100 Mhz SO-DIMM in up to 512MB size.
- It takes a while to warm-up. Both when printing and scanning. It makes the light flicker when it warms up. It works well on a shared 15A circuit so.
- I love the iFAX feature. I can send a fax, have the printer convert it to a TIFF, and send it directly out via a SMTP server without needing a extra computer. I use for sending stuff to an Oracle ERP archiving system. (It can also convert to PDF.)
- It also can scan and send a document to FTP or via the Control Center to a PC or save to local USB flash. You can remote control the functions of the printer via pre-sets on the Control Center app.
- It faxes and copies in b/w and color. Quality of copies is good and very fast when you use the document feeder. It appears to be faster then the small copy machines at my local copy shop.
- I love that the printer both has a duplex document feeder and can also prints duplex (or scans, faxs, copies duplex).
- Consumables are more expensive than for instance in a HP laser printer. However, the purchasing price of the Brother is unbeatable.
Bottom line is that this product is as good as it gets in a multi-functional printer. After using it for a couple of months I am asking myself how I ever could have lived with out it. No more trips to the copy shop and savings for express mail.
July 24th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Review by Bruce Bacon for Brother MFC-9840CDW Color Laser Multifunction Center with Wireless Interface and Duplex
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These seem to be great machines – when they work. Unfortunately, ours doesn’t. The machine generates random vertical streaks of yellow and cyan across printed pages. Solid colors are often printed as blotchy and uneven. Brother tech support has acknowledged that they are having these type of problems with this particular model. We’ve tried changing print cartridges (twice) and the problem still exists.
It’s now been 6 weeks since we first reported the problem and still no resolution from Brother. Escalations have been met with promises of call backs followed by silence. Emails to support go unanswered. It appears that Brother products and support are hits and misses. In this particular case, all misses.
July 24th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Review by Robert Anthony Reis for HP CP2025N Color LaserJet Printer
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I bought several Epson ink jet printers over the last few years. 80% of the time I was just printing black text, hardly any pictures. Clogged nozzles and high costs for the ink made me move to a LaserJet printer. All was well and then the wife said I could upgrade and go to a color printer.
I bought the printer, connected to my 24″ iMac directly by USB. I did not install the driver included on the CD but I was still able to add it as a printer. My test print worked fine.
I them moved the printer to my Time Capsule and set it up there. Again, my test print worked fine. Now my ball and chain can also print to the printer from her MacBook.
I will never go back to an ink jet printer. The print quality is good.
My one issue with this printer is that I have not been able to set up some kind of draft setting so that I could save ink. If I do, I will update the review.
July 24th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
Review by Sherri for HP CP2025N Color LaserJet Printer
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Everything about the printer is good, except the ink cartridges are expensive and it doesn’t come with full cartridges. After about 600 copies the machine says I need to purchase another black cartridge. A full cartridge should print 3x that amount.
July 24th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Review by B. Baker for HP CP2025N Color LaserJet Printer
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02/13/2010 Update: Turned power off. Uninstalled the printer. Pulled out the toner tray and pulled each toner catridge out and reseated.
I had ordered an HP e520t a few months back and had hard drive failure errors until I pulled and reconnected all hdd power plugs…everything has rocked since then. Possibly same issue here I thought. It seems that components get jostled around during shipping and need reconnecting/reseating. Always a good idea to pull and reconnect as much as possible when a shipped pc or peripheral is received.
Powered back up and during install I let windows automatically download the drivers for this printer (PCL 6). Did not install the PCL or PS drivers from HP’s website. Calibrated via the onboard display menu. Printed first page and the output was as expected. Very nice, crisp, text and graphics. No more blurry colors. Exactly what I was hoping for. I am very pleased.
My thoughts now are that it wasn’t so much the drivers, but that the color toner cartidges (black was printing very crisp during the problem) were not seated properly so it affected alignment or output in some way, causing blur.
****Rating is now 4 stars, versus the previous 1 star, since HP has had enough time to release Windows 7 64 bit compatible full featured software, but hasn’t. HP says it will be forthcoming in the very near future.
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Previous post:
Be very careful if you’re thinking about buying this printer and are running Windows 7. You can throw the included software away and expect to download universal ps or pcl print drivers (generic) from HP’s website. This is problematic for soooo many reasons. After 4 hours of “tweaking” various settings and making some improvement, I still come up with fuzzy, blurry, text and graphics. I’ve talked to HP CS and read just about every printer forum know to man. Forget it. I wouldn’t dare attempt to print anything professional with this thing to send to clients. It will collect dust until HP gets its act together and releases the software and drivers meant for this printer.
July 24th, 2010 at 5:02 pm
Review by L. Lambert for HP CP2025N Color LaserJet Printer
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I love this printer. I have it wired to my home network, and we print to it from four different computers. Between my work, my spouse’s work, and our children’s homework, this printer is running constantly. It gives great prints every time. You have to accept the fact that the printing process generates heat and tends to make each page curl as it prints, but that is easily fixed by bending the prints backward after they come off the printer. Be sure you use only genuine HP print cartriges. They last a lot longer and I have not had good print quality with the cheaper “compatible” cartridges.
July 24th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
Review by Motor Head for HP CP2025N Color LaserJet Printer
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I bought this printer about a year ago upon the recommendation of my local IT support company; they also installed it as a stand alone printer with my Toshiba laptop which has Windows XP. After having dealt with inkjet printers and their cartridges I wanted something more robust and simple to use, hence color laserjet printer
Positive points :
- it works without any problems and has not jammed yet
- Black and white print quality is excellent, color is okay, but for photos it’s
not anywhere near as good as a good inkjet printer, such as Canon, will do
- Speed is okay, but not particularly fast
Negative points :
- Toner consumption is relatively high, and toners cartridges are very expensive
- HP Customer Service consists of trying to sell you additional items; they can’t
even answer a question about their HP photo paper availability, and they don’t
have an organized listing of all HP paper formats/qualities
- Be aware that you should NOT use photo paper designed for inkjet printers; it
will likely melt due to the intense heat of the fuser ! This forces you to buy
genuine HP photo paper. This is not even mentioned in the user manual
- HP ToolboxFX which is supposed to help you maintain your printer never worked
correctly on my laptop. Again, no support is available on HP’s website how to
make this work
- User manual discusses actual print tasks on only 4 pages (out of 154 total
pages) : not very comprehensive
- Duplex printing can be done, but is not explained in detail
It is sad to see that reputable companies, such as HP, have such poor customer service that seems designed to sell you things, not solve customers’ problems with a specific product. Yes, HP offers all sorts of free on-line general classes about computers and printers, but very little SPECIFIC product support that is easily accessible