Category: Printers and Scanners

Introduction

I am reviewing the Brother PT-P910BT Bluetooth label printer that uses USB-C or Bluetooth host-device connectivity to print out labels using Brother’s TZe family of label tapes. This means it doesn’t use your home network for this purpose, rather it uses local peripheral connectivity approaches.

The Brother PT-P910BT Bluetooth label printer

The Brother PT-P910BT Bluetooth label printer is similar to the PT-P710BT label printer that I have previously reviewed. Here, these devices work on an USB power or a user-replaceable battery pack installed within the unit. They talk to the host computing device via a USB or Bluetooth connection working in a similar vein to a direct-connected printer.

They are dependent on Brother’s P-Touch software for regular Windows or Mac computers or the iPrint&Label for iOS and Android mobile-platform devices. As well, the use Brother’s TZe cartridge-based direct-thermal tape platform.

This can use the 36mm TZe label tapes that are wider

But the similarities stop here. The PT-P910BT which is finished in white is capable of working with TZe label cartridges that use 36mm-wide tape in addition to the narrower label tapes. That is compared to the PT-P710BT using label tapes with a maximum width of 24mm. Even if it appears to be thicker to accommodate wider tape, the Brother PT-P910BT label printer can be laid flat or be stood upright.

Uses a USB-C socket for data connectivity or power charging

The PT-P710BT label printer used a USB micro-B port as the equipment-side connection. But the PT-P910BT label printer implements the USB-C port as the equipment-side connector and is furnished with a USB-C to USB-A cable so you can connect it to regular computers or USB chargers using the traditional USB-A fitting.

Here, it has become the first Brother label printer that I have had for review that uses a USB-C connection for charging or wired connection to host computing devices.

Setup

Setting the Brother PT-P910BT label printer up with a mobile-platform device was simple. Here, you held down the power switch until the light flashed to make the printer discoverable by the mobile device, then you had to use iOS or Android to pair the printer to your smartphone or tablet.

This can connect directly to your USB-C-equipped Android smartphone using a USB-C cable. You have to select USB as the connection type on iPrint&Scan in this case.

After that, I had to make sure that Brother’s iPrint&Label Android software was downloaded from Google’s Play Store and installed on my Android smartphone. I also tried connecting the Brother PT-P910BT Bluetooth label printer to my Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus Android smartphone using a USB-C to USB-C cable and used the same iPrint&Label app to make a label using this connection. This was feasible once I tapped on the device name and then selected USB as the connection type to use within the same app.

For your Windows computer, you had to download then install the Brother P-Touch software, with an installation step having you connect the printer to your computer via USB. The Bluetooth setup process became awkward at some point because the Brother software invoked Windows and failed to discover even when the printer was in Bluetooth-discovery mode and the computer could “hunt” for Bluetooth devices.

Use

Once set up, the Brother PT-P910BT Bluetooth label printer was able to turn out labels very quickly and clearly. It

But it still works as a Bluetooth labeller

didn’t matter whether were working with the P-Touch Editor on Windows or iPrint&Label on Android.

The printer can work with two Bluetooth-connected host devices concurrently but you will need to wait until it has finished printing before you can submit your label job from the other device.

The single light can be very confusing when it comes to knowing whether the unit is on an active Bluetooth connection or not, or if there is enough power in the battery. There is a second light near the USB socket to indicate whether it is charging or not. Personally, I would like to see a steady blue light glow during a Bluetooth connection and flash while it is in discoverable (pairing) mode as a way to make Bluetooth setup easier.

Limitations and Points of improvement

The Windows driver software needs to adopt a simplified setup approach that is agnostic of whether the device is connected to the host computer via USB or Bluetooth. It could allow you to install all the software then begin the Bluetooth pair-up process using the Find New Device option in Windows 10’s Settings menu.

As well, it will also be of concern for those of us who switch between USB wired and Bluetooth wireless connectivity on a whim. This may be to allow a user who forgot to charge the Brother P-Touch Bluetooth label printer up before doing a labelling run to connect to the host computer via USB for that job with that computer powering the labeller. This is even though the user uses Bluetooth as a preferred connection for their setup.

Brother could also set a good example for USB-C peripheral devices like labellers by fully implementing USB Power Delivery for charging or powering these devices. This could allow for fast-charging using ordinary USB PD hardware, like what is being expected for Android phones.

Conclusion – Is it a tool or toy?

This is an example of Brother offering an incremental update for a P-Touch labelling product and offering it as an updated variant that works with the largest of the TZe tape sizes. Again, this Brother PT-P910BT labeller comes across as a tool especially when you are wanting to do any labelling “on the go” while you are using

It is more about taking an incremental approach to improving and updating products rather than taking a radical new design approach. But the Brother PT-P910BT underscores the idea of using your smartphone or tablet and its Bluetooth connectivity or USB connectivity in the case of recent Android USB-C-equipped smartphones to turn out labels.

Introduction

I am reviewing the Brother DSMobile DS-940DW Wi-Fi mobile scanner which is a highly-portable pure-play document scanner pitched towards the mobile office.

This battery-powered mobile scanner can scan to a regular computer via a USB connection or via a Wi-Fi link , whether you are using the one it creates or an existing small or home Wi-Fi network. As well, you can use it to scan documents to your iOS or Android mobile device using a Wi-Fi link, either one it creates or an extant small network.

As well, you can use it offline to scan documents to a removable microSD card so you can then download them as files to your computer at a later stage. In this case, you can remove the card and install it in your computer’s SD card reader to get at your documents or while you have the scanner connected to your regular computer you see that SD card as a removable storage device with all your scanned documents.

Photo – Insert high-resolution photo of product INLINE

Price

Scanner

Recommended Retail Price: AUD$299

The scanner itself

Two scan heads allow the Brother DS-940DW Wi-Fi mobile scanner to scan both sides of a page simultaneously/
The clamshell design makes it easy to remove jammed paper.

The Brother DSMobile DS-940DW Wi-Fi mobile scanner is powered from an internal rechargeable battery or an external USB-based power supply which you have to provide. That could be through your computer, a USB charger or a USB powerbank. But the same USB power supply also charges the battery whether you are running the scanner or not.

Connectivity and Setup

The Brother DS-940DW mobile scanner has an easy-to-find slider switch on the right-hand side that selects between SD card operation, direct USB connection and Wi-Fi network connection. This makes it easier for the user to switch between the mode appropriate to their scanning needs, be it to scan to their laptop via USB or to their mobile device via Wi-Fi or simply to scan to the installed SD card.

Direct connection

You connect the scanner to the host computer or a power supply using a USB 3.0 or USB-C cable with a USB 3.0 microB plug on it

If you intend to use the Brother DS-940DW scanner with your regular computer via USB, you connect it to the host computer using a USB 3.0 cable supplied with the scanner.

But if your computer is equipped only with USB-C connectors like some new Ultrabooks or you use a USB-C charger to power your scanner, you would need to purchase a USB Type-C to  USB 3.0 microB cable (OfficeWorks Australia, Office Depot USA, B&H Photo Video USA,Walmart, Amazon) rather than use the supplied USB Type-A cable.

microSD card slot for offline scanning to microSD cards

In this case, if you did use the scanner offline and scanned documents to an SD card installed within the machine, the SD card will be presented to your computer’s operating system as another logical storage volume. This is similar to what happens when you are using a USB memory stick or an SD card reader.

Wi-Fi network connection

It is easy to change between WI-Fi, dirrect or offline scanning at the flick of a switch

The scanner can be connected to the computer via a USB cable or via a Wi-Fi network, whether one that it creates or an existing small network. But setting it up to work with an existing Wi-Fi network requires you to work it as its own Wi-Fi access point then log in to a specified Web page which has a “Wireless Setup Wizard” to associate it with the existing network. You can use WPS-based push-button or PIN setup if your access point or router supports these methods. For this function, there is a hardware button located on the side of the scanner near the operation mode switch.

I am identifying the issue of having this mobile scanner on an existing small Wi-Fi network due to the idea of setting up these mobile devices as part of a mobile network where there are more than two devices to be on that network. It is in addition to having this same device work as part of your home or small-business network.

Control panel with buttons to start scanning, determine whether to scan in colour or black and white or scan both sides of the page. Another button allows you to determine whether the scanned results are to be a JPEG image file or a PDF document file

When the Brother DSMobile DS-940DW mobile scanner is connected to the host computer via USB, it exposes a Mass Storage device class for the internal microSD card reader. This is in conjunction to vendor-specific devices that depend on the host computer running a Brother-supplied driver and scan-monitor software.

There is a default arrangement that if you enable Wi-Fi mode on the scanner, it will check for previously-configured networks before it goes to own-access-point mode which is indicated by a steady Wi-Fi light. Successful connection to a previously-configured network is simply identified by a steady Wi-Fi light after a bit of flashing.

Software installation

If you are setting the Brother DS-940DW mobile scanner to work with your regular computer, you would need to install the drivers from the Brother support Website for this machine to work. You will also be supplied with the Brother iPront&Scan software which can do most of the essential scanning tasks.

Brother throws in complementary software like a business-card scanning app so you can scan your pile of customers’ or business partners’ business cards in to a contact-management database. This is software you can install when you download the driver and software package or install at a later date.

Mobile users will need to install the Brother iPrint&Scan app from their mobile platform’s app store. Here, they will need to use this simple software to scan the documents in to their device and “take them further” as they see fit.

Document Handling

Scanning a standard A4 or letter document page

The Brother DSMobile DS-940DW can only handle one page at at time but can scan both sides of that page at once. The double-sided scanning approach is similar to some of Brother’s multifunction printers that use single-pass duplex scanning.

When you scan a document, you need to make sure that the black paper guide is lined up against the original document’s edge before you start the scanning process. Here, you are making sure that the document isn’t skewing or likely to jam.

To deal with paper jams, you press the front of the scanner above the document-feed slot in order to expose the scanning heads to remove the misfed original. Here, the “clamshell approach” makes it easier to rectify any paper jams.

Ready to scan an ID card of standard “credit-card” thickness and with embossing – it can.

The Brother DS-940DW was able to scan ID cards, even those with embossed characters properly. I would see this as being important where users have to scan them to prove a customer’s identity during an “on-the-road” transaction.

Walk-up functions

The Brother DS-940DW has a built-in SDHC-compliant microSD card drive so you can scan documents offline to a microSD card. This is presented to the host computer as a standard USB Mass Storage Device and you use your operating system’s file manager to get at your scanned files which exist on that SD card.

I wouldn’t really expect this to work properly with the idea of showing your scanned photos through a smart TV or similar device that has its own USB port. It is because most of these dedicated-purpose devices don’t do a good job at handling multiple-function devices connected to their USB ports thanks to their firmware not supporting USB hubs as a device class.

Computer functions

I have used the scanner with the Brother iPrint&Scan software and found that it is competent as a basic scanning package whether to store the scan to your computer’s file system or to an online storage service.

At the moment, the Brother iPrint&Scan desktop scanning software works on a “pull-scan” approach where you have to start the scanning job from the software rather than a “push-scan” approach pressing the machine’s START/STOP button to initiate the scan job. This is due to the scan monitor software associated with the machine and providing this functionality not installing properly. I have addressed this issue previously on this site due to various scan-monitor programs taking time to respond properly when you start a scan job on the printer or scanner, with the idea of operating systems undertaking this role.

The Brother DSMobile DS-940DW network mobile scanner works with the Brother iPrint&Scan mobile app available on both the Apple and Google app stores. Here, it worked properly where you can simply save the scan to your mobile device or share it with other apps that handle the supported file types using the “share to” shortcut that iOS and Android provide.

Scan speed and quality

The machine can scan the pages you feed through it quickly and yields a high-quality reproduction of these pages. I had tried it with an ordinary A4 document, a snapshot photo, two till receipts and two ID cards and this was proven for each of them. With the photo, there wasn’t any difference with the colour saturation that was yielded.

If you are scanning till receipts with the scanner, it is a good idea to set the machine or your scanning software to scan the receipt single-sided. This will avoid problems with reverse-side text that may “come through” during the scan which may be a problem with receipts coming from devices that are loaded with “branded” paper that has advertising material printed on the back.

Limitations And Points Of Improvement

A key issue that I found with the Brother DS-940DW mobile scanner was a poor user experience when I enrolled it with an existing Wi-Fi home network from my smartphone. This could be improved upon through having a native mobile platform app for configuring this scanner’s network connectivity. It can include the ability to transfer a network’s connection details that are stored in your mobile device to the scanner as part of configuring that device.

For those of us who use a regular computer and the scanner’s Web user experience for configuring it to work with an existing Wi-Fi network, that user experience could be improved with an indicator that highlights successful connection to that network. As well, a hardware switch could be used to toggle between the scanner’s own network and an existing network, which may come in handy for troubleshooting or if you don’t want to use an existing network that you set up the scanner for.

It could also benefit from the full set of USB 3.1 specifications including the Type-C connection and USB Power Delivery for quick charging. Most likely I would see Brother offer this connection in a newer portable printing devices as the USB Type-C connection becomes the norm for portable computer equipment.

I also see the Brother DSMobile DS-940DW network mobile scanner being an ideal device to implement Mopria Scan driver-free scanning technology (Mopria Alliance press release PDF) which is currently implemented as an app for Android devices.

As well, it could support a transparency-scanning mode that capitalises on the single-pass auto-duplex scan method. Here, one of the scanning heads could simply be a white backlight while the other simply reads the image on the film. This would come in to its own with a wide range of applications like photographers with their negatives and slides, the medical profession with their film-based X-rays or businesses who have archived documents using microfilm and similar technologies.

Conclusion and Placement Notes

I do see the Brother DSMobile DS-940DW network mobile scanner as an agile highly portable pure-play document scanner that can answer many different needs. Here, it works well with anyone whose office is the driver’s seat of a car or the back of a van and can even answer the requirements to use mobile-platform devices as one’s primary workplace technology.

It is easy to consider a mobile scanner, especially a network-capable machine, to be a toy but I do see the Brother DSMobile DS-940DW mobile scanner as a tool. This is more so for mobile workers who need to scan receipts for work transactions incurred while travelling or to scan documents such as work authorisations and customer ID at the customer’s premises.

The fact that you can switch between scanning to an SD card, a USB-connected host or a Wi-Fi-connected host using a hardware switch makes the job of selecting the right mode for the job easier. For example, a mobile professional could switch the scanner over to “scan-to-card” mode and scan the fuel receipt to an SD card installed in the unit and serving as a “digital receipt shoebox”. Then they scan that work authorisation that their customer had signed when they visited and use the Wi-Fi link with their iPad running an email app to send the signed authorisation to their office.

Introduction

I am reviewing the Brother MFC-J5730DW multifunction colour inkjet printer which is part of Brother’s newest generation of colour business inkjet printers that follows on from the MFC-J5720DW that I previously reviewed.

There is a cheaper model in this lineup, known as the MFC-J5330DW that has a single A4/A3 tray, a paper bypass feed that only handles one sheet, doesn’t come with the single-pass duplex scan, and has a smaller user-interface screen But this printer uses the same high-capacity ink cartridges and is able to print to A3 using that same landscape-printing technique.

Prices

Printer

Recommended Retail Price: AUD$369

Inks and Toners

The printer itself

Control panel with touchscreen and traditional keyboard

Unlike the Brother MFC-J5720DW, the Brother MFC-J5730 doesn’t convey the sleek looks that make printers of this class attractive. Here, the unit is styled in a more conventional approach that is very similar to Brother’s laser multifunction printers with the control panel keyboard that you use for entering numbers very similar to most other office-grade printers. This may be more user-friendly for those of us who are confused with touch-panel keyboards that light up on an “as-required” basis.

Connectivity and Setup

The printer can connect directly to your computer via a USB cable. But it can connect to your home or small business network using Ethernet or Wi-Fi wireless that supports most connection setups. It can even create its own Wi-Fi access point which just exists for printing and scanning, but I personally would like to see the ability to be its own access point to “extend” coverage of a wireless network with this feature able to be disabled by management IT along with supporting “business” access point requirements. The network functionality is future-proof in that it supports IPv6 addressing, a real requirement as we run out of public IPv4 network addresses.

Black-on-white detailed function display

Like all of the recent Brother inkjet printer generations, the cables for the USB or Ethernet connections is snaked in under the scanner rather than being connected to a socket on the back of the printer. The same holds true for the phone and line connections that you would need to use if this machine is being used as a fax.

The setup experience is very similar to the previous Brother printers but this is improved thanks to the larger LCD display that the printer is equipped with. Some of you may find that the black-on-white display which is implemented in this generation of printers  may be a bit awkward to use when working the menus.

Paper Handling

The Brother MFC-J5730DW implements the same paper-feed options as its predecessor model that is: to use two paper drawers up front as well as a bypass feed slot on the back of the printer capable of handling many sheets of paper. These drawers can be extended out so you can load A3 or Ledger paper in the machine, but they leave the paper exposed, which can cause it to attract dust, thus leading to unreliable operation. Here, Brother could answer this problem by integrating a larger slide-out flap in each of these trays which comes out whenever you load the tray with larger paper sizes.

Output shelf separate from the upper paper tray

Printed documents end up on a separate output shelf rather than one that is integrated in one of the paper drawers. This makes the job of topping up the paper supply in that drawer easier because you are not having to extend or collapse the output shelf.

The ability for the Brother MFC-J5730DW multifunction inkjet printer to print to A3 or Ledger paper from either the bypass feed or any of the paper trays. This has been due to Brother implementing the “landscape” paper feed for the standard document sizes. This means that the print head works along the long edge of the paper and has allowed for documents to be printed very quickly while allowing for a relatively-compact printer design.

The scanner’s automatic document feeder doesn’t share that same compact look as the previous generation of A4 business inkjet printers that Brother issued. Here, it looks like the automatic document feeder installed on Brother’s “full-A3” inkjet multifunction printers or their laser/LED-based multifunction printers. The other missing feature for this model is that the glass platen for manual scanning is still only able to handle A4 or Letter document sizes, where I would prefer these units to have a Legal-sized glass platen for documents that are on Legal or foolscap paper sizes.

The automatic document feeder in this model implements single-pass duplex scanning but the paper path is still the “U-shaped” path which can be of concern when you are dealing with brittle paper like thin letter-writing paper. Here, it is a design limitation associated with scanners that are required to support manual and sheet-fed scanning, but could be improved upon by supporting a “two-way” feed setup.

Like with the previous models, the scanner lid on the Brother MFC-J5730DW can be pulled up at the rear so you can scan or copy thicker documents but I would like to see this improved upon by allowing you to lay the multipurpose feed tray flat so you can easily position thicker originals further up the back.

Walk-up functions

The Brother MFC-J5730DW only supports USB-connected media like USB thumbdrives or SD card readers for local data storage. This can be a limitation if you deal frequently with digital photos, where I would like to see it support PictBridge “direct-from-camera” printing or printing from SD and CompactFlash cards.

You also have the Brother MFC-J5730DW able to work as a capable up-to-date colour fax machine with T.37-compliant email-based Internet fax functionality.

This includes the fact that Brother MFC-J5730DW offers a “fax-to-cloud” feature for standard faxes where incoming documents can be forwarded to a folder on an online storage service as soon as they arrive. This offers an Internet-based “fax-vault” functionality so that the machine isn’t printing out every fax that comes in, making it easy for others who have access to your office like contract cleaners or night-shift workers to be snooping on your confidential incoming faxes when you are not there. This is also in conjunction to being able to have faxes forwarded to a fax number or email address or sent to your regular Windows computer, functions that Brother had offered for handling incoming faxes.

Speaking of cloud services, Brother offers access to the common online services for scanning and printing. This means that you could print a photo from Facebook, a document from Dropbox or scan a document to OneDrive for you to work with on your laptop.  The cloud services also include the ability to print notepaper, graph paper, music manuscript paper and similar form documents, a feature that competing printer vendors have been offering for a while. But these documents can be improved upon such as simply providing the music paper without any clef markings so you could write manuscript for different instruments and ensembles.

Computer functions

At the moment, Brother still supplies model-specific drivers for their printers rather than offering a monolithic driver that can cover a product range. This applies to the desktop operating systems although they offer a single piece of software for the mobile operating systems. A single piece of software that covers one or more product ranges could make it easier for those of us who standardise on a particular manufacturer’s devices to set a computer up for newer printers.

But these drivers installed properly on my Windows 10 computer without throwing any error messages. They also provide the same “at-a-glance” dashboard that Brother uses for their printers. The print jobs had come through properly and reliably as would be expected.

The scan software that Brother provides hasn’t been improved upon for a long time and could be worked on, especially in the context of “editing” multiple-page scans. Here, it could support the ability to do things like re-scanning a single page so as to correct scanning mistakes like skewed pages or “splitting” a scan job to two or more documents. The latter situation may be of benefit if you are using the machine’s automatic document feeder to expedite the scanning of multiple documents and would earn its keep with the Brother MFC-J5730 and other machines equipped with a single-pass duplex scanner.

I have used this printer with my Android phone and it worked properly when I wanted it to print out an email attachment. This was using the Brother-supplied Android Print Services plug-in for the Android platform, but the printer can work with Mopria-compliant print-service plug-ins.

Print / scan speed and quality

Like most inkjet printers, the Brother took a similar amount of time to get going with the first page of the print job.

Pigment-based inks and pipe-based ink-distribution are part of this generation of Brother inkjet printers

But I have focused the print-quality tests in a way to show up the print quality offered by the new pigment-based ink setup that Brother implemented in this generation of inkjet printers compared to the previous generation machines. Here, this generation of business inkjet printers integrates the pipe-based ink-flow system, piezo-based printhead design and the pigment-based ink chemistry in to equipment designed to offer value for money at a price most people and businesses can consider.

As well, I have allowed for a firmware update to take place to assess the print quality for these newer machines.

The Brother MFC-J5730DW multifunction printer was able to turn out regular office documents very clearly and there wasn’t much difference in the quality of these standard print jobs.

But when it comes to presentation-grade printing, be it a poster to put up on that noticeboard, a presentation handout to give to your attendees or a photo to put in your album, this is where the real tests show up. This also applies to those of us who use these printers to turn out inkjet proofs of documents we intend to have printed by someone else before we engage the printing service to have them printed.

You may have to use the “vivid” setting in the printer driver to make sure that presentation-grade work doesn’t look dull, as I have tried with a noticeboard “tear-off” poster to promote this Website.

But I have compared output quality for photo printing against the MFC-J5720DW which represents Brother’s previous generation of printers. Here, the photos came across with slightly more saturated with flesh tones coming across slightly more red compared to the previous model. This is a very similar look to what comes across with magazines or with most TV broadcasts where there is that stronger colour effect.

What is happening is that Brother is pushing their business inkjet printers towards the same standard as the HP OfficeJet 8600a which was a printer of this class that was known for sharp vibrant presentation-grade image quality.

As for scanning and copying, the Brother MFC-J5730DW had yielded a clear sharp image for the documents that were scanned. But it needed to be configured for the standard A4 paper size when you set up the scan software for working with most office documents if you are in Europe, Asia, Oceania and other areas where these sizes are normally used. This was because it was set up by default for the US Letter paper size, normally used in North America.

Brother hasn’t yet rectified a problem that I find with copying or scanning from the glass platen. This is where the document edge is clipped by a few millimetres and can affect jobs where you deal with documents are printed “to the edge” like credit and ID cards or news clippings, but you want to align the document against the platen’s edge to avoid skewing.

Limitations And Points Of Improvement

Brother could equip this printer with a Legal-size scan platen rather than the standard A4 / Letter platen. Here, it could cater towards situations where you are dealing with documents written on Legal-size or foolscap-size notepads which can be a reality when you are digitally archiving very old material. As well, they could support “to-the-edge” scanning so that documents that are placed against the edge of the glass aren’t clipped.

Brother could make better use of the network connection on these printers so people can benefit from these connections especially where there is on-premises network-storage options available to that network. This is more so for small businesses and community organisations who may prefer to use a small desktop network-attached-storage system or file server in addition or in lieu of an online service for this purpose.

For example, they could provide a walk-up print option that allows you to print documents that exist in a folder shared via your network or an Internet location using SMB, FTP or HTTP protocols using the machine’s LCD control panel. This feature could allow an organisation to create a “document library” or “stationery library” shared using an on-site server or NAS that has documents or pro-forma stationery which can be printed as required. This idea can extend to public Websites or organisation-specific intranet sites that host a collection of “download-to-print” resources.

These “print from network” setups could be configured through the printer’s Web-based admin dashboard or through the printer’s control panel. There could be the ability to remember resource-specific passwords for network shares or Web pages that are protected with passwords or require the user to supply them each time they print documents from these resources while allowing for SSL encryption where applicable. Here, it avoids the need just to rely on Dropbox & co to provide these resources.

To the same extent, the Brother “MFC-series” fax-capable multifunction printers could use a network-shared folder to hold incoming or outgoing faxes for later printing or sending. Here, this can capitalise on the idea of a “fax-vault” used to assure confidentiality when it comes to inbound documents, or to allow an organisation who does a lot of overseas business to hold the overseas faxes to be delivered to the partners according to their “local morning” time.

Similarly, Brother could support PictBridge camera-based digital printing for their business printers. This is where you can print pictures from your digital camera using a suitably-equipped printer just by connecting the camera to that printer and using the camera’s control surface to print the pictures. Such a feature can come in very handy if you need to turn out “proof-quality” prints of the photos you had taken in order to show them to others.

Brother can also use some of the neat-looking design aspects from the previous generation of business inkjet multifunction printers along with the new print-engine design to develop a range of consumer-focused A4/Photo inkjet multifunction printers that use the same consumables as these business printers. Here, these machines could be positioned as a secondary printer for the home network or as an entry-level printer for one’s home-computing setup.

Similarly, they could offer a single-function A3/Ledger printer based on these printer designs to allow people to add large-sheet printing to their document-handling needs without having to replace their existing A4 multifunction that has served them well.

Conclusion and Placement Notes

Brother has just about achieved its goal in yielding a business inkjet printer that can excel with presentation printing as well as regular office-document printing tasks. This was more important for me where the goal was to see something answer HP’s well-known OfficeJet 8600 series of business inkjet printers when it comes to this task. As well, I placed importance on this feature with these printers due to the fact that the Brother MFC-J5730DW and its peers can print on A3 or Ledger paper, a size that yields very strongly with presentation-grade printing jobs.

What the printer manufacturers need to do is to keep themselves interested in maintaining their business inkjet printer lineup as something that is about high-quality presentation-grade printing especially on A3 paper as well as turning out ordinary office documents. It can encourage everyone else in the small-business desktop printer game to compete against each other when it comes to presentation-level output quality as well as their equipment’s functionality. What it can lead to is companies like HP, Brother, Epson, Canon and others to keep a viable product class for machines that can satisfy small-businesses’ and community organisations’ small-run printing needs without losing the quality aspect.

Here, I would recommend the use of the Brother MFC-J5730DW as an all-round small-run workhorse printer for a home office or other small office. This is more so if you expect to doe a significant amount of A3 printing such as to place posters on that noticeboard. You may be able to get away with saving money and buying the cheaper MFC-J5330DW if you rarely do A3 print jobs or don’t place value on double-sided scanning.

Previously, I reviewed the Brother PDS-6000 sheet-fed document scanner which scans both sides of a document at once very quickly. This model connects directly to a host computer and would work with most document-management software. Now Brother have released the ADS-2800W which is a network-capable sheet-fed document scanner that allows you to direct a scanning job to a computer or a file server / NAS, and this is the machine that I am reviewing now.

RRP AUD$899

There are some more expensive variants of this network document scanner that can scan at higher speeds but I am reviewing the entry-level model.

The scanner itself

Setup

Single-pass document scan, easy to service if anything goes wrong

Brother have avoided the tendency to create a separate setup regime for the ADS-2800W network document scanner, which will be a bonus if you have stuck with this brand for your multifunction printer. Here, the software interface both at the scanner and at the computer are very similar and you can even use the ControlCenter 4 software to process your documents.

Wi-Fi connectivity

It was simple to connect this scanner to the home network although I used the Ethernet connection which is what I would prefer for normally-sessile devices. Here, it can be connected to a Wi-Fi wireless network segment or a wired Ethernet network segment (which also works with a HomePlug network segment) with the former network type working properly if nearer the wireless router. Personally, I would recommend that you use the wired network (Ethernet or HomePlug) at your home or office as I would recommend for sessile equipment.

Walk-up and mobile operation

It scans directly to Dropbox

There is the ability to use a Web-based interface to set the Brother ADS-2800W network scanner to be able to scan to a computer, file server or NAS without the need to run a scan monitor on that computer. Here, the unit deposits the files to a known directory on the destination device in a predetermined form. As well, it can be set up to “scan and send” where it can send a document via SMTP-based email.

It also exploits the Brother Web Connect infrastructure to allow you to enrol it with Evernote, OneDrive, Dropbox, Facebook and other online services so you can use them as a destination for your scanned documents. You can also scan documents and images to your mobile device as long as you run the Brother iPrint&Scan mobile app, which is how I scanned some snapshots to be destined to Dropbox. An improvement I would like to have would be to see the scanned picture appear on the scanner’s screen so you can have the picture or document the correct way up.

Computer-based operation

The fact that this scanner makes use of Brother’s ControlCenter 4 software and uses the same scan monitor if you are running a Brother MFC alongside it means that you are not having to install extra software on your computer. When I ran the CD to install the drivers because I had issues with the Website, the installer detected the existence of the driver software associated with Brother printers and effectively updated the scan monitor to work with this scanner.

I even had the software set up so that blank pages were skipped even though the Brother scanner scanned both sides of the document when I was handling regular documents. This allowed for a single-side document to be worked on yet be ready to scan double-sided documents when dealing with “print-sign-scan-send” documents.

Scanning results

The Brother ADS-2800W network document scanner, like its stablemate the PDS-6000 implements a straight-through document feed which makes the scanning job quick but is kind to the documents because there is no curved path involved.

A job that I have been putting the Brother ADS-2800W network document scanner to over the past week is to scan a collection of snapshots due to the passing of someone whom I knew well. Here, I had set the Brother scanner to scan at the normal-for-35mm-snapshots “10x15cm” size with a resolution of 600dpi and fed the minilab prints in vertically. The document scanner had turned out the high-quality images while it was able to handle small batches of prints at a time like as though I was handling a multiple-page document. But I would like to see a “photo-optimised” scanning profile that copes with the glossy snapshots and works at a high resolution. As well, there could be the ability to determine whether a photo has a landscape or portrait orientation.

I had found that a bit of dust had ruined a scan of a photo and it was a cinch to remove that bit of dust from the scan head simply by opening up the scanner so I can see the scan heads. Then I was able to blow off the dust from the scan heads.

When I scanned a regular “print-sign-scan-send” document, the Brother ADS-2800W scanner made light work of this job and turned out the right number of pages based on what was marked. This avoided the creation of a 2-page PDF for a document that was written on one side only.

Limitations and points of improvement

A feature that would benefit the Brother sheet-fed document scanners, especially the network-capable units, would be to have functionality that gains the best out of photo scanning. This could be in the form of a “photo-optimised” high-resolution scan mode for scanning snapshots and / or a transparent-media scan mode with negative conversion for scanning film strips such as negatives.

Conclusion

I would recommend the Brother ADS-2800W network sheet-fed document scanner as a network-focused high-speed document-scanning solution especially if you want a high-speed dedicated-purpose scanner that can work independent of a regular computer.

For example, this could work well if you destine documents to the like of Evernote or Dropbox or to a NAS. Similarly, if you are wanting to get that hard copy document to be able to be viewed on something like an iPad, the Brother ADS-2800W and its peers can do the job properly.

But these devices would earn their keep if you scan many documents rather than the occasional few documents that have few pages and I would see it perform well with most businesses including tax agents who scan the receipts that are part of their clients’ “shoeboxes”.

Article

This slide scanner can scan 10 of the old memories at a time to an SD card

Diascanner: Negative und Dias digitalisieren | Netzwelt.de (German language / Deutsche Sprache)

From the horse’s mouth

Rollei

DF-S 290 HD Product Page

My Comments

Those of us who lived through the 1950s to the 1970s often dealt with 35mm photo slides being par for the course for family photography. This was most often through people keeping large collections of these slides or sitting through many evenings where it was time to drag out the slide projector and show these slides on a screen. It was infact the kind of activity that tended to take place once someone came back from a long trip overseas.

These people valued the slides as a photographic medium because they were compact and you could either show them to many using that projector or view them personally using a handheld viewer.

A fast-track path for your old photographic memories to end up on that DLNA-capable NAS

There have been some unsatisfactory attempts to get these slides along with 35mm negatives on to a computer form. This typically involved a very expensive process of sending the pictures out to a digitizing service who would scan them to a CD or you were dealing with a scanning device that would turn out low-resolution images of these pictures and allow you to handle up to five of them at a time.

Rollei have raised the game with this class of device by selling a range of standalone slide / film scanners that had a 10-slide “continuous-feed” tray as standard. Here you could place 10 slides in this tray and work a lever to feed each slide through the machine once you scan them using the machine’s control surface.

Here, you could scan the slides stored in one of those classic yellow Kodachrome slide trays with very little fuss and is an improvement on similar scanner devices and multifunction printers that have transparency-scanning abilities because you don’t have to place slides in to a carrier like ducks in a row. It can also be of benefit to those of us who have limited dexterity, something that will come about as we get older.

Where do the images end up? They end up on an SD card that you provide and you transfer this card to your laptop to download the images. There is the ability to correct exposure or colour balance using the Rolei slide scanners’ controls, along with the ability to correct slides or negatives that were put in the scanner the wrong way. Some of you may find these options superfluous if you use software on your computer like iPhoto or Windows Live Photo Gallery to adjust the picture quality as part of using your computer to add metadata to your image scans. But this can come in handy if the goal is to have those memories appear on an electronic picture frame or similar device, or simply to “dump” them to a DLNA-capable NAS to be available on your home network or a Dropbox folder that you share with your family .

As well, the Rollei DF-S 290 also has an HDMI connection so you can use your large-screen TV or computer monitor as a preview screen or as a playback screen for showing those slides.

Of course, there is still a gap in the marketplace for certain “off-the-film” image-scanning jobs.

One of these is handling large slide collections that are stored in slide-projector magazines like the Kodak Carousel. This is because most of the scanners that support these magazine systems tend to fetch premium prices and are typically designed to work as peripherals for computer systems.

Another gap is being able to reliably scan film that isn’t held in a carrier that is supplied with a film scanner. This is of annoyance for people who deal with long flimstrips such as slide film that is “strip-processed” or negatives that you developed in the darkroom but didn’t cut in to the standard strips.

Yet another gap is being able to handle film formats other than the common 35mm film. In the consumer space, these surface as the 110 or 126 “Instamatic” cartridge films whereas in the hobbyist and professional space, these surface as the 120 or 220 “medium-format” roll films. It also is true for people who use equipment that uses variants of the 35mm film format like half-frame or panorama cameras.

Here, a scanner design could answer these needs through the use of optical zoom or digital zoom with a high-resolution imaging device. As well, for “on-device” editing, there could be the ability to crop to various aspect ratios supported by these films or stitch together panorama images taken by multi-frame panorama cameras.

At least someone is taking a proactive step towards providing affordable equipment for scanning those large slide collections and making them available to view on our home networks.

This is an updated version of the article I had published in February 2012

Most small organisations such as micro-businesses and other small businesses will place an expectation on desktop-style computer printers to be used as an “organisational short-run printing press”.

HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 Series – a desktop multifunction printer that has been pitched as something that can turn out flyers and brochures

This expectation has been brought around through the availability of software with varying levels of desktop-publishing functionality at prices most people and small business can afford. This ranges from software in a typical office-software package offering elementary desktop publishing functionality like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, through to dedicated mid-tier desktop publishing software of the Microsoft Publisher class that is at a price most people can afford and is easy to understand.

The same expectation has been underscored by the various printer manufacturers with their recent desktop-printer designs, especially with the high-end business models of their product range like HP’s OfficeJet Pro lineup. Here, they are bringing printing abilities, output speeds and document quality associated with workgroup-grade freestanding printers to this class of printer with such examples as Brother offering business-grade desktop inkjet multifunctions that can turn out A3 documents.

It has been underscored in the advertising that these printer manufacturers provide and is more evident with Websites and, especially, TV commercials that are run on prime-time TV which reaches most consumers more easily. Examples include a recent Canon TV commercial for their PIXMA printers, HP’s website for their OfficeJet Pro inkjet printers highlighting their prowess with turning out brochures, or Brother underscoring their business printers’ prowess with desktop publishing through a series of TV commercials.

What features does it need to have?

High-yield printing

The printer should have separate colour ink cartridges and be able to accept high-yield cartridges

It should be feasible for customers to purchase high-yield ink or toner cartridges as an option for the printer alongside the standard-yield cartridges. Some vendors like Brother are known to offer “super-high-yield” cartridges for some of their printers alongside the high-yield and standard-yield cartridges. This is more important for inkjet machines because the ink cartridges are typically very small and aren’t able to hold a lot of ink.

It is worth noting that most of the equipment pitched at business users like the HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 will typically have the larger-capacity ink or toner cartridges even for their standard-yield variants and have a higher duty cycle therefore being able to do this kind of work.

Another direction that high-yield ink or toner supply is taking is in the form of tank-equipped printers instantiated by the Epson EcoTank approach. Here, the printers are equipped with high-capacity tanks and the user manually adds ink to these printers’ tanks to replenish them. Brother even uses the tank approach with very high-capacity cartridges in order to combine the best of both worlds and simplify how you manage your printer.

As well, you should prefer to use an inkjet printer that uses individually-replaceable ink tanks for each colour. These printers also become more cost-effective to run because you only need to replace the colours that you run out of when you run out of them.

The print mechanism has to be able to support large print runs without failing mid-job. This includes having it perform advanced printing functionalities like auto-duplex or use of anciliary trays. It also has to work reliably with jobs that are based around media other than regular paper.

Automatic duplexing

This brings me to automatic duplexing. An increasing number of home-office printers and small-business printers are being equipped with an automatic duplex mechanism so that the unit can print on both sides of the paper. This is usually to permit you to save paper but people may find this function useful for turning out booklets, brochures, greeting cards and the like where they want to print on both sides of the paper. For that matter, most of these printers have a “booklet printing” function built in to their driver software where they can use the duplex functionality to turn out booklets such as a four-page booklet on one sheet of paper. Similarly, automatic duplexing may come in handy for making flyers and signage that is to be seen on both sides such as a sign that is fixed to a window, or a sign used in a freestanding sign holder.

A Brother desktop printer that can print on A3 paper

A common problem with some of these mechanisms is that they don’t print to the narrow edge of Letter or A4 paper during a duplex print run especially if the paper size determined in the driver software or print job doesn’t match the paper in the printer. The problem has been more so with most Hewlett-Packard inkjet printers except the OfficeJet Pro 8600, which was pitched as a brochure-printing machine. This can cause problems with registration shifting or a requirement to have large margins on the document. Some Canon printers such as the PIXMA MX-870 have improved automatic duplex mechanisms that can work to the edge of the paper.

In the same case, you may find that some automatic duplexers in the home or small-business printer class may have problems with page registration. That is where the page is lined up properly on both sides of the paper and can be of concern if you are turning out work like luggage tags, door hangers or bookmarks where it is critical to have the back of the document lined up with the front of the document. You can work around this by allowing a margin on both sides of the design.

Another problem is that there is a time penalty of up to 15 seconds per page with inkjet printers when they use automatic duplexing with this happening when the front side of the document is being printed. This is to allow the ink to dry on the front side of the paper before the printer draws the paper in to print on the back and is being reduced with newer equipment that uses quick-drying ink. As well, the automatic duplexing cycle is even being optimised to slowly retract the document in to the printer after the first side is printed so the printer can start the other side sooner.

Another limitation that I have found with automatic duplexers is that they don’t handle card stock or similar paper easily because they have to turn the paper around one or more rollers. Here, you may have to use manual duplexing where you reinsert the work in the machine with the other side facing the print head to print it double-sided.

Something yet to be seen for automatic duplexing in the context of desktop publishing and presentation-grade printing is the availability of coated paper that is coated on both sides of the sheet alongside duplexer mechanisms that can handle such paper.

Issues concerning use of the printer

Special printing media requirements

Plastic-based media

Plastic-based media like overhead-projector transparencies, back-print film and vinyl stickers / decals have special requirements when it comes to printing them on your printer.

They range from being able to “hold” ink that is sprayed on to them by the inkjet process or passing through a heat-based printing process such as the xerographic process used in laser and LED printers.

Laser printers and special media

Brother HL-L8350CDW colour laser printer

If you use a laser printer, you need to use laser-optimised media for plastic-based media and stickers. This is because the printed documents have to pass through “fuser rollers” that are heated at a very high temperature in order to melt the toner on to the media. This can be a problem with the adhesive and plastic backing associated with stickers or the plastic media melting inside the machine and causing damage that is costly in both money and serviceability terms.

It also can extend to glossy or silk-look “presentation / brochure” paper which uses some form of glazing to provide the sheen, and this can cause problems with different printers.

So you have to use special media that is designed for laser-printer or xerographic photocopier use. This media is designed to work at very high temperatures so it can pass through the hot fuser rollers without damaging the printer.  Some of the media that is made by particular printer manufacturers is designed for the printers made by that manufacturer and, in some cases, printers based on a certain print-engine type. This is due to the manufacturer knowing the operating temperature for the printers in question.

But there are some kinds of special media that is made by third parties and pitched at a range of printers offered by many different manufacturers. Some of these also may be available under the private labels that different stationers and office-supply stores use. For example, Avery make a large range of laser labels that are compatible with most laser printers that are in circulation nowadays.

Inkjet-compliant plastic media

To get best results out of inkjet printers with plastic media, you have to use inkjet-optimised plastic media that has a rough surface on the printed side. This is to catch the droplets left by the inkjet printer as part of its printing process and avoid the ink smearing over the medium as it passes through the printer or is handled by the user.

As well, you will need to set the printer’s driver software to work with “overhead transparencies” or “back print film” when you print to plastic media. This is to allow the printer to optimise its printing process for the media such as slowing the print-head action so as to make sure the ink ends up properly on the medium.

When you load the media, you have to make sure that the rough “printing” side faces the print head as it feeds through the printer. This may be harder to understand with Hewlett-Packard and Brother printers because they use a U-shaped paper-feed path and eject the printed document above the paper storage trays. Here, you would have to put the media in with the rough side facing down when loading the printer.

Card stock, art board and similarly-thick media

“Manual-bypass” special media tray in a colour laser printer

Another medium that may prove itself to be difficult for desktop printers is art board, card stock and similarly-thick papers. Most of these papers can cause problems with printers that implement any paper path that has a U-turn in it like most desktop printers.

Here, you may have to use a “straight-through” paper path on them for these papers to work properly and use manual duplexing if you are printing on both sides. Most inkjet multifunction printers have a rear-mounted multifunction tray where you load this paper while laser printers will require you to use a “manual bypass” tray or slot at the front as the loading tray and have a drop-down door at the rear as the output tray.

Increasingly, budget and some midrange printers will have a limit on the number of sheets of paper that you can load through this way with some of them even requiring you to load one sheet at a time in to the printer.  This can be an inconvenience to you if you are turning out multiple copies of the same document.

Use your printer or outsource your printing for that print run

HP LaserJet Pro 400 Series colour laser printer

The main question that a lot of users will end up asking will be whether to have the print runs made by an outside printing house or print the documents with their printer. Some of you may prefer to outsource your printing rather than use your printer especially with public-facing documents like brochures and flyers. This is because the print shop that you use has better equipment than what you would have and it is increasingly true of large office-supply chains like Office Depot, Officeworks or Staples who provide on-site printing and copying facilities.

I have talked with two men who pastor churches with medium-sized congregations about this issue through the time I was reviewing the Brother MFC-J5720DW desktop inkjet multifunction printer. This is a class of user who could be tempted to use one of these printers to turn out flyers and tracts as a way to make the offering dollar go further. One of these men, who happens to be my pastor, raised the issue of output quality from outsourced work versus work turned out on one of these printers and remarked that the outsourced work is of much better quality. The other pastor raised the fact that these printers wouldn’t work well for turning out large print runs like what would be expected for promoting an upcoming special event at the church.

Brother MFC-J6720DW A3 desktop inkjet multifunction printer

One factor to consider is how many copies you will be eventually needing for your design. If you are turning out up to 20 to 40 copies of your design at a time, you can get by with using your machine. If you end up running more than that, you would need to outsource your printing. This is because of the cost of ink and paper involved in the large print runs, the costs associated with the wear and tear on your machine and the time it takes to run the large print jobs on the typical home-office or small-business printer. This last factor will be of importance with fax-enabled printers serving as fax machines that have to be ready to receive faxes or printers that are required to turn out hard copy as part of business processes.

Another factor worth considering is how often your design is likely to change. This also includes situations where you want to adopt a “print-as-needed” policy such as to run a small-enough quantity of flyers for an appearance like a house inspection. If the design is likely to change frequently or be suited to an occasion, you may have to use your printer for the short runs or outsource larger runs to a print shop that supports quick-turnaround printing such as a copy shop that relies on inkjet or xerographic technology or a printing house that uses digital presses.

Examples of this may include a café, restaurant or bar turning out menus or drinks lists that are centred around particular food and drink specials, a church or funeral home turning out an order-of-service for a particular occasion or an estate agent or auctioneer running flyers about the property that they are auctionning to hand out to customers.

Other factors worth considering include the printing cost per copy if you are intending to use a premium paper stock like coated paper, glossy paper or art board when you are wanting that special look for your public-facing documents.It also includes using finished-document page sizes and forms that are out of the ordinary document-paper sizes like A4 or Letter.  Here, you may have to factor in any extra handling that you our your staff may have to do for manual duplexing or cutting to small sizes.

It is worth knowing that your machine would keep its worth in the equation as part of the design-approval process before you commit to having them printed. This is where you would be turning out proofs so you are sure they are what you want them to be; or to turn out short “test-runs” to assess the effectiveness of a design.

Your printer can also complement the print shop you use for outsourced printing by being able to provide short supplementary print runs of the final document on request. Here, you may want to:

• do a preview run which you would give to special customers or partners while the main print run is being turned out;
• turn out a short “infill run” of the documents when you find that you have run short of copies and you don’t want to commit to another large print run due to cost or turnaround-time reasons; or
• want to keep some copies on hand and ready to distribute so you can get your campaign off the ground without waiting for the printing to be finished especially if you find that your print job has been delayed for some reason.

Conclusion

Here, small businesses can consider the use of a desktop printer as the “small-business printing press” if they know what their machine is capable of and they are using the right media for the job. This includes whether to work it hard on a large print job or assign the job to the local print shop.

Updates:

7 February 2020: This document has been updated to cater for the high-capacity tank-based inkjet printers that are now on the market.

Introduction

I am reviewing the Brother HL-L8350CDW colour laser printer which is similar in capability to the HL-4150CDN and HL-4570CDW colour laser printers. This is the kind of printer one would consider as being useful for high-throughput printing of presentations and marketing collateral for a small business i.e. the organisational “short-run” printing press. The classic example of this would be a real-estate agent or auctioneer who has to turn out flyers that describe the property or goods that are for sale to hand to prospective purchasers when the property or auction lot is available for inspection. Or a church or funeral home could use these printers to bring colour in to those “order-of-service” cards or other similar short-run printing jobs.

There is a cheaper variant of this printer, known as the Brother HL-L8250CDN. This has a slower output speed and only has Ethernet as its network connection but is fast enough for most colour printing applications.

Prices

Printer

Recommended Retail Price:

HL-L8250CDN: AUD$399

HL-L8350CDW: AUD$499

Optional Extras:

High-capacity paper tray: AUD$249

Inks and Toners

Servicing and Other Parts (Laser Printers)

The printer itself

Setup

The Brother HL-L8350CDW printer is apparently easy to set up or prepare for transport compared to previous-generation Brother colour laser printers. Here, there isn’t a need to remove catches and other pieces to prepare the HL-J8350CDW for use. There isn’t also a need to prepare the printer’s print engine for transport such as installing special fittings if the machine needs to be transported.

Toner cartridges and drum unit as a drawer

Like the Brother HL-4150CDN, the HL-L8350CDW has the drum unit working effectively as a “drawer” when you have to change toners, which would make this process a lot more easier. As well, like all of the Brother printers or multi-function units that implement laser or LED xerographic technology, these use a print engine with running parts like the imaging drum and/or transfer belt that the user can separately replace, along with the option to purchase toner cartridges that have a higher yield. These features allow for the printers to be effectively cheap to keep going.

It is capable of being setup for an Ethernet of Wi-Fi wireless network or even supporting Wi-Fi Direct so you can print directly from your mobile device without the need for the printer to be connected to a network. But the Wi-FI Direct function cannot be operated at the same time as the printer being connected to your network.

There is the ability to set these printers up for advanced print jobs such as working with envelopes or thicker media. This is through a drop-down “manual-bypass” tray that accommodates up to 50 sheets of the media along with the back of the printer being able to be dropped down for “straight-path” printing of envelopes. This ability places the Brother HL-L8350CDW and its peers along with the higher-capacity monochrome laser printers at an advantage compared with cheaper Brother printers for working wiht special media.

Walk-up functions

USB socket for plugging in USB flash drives

You can print PDF or similar files from a USB memory stick by plugging it in to a USB port on the front of the unit. One disadvantage here is that it is slower to turn out a 2-sided PDF print job which may come as a limitation when you want to turn out that flyer where the artwork is on a memory stick.

It is also worth knowing that the USB port can serve as a “walk-up” charging port for your smartphone or similar devices. The manual doesn’t seem to support this but I haven’t had error messages thrown up as a result of my charging of gadgets this way. This function even operates when the printer is in the “Sleep” mode or in active use. It doesn’t work this way in the “Deep Sleep” mode.

Computer functions

Control panel

An issue with a lot of Brother printers is that they make one driver package for each model even though most or all models of a series have common abilities and features.  This can cause problems with installation especially over the network. Other than that, the software installation worked smoothly.

For printing, it took only a few seconds for the printer to “wake up” and turn out the first page of a job once you submitted it. This was from its “sleep” state. As for heat build-up, there wasn’t much of that during a small print run but it starts to occur through larger print runs say, for example, after 20 double-side pages are turned out. As well, the noise level is similar to what is expected for most laser printers and photocopiers.

The on-machine user interface is similar to the HL4150CDN’s user interface, which has the small LCD display and four-way arrow keys. This doesn’t have the ability to show up how much toner is currently available or provide an easy-to-implement “confidential-print” or “walk-up” printing function.

Print speed and quality

Multi-page special-media tray

The text and graphics documents came out of the Brother HL-L8350CDW very sharply and clearly. This was exemplified with a personal “desktop-publishing” job that I had run as well as other print jobs that I had done with this machine.

The automatic duplex functionality came across as being very quick for jobs that were sent from the host computer. It was something that was very similar to what had happened with the Brother HL-4150CDN where it apparently worked both sides of two pages at the same time. This didn’t cause problems with registration shift, which could make it work well for turning out bookmarks and similar documents or proofing documents that are to be printed on card-stock by a print shop.

As for photos, these came through sharp and vibrant, which is above average for a colour laser printer. Here, I was able to see bright reds in the test images which also came through very brightly and with good contrast. This would increase the Brother HL-L8350CDW’s appeal to people like estate agents who need to turn out a run of flyers to have on hand during an “open-for-inspection” visit.

Build quality and serviceability

The Brother HL-L8350CDW is built very well and, as I have mentioned before, hasn’t had issues with heat buildup or excessive noise. This has been through use of proper cool-down procedures. As well, all the doors and drawers snapped shut properly and didn’t come across as being flimsy.

For serviceability, the rear door exposes most of the output print path so you can remove jammed pages easily. The fact that the drum unit is separately replaceable makes it easier to reach inside the unit if you had to deal with paper jams inside the unit. This makes the job of rectifying most printer paper-transport problems less of a chore.

Limitations and Points Of Improvement

The Brother HL-L8350CDW could show the amount of toner available in the unit on the LCD display so you don’t have to operate a computer to know when it’s time to put a replacement toner cartridge on the shopping list. This could simply be shown as a bar graph and not only when the supply is critically low.

The USB device port on these machines could be implemented for more than just walk-up printing from USB flash drives. For example, this port could support PictBridge printing from digital cameras so you could obtain a quick printout of a digital photo you took with your camera. As well, it could use the USB Human Interface Device class to work with an external numeric keypad for applications such as Secure Print or whenever you are setting it up with a wireless network. It then avoids the need to “pick and choose” numbers for code entry.

A nice-to-have feature that the machine’s owner could separately enable would be a “plug-and-charge” function that is available at all times the printer is plugged in to AC power rather than when it is active or in “sleep” mode. Here, this means that the USB port could provide 1 amp or 2.1 amps of power available irrespective of sleep-mode status so you can charge up a smartphone, tablet or similar gadget from the printer’s USB port. It is one of those features that is becoming more important as the USB port is seen as a universal power outlet for personal gadgets.

Brother could improve on the automatic duplexer in these printers to improve its throughput so that the “sheet output” approaches that of half of the machine’s rated single-sided throughput. This is although these machines do excel on that feature by effectively “working” two sheets at once. It would then raise the bar with those of us who are using this feature as part of our desktop-publishing needs. Similarly, these laser-printer automatic duplexers could be worked further to handle A5 and similar small sizes of paper for those of us who expect them to work as “short-run” printing presses.

As for replaceable parts, Brother could offer for these colour laser printers a “heavy-duty” replacement-parts kit with a drum unit and belt unit that are optimised to handle longer more-intense print runs as an option. This could appeal to small businesses and non-profit organisations who are more likely to run these machines constantly as the organisational short-run printing press.

Conclusion and Placement Notes

I would recommend the Brother HL-L8350CDW as a cost-effective high-volume colour laser printer for those of us who turn out a lot of colour business or presentation documents and place value on the laser xerographic print method for this application. Those of us who are on a budget could opt for the HL-L8250CDN which has a slower throughput and just uses Ethernet network connectivity.

As well, I would run these printers with the TN-346 series of toner cartridges when you are expecting to push them hard on a lot of promotional printout work. Most users can run them with the TN-341 cartridges when on a budget or even use a TN-346K black cartridge along with the TN-341 colour cartridges as a way of stretching your dollar further.