9 out of 9 people found this review helpful.
Good unit and good value for the price
Date of Review: Feb 6, 2009
The Bottom Line: A great device that has a small foot-print, is full-featured and does all of them well - and all at a very affordable price. Bottom line: Great device/Great value.
Found the MFC-7840w at Newegg during one of their promotions. I would recommend including them in your search for the best price on this device as often times they have the lowest price when they put it on sale.
Setup took a little longer than say a simple printer. But silly me, I followed the step-by-step instructions, and low and behold, it worked the first time I tried to print and scan.
FYI - the MAC address is the same as the Node name minus the prefix BRW. The device did not auto detect my SSID on my Linksys Router. Once I manually put in my SSID, and pressed okay, about 5 seconds later it said "Connected." So don't assume that it will automatically find your SSID and connect - odds are it probably won't and you'll have to enter the SSID manually. No biggy - just be aware of it.
Contrary to other reviews, this unit will do duplex, albeit what is called "manual duplex." This means your print out the odd pages first, and then, a printer dialog box tells you how to put the pages back in the paper tray so that it will now print out the even numbered pages. I found this to be a reasonable workaround withut having a physical duplexer unit inside the printer.
The copier feature is really fast and makes excellent copies. Scanning tends to be slower, but the quality is very good. It defaults to PDF format. However, with the Paperport software you can then drag and drop it into any of the program icons at the bottom for whichever application suits you (i.e. printing, faxing, OCR, graphics, etc).
If you decide to use the FTP function, do not try to use Microsoft's FTP Server and IIS. I spent 2 1/2 hours trying to get it to work - and I'm an I.T. professional! Instead go out on the internet and get a program called Home FTP server (it's free) and can be found at: http://downstairs.dnsalias.net/homeftpserver.html It took me under 10 minutes to download, install, and start scanning to FTP with this little progam.
If you decide to use the toner save feature and 300 dpi for your print setting, be prepared to have a fairly light printout. It's readable, but really fails when trying to print items on say web pages that are shaded. The toner save/300 dpi is more for people who simple like to print out e-mails and read them on paper instead of on the screen. I would recommend turning toner saver off, and put it at 600 dpi and you'll get more than satisfactory printouts for important documents (i.e. correspondence you'd send out when applying for a job).
It is truly a great multi-function device for the price. I'm not saying it's perfect, but for most people you will find it to be an outstanding value and a good choice for Home/Home Office use.
