The Brother MFC-8860DN is basically suited for a small/medium business or workgroup who are lookinf for an all-in-one printer. The MFC-8860DN features two sided (duplexed) printing, copying, scanning, and faxing.
Having a mulit-function printer can be really useful, been able to scan to your PC as well as scan to e-mail, automatically launching a message in your e-mail program and adding the scan as an attachment can be just perfect for any small business.
The MFC-8860DN also has the ability to function as a digital copier and supports reduction and enlargement of documents from 25 to 400 percent in one percent increments.
In General the graphics and photo quality are both within the typical range for a monochrome laser. The color scanner function comes bundled with document management and OCR software.
* Print Technology B/W Laser Technology
* Max. Black Print Speed (ppm) 30ppm Black
* Print Resolution Up to 1200×1200 dpi
Just got a new MFC-8860DN. Copying and printing are great; double-sided is nice; Mac OS support is good. I plan to scan/archive tons of paper and was disappointed with the slow scan speed. (I wish these companies would advertise scan speed.) I tried all kinds of combinations of USB, ethernet, file formats, etc. USB is generally faster than ethernet but doesn’t have the network access convenience. A 300 dpi scan transfers over 100-base ethernet at a paltry 104 KB/s for some obscure reason and this really stretches the overall scan time with the larger file formats (scanning to PDF actually transfers a large file to the computer where the PDF conversion happens). Brother Tech support doesn’t acknowledge any problem, which is surprising considering that this unit is designed for an office environment.
I eventually found a combination that provides tolerable scanning speed. Use Scan to FTP, PDF format. The physical scan is faster, the PDF conversion takes place on the machine (smaller file to transfer) and network transfer is faster (192 KB/s).
Comment by GP — October 21, 2006 @ 3:48 am