Brother MFC-7860DW

Great budget Black and White Toner Duplex Printer – I've had this printer for years and it hasn't disappointed me yet. It prints duplex and the software that it comes with is great to adjust the DPI of prints so you can print thousand of pages in one toner. The toner price itself is very budget oriented as well when you know where to buy it from. I love how you can customise the quick buttons on the machine so when I use the scanner, it sends it to a folder I've set it to in my computer.

Connectivity wise, it's fantastic! It has USB, LAN and wireless connectivity so I pretty much can put this thing anywhere in the house.

It has fax as well which I haven't used but great addition. (why do people still use fax I will never know).

Only qualm with this is that the manual feeding tray between the paper drawer and the output doesn't have an extendable function so you have to hold the paper until it "eats" it.

Poorly made – The feeding tray for scanning and copying documents often eats multiple pages at one time, and will scan the document wonky (at an angle) so doesn't look straight in PDF form, also the bypass tray to enter in sheets other than from the standard paper tray prints wonky as well! Really irritating.

Fabulous, the duplex and wireless printing and scanning a great advance over earlier models – Bought my Brother MFC-7860DW from Centrecom on Jun 30 2011 so it became tax deductible for last financial year. Then had to wait a few days for it to arrive. Paid around $329. This 7860DW replaced an earlier Brother MFC-7420 which was starting to play up with paper feeds, etc. The 7420 had done quite a bit of work. The 786ODW is miles ahead of the earlier models. Being wireless all our computers can print to it, it duplexes and you can scan to any of the computers once the Brother software is loaded onto them. Before the 7860DW arrived we had a couple USB Canon scanners. But with the 7860DW on the job these have been retired.

When scanning you can quickly set the file and the file name where the scanned image will go. There's a choice of how many DPI, colour or black white, normal or duplex. If you have a heap of pages to scan, you can put say 15 in the scanner so it auto feeds. If there are another 15 after this, simply select "continue" do the same again, select finish and it's done.

This is a very good MFC. It's made our office work more fun, more efficient. It's intuitive and setting the file name and folder destination first rather than the other way around just seems so much better.

At just over $300 this is a no brainer. The introductory cartridge is good for about 700 pages. The warning light on our machine came on at about 370 pages. A lot of these had been duplexed. Ignoring the warning we finished up getting about 680 pages before finally the machine wouldn't print. This is how Brothers are made. Replacement toner cartridges are about $120 from Dick Smith and Officeworks. I found an Ebay store in Adelaide and got genuine ones posted to Melbourne for about $93.

Years ago I can remember paying nearly $1500 for a Mitsubishi thermal fax and then about the same for a HP 3100 MFC. These Brothers are like the Hyundais of the printer world. They are functional, reasonably priced and do the job. The 7860DW has been a great step forward on the earlier model.

Recommended! Intuitive to use, wireless, duplexing and a great remote scanning function. Well priced