Brother MFC-5100c Multifunction

Rating:
Summary: Amazing product
Review: I love this machine. I have had no problems and all and it makes amazing quality copies. I highly recommend this machine.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding all in one machine
Review: You get everything you need in this product. If you do not have a copier, get this flatbed design. Good and sharp resolution on the scanner and printer.

Rating:
Summary: Ok for a while
Review: I had this machine for 2 years. It worked fine, ink cartridges went quickly though. It's on it's 2 year anniversary and the head is broken. It costs $300 to replace. Out with this and in with a new one. I will buy extra warranty on my next one.

Rating:
Summary: Agree with the sentiment - big piece of crap
Review: bought this unit for my 76 year old mother. What a piece of crap this thing turned out to be 1 year down the road. Printer stops printing magnetta, despite three different cartridges being tried. Cleaned the heads etc. Additionally, their printer drivers are the worst I've ever seen. They utilize 100% CPU through some sort of polling mechanism and cause excessive disk thrashing too. STAY AWAY !

Rating:
Summary: ERROR 41 !! - Real Piece of Junk !!
Review: Look at all of the reviews below - Error 41 - I have had 2 in the last 9 months - each time the units are replaced by brother with units that have been refurbished (Probably error 41).

Unless you have more time on your hands then you need and reliability is not an issue, get something else. For all of us that have already been ripped off - someday a class action suit must be in the cards !

Rating:
Summary: Never, EVER, buy anything from Brother
Review: I bought 2 Brother printers in the last year for my office, a 5100c and 5200c multifunction respectively. Neither one of them made it more that 9 months before the dreaded Error 41 occured. These are not the only model printers from brother that experience this god awful problem. While, as an IT guy, I could never recommend an HP computer for anything other than a paper weight, I can easily say it would be a very good idea to purchace an HP printer over a Brother anything on any given day of the week. Avoid these products like the plague, unless you enjoy wasting money on flawed product that will need to be replaced sooner rather than later. If i had the option, i would give this NO stars at all.

Rating:
Summary: Loud, jams and ERROR 41 problems.
Review: I bought this printer in 8/03 because I liked the flatbed/feed feature and the separate ink cartridges. The salesperson warned me that Brother machines were known to have frequent paper feed problems. I crossed my fingers and flashed the plastic. The scanner works great and the print quality is okay. The machine is quite noisy printing. Turned out that all the ink cartridges tended to run out about the same time -- so much for convenience. Paper jams became more of a problem the longer I owned the unit. Recently one color no longer would print regardless of how many times I cleaned the head. Now I have an ERROR 41 message requiring me to bring the unit in for repair. Brother C/S was very nice (after a 15 min. wait to talk to a rep) and immediately offered to have the unit repaired gratis. I'm shopping for a new printer.

Rating:
Summary: what a piece of junk brother mfc 4820
Review: I cant believe how bad this printer is. My husband purchased it off of QVC (our first and probably only purchse there) late Dec 03. In two months the ink was not coming through the clear plastic tubes. This printer has hardly been used, it only gets used fot my high school daughter's school work and occasional use by the rest of the family. I would guess that we have only printed 500 pages and now we have an error 41 which means replace print heads for $125. I wouldn't spend 1.25 to replace something on this dissapointing office machine. Next time my husband and I will do research before buying another printer. The one we donated to charity still worked fine after 5 years.(just had less features) It was an HP deskjet product. I think we will check into HP products again. BUYER BEWARE OF BROTHER MULTIFUNTION CENTER MFC4820

Rating:
Summary: Don't Buy One of These... Run Away Fast
Review: We've owned this machine for two years now. It has never worked well. The feeder for the fax seems as if it is a bit too small and paper jams all the time. The problem is that it doesn't stop trying to pull it through, instead it totally eats and ruins your document. The paper holder in the back always jams. I'd say 1 in 10 times it works without a paper jam. (Not to mention it makes the most annoying loud beep when it jams, which seems like all the time.) It often sucks in too many pages, like 20 too many. The print quality was good for the first month and quickly declined. It seems the heads clog constantly. It uses a lot of ink and takes a long time to clean them. Then it still doesn't look better. Despite changing inks and cleaning heads, I still can't print color pictures and have the colors be close to the right look. Let's see... what else... the inks are fairly expensive and tend to run out rather quickly.
Now my machine has an "error 41" which is another way to say "toss me out now". After doing much research it seems this machine gets this error standardly around 14 months of age. (A class action suit is being looked into for this problem) It seems to be that the print head needs to be replaced. I've tried cleaning mine and resetting the machine as some techs have suggested, but it won't work still. The new head costs from $150-300. So, it's time to toss the machine. If your considering this machine... bad idea.

Rating:
Summary: Bittersweet
Review: Well I thought I really must add my 10 cents worth here. We purchased our machine in Dec 03, now July 04 we are on our 4th machine due to issues with the various original and replacement machines. Initially machine works great, OK print quality, cheap ink replacement, sheet feeder works great, scanner OK. We just use for general stuff nothing fancy or photos. Letters and customer invoices, probably around 150-200 pages a week. 2 months working fine, then suddenly I get an error 'machine error 41" and message to call Brother. We are a computer repair, so are quit familiar with the usual printer/computer issues, done all the usual stuff with no avail. Called Brother, yes just like other comments all our dealings with them the techs are very nice. Well machine was replaced, quickly (48hrs) with another refub, Seems to print OK 2 weeks later, find scanner not working correctly, faxing full black pages to clients, printing full black pages hers. Back to tech support, same deal very nice replaced printer. This one scans OK, but is jamming on more than one sheet of paper in the feeder. Managed to clear that up after a few hours finding little cloth threads etc in the rollers. But the sheet feeder can only use one at a time, multiple pages feed through 2 or three at a time. Not a big deal don't use it very often so can live with it. Since my initial error the local Brother repair tech tells me the error 41 is pretty common and means the print heads need replacing. Well here we are replacement machine worked great for 3 months, now we are back around top error 41 again. I like this machine but would never recommend to anybody now. Reliability is very, very low. We ran a HP 720c for over 5 years, wore the poor thing out alomost (it is still working though noisy). Having need of scanner/fax deal we thought we were upgrading. I'll not buy a Brother again reliability is not an attribute of these machines.