Rating: 
Summary: Great Copier, Great Fax, Not So Great Printer
Review: I purchased the 5200 after plenty of research and comparison shopping. It is the big brother to the MFC-5100c which looks very much the same... but there are some big differences. The 5200 has the stand-alone digital media print capability (can read Compact Flash, Smart Media, Memory Stick) but also has more built-in memory and a print system that works almost twice the speed of the 5100. It was this speed that I was after, and so it was the speed that I will focus on here. Both models use the same ink cartridges, which separate the colors to save you money.The advertised print speed of around 20 pages per minute black and 16 color should not be considered realistic. All advertised print speeds are basically fabrications that use "draft" print setting and low complexity document types to get best possible results... not the world I live in. That being said, the 5200 really is fast in two departments -- It can copy faster than any all-in-one inkjet I've ever seen, and it spits out faxes like a machine gun. I timed the copy speed using the cover of a children's book as the source (lots of color and about letter-size) and hit my stopwatch the moment I hit "copy"... I used the "normal" setting. A very nice quality copy was produced in 28 seconds. This is a far cry from the 12-16 pages per minute color copy speed advertised, but you will have to take my word for it when I say this is fast for a multifunction machine. The reason for the speed is a very wide print head that can cover nearly 3/4 of an inch on each pass over the paper. As a comparison, the HP 6110 (nearly identical to the Brother in specifications and capabilities) took 56 seconds for the same copy job at the same settings. The HP print heads cover a much smaller path, requiring many more passes to get the job done. The 5200 seems to love fax and copy jobs more than anything else, because the manual and software focus on these jobs to the near exclusion of everyday computer printing. In fact, the software was not very impressive and included an image management package that I didn't want, but couldn't elect not to install. Now, on the the one problem that I encountered and don't want to live with -- Print speed for computer printing. I thought my old Lexmark z52 was slow printing in color, but the Brother was worse. Printing a 4x6 inch color picture (jpeg format) on plain paper in "normal" (one step above draft) print mode took about 4 minutes. After calling and e-mailing Brother support, I finally got a technician that said, "That's the way it is supposed to work... nothing's wrong." What is maddening about it is that it makes a sweep with the print heads, then stops for between 5 and 15 seconds waiting for data to stream in and get processed before sweeping across again. I know that the USB port is capable of sending large amounts of data very quickly, so it doesn't seem like there should be such a bottle-neck. Is it the speed of the printer's own processor? I don't know. I tried altering print spooling settings, I tried it on another computer, I tried using the parallel connection instead... all gave similar results. Printing a larger image at a somewhat higher print mode left me enought time to make a sandwich and catch a little t.v. I just expected faster printing. Comparing to the HP 6110, the same picture took only slightly less time (about 25% faster) but the print heads of the HP never stop moving back and forth waiting for data. A better printer driver might fix the speed issue, or maybe the machine I got was not performing properly... I can't say. Anyway, it is a really nice machine that is capable of some really nice output, but I wish the folks at Brother would spend as much time and energy on machine to computer interface as they have on stand-alone faxing and copying (which are very good).
Rating: 
Summary: Cautionary Tale About the Brother MFC-5440CN
Review: I should say up front that I'm reviewing the Brother MFC-5440CN, which is very close to the MFC5200c, but it's not quite the same model. However, there's enough overlap that my comments are still germane.
I've been in the market for a multifunction scanner/FAX/copier/printer that can speak Ethernet on a heterogeneous LAN. My primary computer is an Apple Macintosh running Mac OS X 10.3.5. So far I've tried the Hewlett Packard HP PSC 2510 and the Brother MFC-5440CN. Neither is worth owning.
I bought the Brother MFC-5440CN two days ago (2004-10-10) after returning a Hewlett Packard HP PSC 2510. (After struggling with Hewlett Packard's obsequious but useless technical support from March 2004 through September 2004, I finally asked if I could return the unit directly to Hewlett Packard for a refund. In early October I returned the unit. The Hewlett Packard HP PSC 2510 is all but useless with Mac OS X because of a myriad of show-stopping bugs ranging from the bundled application software down to the broken wireless Ethernet implementation.)
Right out of the box, the Brother MFC-5440CN seems to be a more "serious" unit than the HP PSC 2510. It supports a finer-grained FAX resolution than the HP PSC 2510, and it seems slightly less cheesy in construction, but I have no reliability or performance data to support that impression.
I've printed a couple of black-and-white pages so far. The print quality is less than ideal. You can see light horizontal lines in the otherwise black ink when you print a 2"x2" black square. Other than that, it seems all right for printing simple things like business letters with no graphics. I haven't tried to print pictures or anything especially colorful.
The Brother MFC-5440CN has an automatic document feeder which produces scans that are almost as good as what the integrated flatbed scanner gives you. (It's not _quite_ as good. You can detect some "choppiness" in the document images generated via the automatic document feeder, reflecting the jerky movement of the paper transport.) The automatic document feeder employs a narrow scan window rather than the full flatbed scan area.
The Brother MFC-5440CN is terrible at scanning anything other than plain old dark-text-on-white-background documents. For example, a yellow credit card receipt that showed up with no problems on the HP PSC 2510 would be virtually unreadable when scanned by the Brother MFC-5440CN. Playing around with the brightness and contrast controls only seemed to make it worse. Even getting dark-text-on-white-background documents to show up acceptably was a challenge: the Brother MFC-5440CN tends to lighten everything to the point where text is hard to read. I had to pull down the brightness and adjust the contrast to a fairly extreme setting just to make text look decent.
The Brother MFC-5440CN comes with Presto! PageManager 4.0 software (abbreviated "PPM4"). PPM4 is product made by NewSoft, a company based in Taipei, Taiwan. (See URL: http://www.newsoftinc.com). For some reason, Brother bundles PPM4 even though NewSoft, as of 2004-10-10, is already up to Version 6 and doesn't mention anything earlier than Version 4.8 on their website. They make no mention whatsoever of Apple Macintosh support on their website. It appears that PPM4 is dead software.
PPM4 has serious problems. Not as serious as the debilitating bugs associated with the garbage that Hewlett-Packard ships with their HP PSC 2510, but dysfunctional enough that you have to make special concessions to it when it's running.
First of all, its user interface doesn't adhere to Mac OS X usability guidelines. It has a nonstandard file directory tree widget (apparently from a third-party toolkit) that doesn't even allow you to select multiple documents (let alone directories) at the same time. This is a real pain if you're trying to delete multiple items at the same time. For example, if you've just scanned in 50 pages via the automatic document feeder, and you decided that you don't want any of them, you have to delete every scan file, one by one. The program provides no way to let you delete them all at once. Also, menu items such as "Delete Document" have no corresponding accelerator keys mapped to them. This lack of attention to detail is prevalent throughout PPM4 and raises serious questions about competence.
All scans performed under the control of PPM4 are deposited in a system-wide directory ("/Applications/Presto! PageManager 4/My Pagemanager/Inbox/"). This tells me that the people who wrote the software weren't properly acquainted with the requirements of multi-user operating systems.
Once you scan more than about three documents from the automatic document feeder, PPM4 becomes unresponsive, as it takes forever to finish processing all of the files that have just been scanned in. No progress bar, no nothing. (PPM4 is obviously a single-threaded application. Incompetence aside, there's no excuse for writing an application like this in a single-threaded manner when you expect to encounter long stretches of processing.) There's some horrific inefficiency inside PPM4 that makes that application instance unusable from that point onward. The only workaround I know of is to kill the PageManager process and move all of the generated TIFF files from the "/Applications/Presto! PageManager 4/My Pagemanager/Inbox/" directory into your destination directory of choice.
This workaround exposes yet another design flaw in PPM4. PPM4 appears to make very naive assumption that it is the only agent that will ever modify the "/Applications/Presto! PageManager 4/My Pagemanager/Inbox/" directory. The PPM4 GUI doesn't update when you modify that directory; there's no "refresh" button either. Somehow it keeps some mapping between filenames in that directory and the thumbnail sketches that are shown in association with each of the filenames. This association is very easily corrupted. Expect to see the wrong thumbnail showing up for any given graphic file. (I'm not sure that the corruption results only from users modifying "/Applications/Presto! PageManager 4/My Pagemanager/Inbox/" or not, but at any rate, the application shouldn't act this way, and the fact that it does is further evidence that the authors were rank amateurs. "Finder" can cope with users modifying the underlying filesystem; so should PPM4.)
One other bug in PPM4 is that the main system Menu Bar doesn't always update when you give PPM4 the main application focus. The Menu Bar may remain bound to whatever previous application had the focus (such as Finder). When this happens, PPM4 is basically dead in the water. You have to go to a command-line tool (such as Terminal) and kill the process yourself.
Finally, they claim that you can bypass the TWAIN mechanism when scanning, but in practice this often leads to dialogue boxes with bizarre error messages popping up when you initiate a scan.
Furthermore, using different page manager software isn't going to improve the mediocre scan quality.
Finally, Brother's tech support is bad. They're only open on weekdays, and even then it's not 24-hour support. The FAQs contain zingers like this:
Date: 23/09/2004
ID: faq000314_000
TITLE: I'm using Mac OS X. How can I uninstall the drivers?
DESCRIPTION: To solve this problem, please delete the installed drivers and reinstall them.
(To their credit, they do give you some useful information after that, but it's obvious that they're sloppier than they should be.)
Brother USA's website (http://www.brother-usa.com) is a mess. If you search Brother's "Support Options" page with the keyword "driver", you won't even run across the page mentioned above. I found it somewhere _else_ on Brother USA's website! Their website is a mess. (NewSoft's website is also far from perfect. I didn't look very deeply at it, but two things that caught my eye right away were the abundance of interesting variations on the English language and the avoidance of anything related to Apple, Macintoshes, or Mac OS X.)
I'm going to return my Brother MFC-5440CN because the scanning is poor and the software, while not as pathologically dysfunctional as that of the HP PSC 2510, is still bad.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Versatile Multi-Function
Review: I'm writing this review after reading some of the highly negative ones shown here. I use the MFC-5200C in a busy home office primarily as a printer and fax machine. I have been extremely pleased in terms of performance, its ability to do a variety of things as well as the individual machines I've owned in the past, the easy to read manual, etc. I love that I have a document feed color copier for under $250 bucks! That alone makes this product well worth the money. I find it to print just as fast as my HP Deskjet, which is perfectly acceptable even when I'm printing 30 or 40 page documents. Plus, my HP printers would mangle every other envelope where the Brother handles them with ease. There is a lot of versatility with this machine that I haven't even used in terms of its ability as a scanner and photo capture center.I've had mine for over a year with zero problems and I mean zero. Works like a champ and I would buy another one in a second.
Rating: 
Summary: Won't Last Longer than Two Years
Review: I've noticed a few positive reviews for the MFC5200C, and all I have to say is - we'll talk in a few months and see if you still feel that way.
The machine was good for me for several reasons - multi-function, fair print quality (if you don't need photos), and moderate printing speed. However, after 21 months of low volume usage (5 print/copy per day), I got the dreaded "Machine Error 41". That is essentially the death dirge (the printer head needs replacing). The repair cost is $164, which when compared to the cost of the machine is a "no-brainer" solution -- don't!
I've talked to a couple of technicians in my area, and they said that I am not alone in my Brother problem. If you want my opinion about this particular Brother product, I say buy if you have the expectation to replace it every two years. If you are planning on keeping it longer, then go elsewhere.
Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely love it!
Review: If you're getting a multifunction, I personally think it's important to get one with a flatbed scanner. A copier that can't copy or fax pages from a bound book isn't of much use to me. I've tried quite a few multifunctions out there - lexmark, canon, HP, you name it. HP was the best of the lot in terms of speed, quality and life of the cartridges. I had almost made up my mind to get HP-2210 which was also appealing to me because it can print directly from a Sony memory stick.
Then I came across Brother MFC-5200 and it didn't take me much convincing to go with this one. Not only does this have great printing speed (I agree with the first reviewer that you can't go by the advertised speed, but that being said, it does print pages with text pretty fast), the copying and faxing is excellent. Moreover, this printer also has the PC-Fax feature that lets you fax a document directly from your PC rather than having to print it out first and then faxing it. That way, you save a lot of ink by not having to print pages you want to fax. The printer has a full-fledged photo-capture center that also accepts a Sony memory stick and a compact flash card as a direct input. What can beat this?
The installation was a breeze on my Win 2000 machine. The literature is extremely well documented and product packaging was very well organized. It comes with separate cartridges for each color - cyan, yellow, magenta and black. You can replace each cartridge separately as compared to some other cartridges where the colors are contained in one unit and you have to pretty much discard it when one color runs out.
I needed to hook this printer up on a LAN so it could be used by the other computers in my house too. This unit was advertized as being network enabled. But the problem was that the LAN board must be purchased separately and costs a fortune. So I connected it to one of my PCs and made it a print server. Serves the purpose.
The downside is that this printer is pretty big and shakes a little when printing, so make sure it's on a sturdy stand!!
Rating:
Summary: Stay far, far, far away from Brother products
Review: My printer was a lemon. They said that they would replace it. I am now on hold for the SIXTH time. They tell me to fax proof of purchase. I do that and then they say they need a credit card #. I provide that and then they say I need to fax in proof of purchase. This has gone on literally six times. I am so frustrated. I can't believe customer service can be soooooo bad.
Rating:
Summary: SAVE YOUR MONEY - DON'T BUY THIS!!!
Review: Ok so here I was ready for my first multifunction printer. I did all the research, shopped around and decided on the Brother MFC-5200C, mainly because I previously had a brother fax machine that was a workhorse and lasted me years! I loved that fax machine and when my research came down to a few that included a brother I thought I'd go with what I knew but from day one I had problems with this printer. It was still under the manufacturers warranty so I called brother to fix it. They gave me such a run around and then finally sent out a replacement. The replacement lasted about 5 months and then the printer broke. We couldn't receive faxes or do anything that involved printing. I ended up just giving up and buying a whole new multifunction printer by a different maker.
All I can say about my whole Brother experience is I have never been so disappointed in a product or manufacturer before!
Do yourself a favor and save your money!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Scanning Feature
Review: The only problem that I am having with my MFC 5200-c is the fact that the software that they provide for scanning will not let you scan a document as a PDF File, which many people commonly use these days for scanning documents.
Rating:
Summary: Brother gone bad
Review: This was a huge disappointment as this unit replaced a great model 9200c. The unit is tinny sound..squeaky belts..most difficult for single sheet feed, due to a rear entry where a compartment must be opened..ends up jamming most of the time. Fax feature is also not very good as it disconnects transmission without reason, then redials. I would not recommend this model
Rating:
Summary: Stay away from this product
Review: Within the first six months we had to replace it twice and it has been the worst experience. I asked them to substitude this product for something else but they said it is not their policy. My advice - get HP and stay away from this product.
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