Two days ago it was time to buy a new multi-function-center for our office. As we needed a new fax and a laser printer it was obvious to have a look on that multi-function-centers (mfc) which offers almost fax-, printing-, scanning- and copying-functionalities. Sounds good but first take a closer look.

Due to of our needs we chosen to get a monochrome laser mfc for mainly three reasons: printing quality, speed and low usage costs. The wide spreaded ink jet mfc’s have a good colour printing quality but the expensive ink you need far more often can make you cry. So the range of possible mfc’s becomes smaller…

The next requirement was the possibility for usage with two separated paper magazines. We need one for feeding blank sheets for fax and copier and one for feeding with our business sheets. The range decreases more…

The last criteria was the possible usage within a heterogenous network. At the moment there are Apple and Windows computers in the network but next year every non-creative workstation will be equipped with Linux. So it was obligatory to get a mfc which at least makes it possible to the Linux client to use it as printer. Well the range decreases more and more and at last there remains the Brother MFC range.

I decided to buy a “MFC 8440LT”:http://www.brother.de/index.cfm?pos=product&artnr=MFC8440LTG1BOM which comes as a fax-printer-scanner-copier with two paper magazines and an optional networking card (wired or wireless). For the features it has the prize is quite acceptable and after the first two days it seems that it is worth the money.
Brother ships it with a nice collection of Windows and Mac software, including my desired drivers for Mac OS X. For other clients like Linux Brother has an own “Linux support website”:http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/ which offers even printer drivers for Debian, Suse, Mandrake and RedHat packaged.