Scanning and Faxing recommendations

**Fred Bloggs** · 19 July 2008, 16:16

I had a Brother MFD that did it all. I used about 2 sets of inkjet cartridges in a year, so it wasn't heavily used. 1 month outside of the 1 yr warranty it gave a error message on the LED screen. To cut a long story short the message meant "give us a load of money", more than the cost of a new machine. Brother would not sell me the part to install myself. I chucked it and bought a HP that has been trouble free so far. It grieved me to throw away such a complex piece of kit for a relatively minor fault.

(I should add here to be fair that the 4 toner cartridges for the HP (laser) machine will cost more to replace than the cost of a new machine when the time comes. Ho hum......)

**lilelvis2000** · 19 July 2008, 20:43

[QUOTE=Fred Bloggs;588672]I had a Brother MFD that did it all. I used about 2 sets of inkjet cartridges in a year, so it wasn't heavily used. 1 month outside of the 1 yr warranty it gave a error message on the LED screen. To cut a long story short the message meant "give us a load of money", more than the cost of a new machine. Brother would not sell me the part to install myself. I chucked it and bought a HP that has been trouble free so far. It grieved me to throw away such a complex piece of kit for a relatively minor fault.

(I should add here to be fair that the 4 toner cartridges for the HP (laser) machine will cost more to replace than the cost of a new machine when the time comes. Ho hum......)[/QUOTE]

Yeah, and some want the fuser and belt changed after a while as well...about £500!

We'd go with a mono laser as we have no need for colour. So I think for Brother..you only replace the ink which is quite cheap.

**Fred Bloggs** · 20 July 2008, 07:59

The ink for the Brother is only cheap if you hardly use it. I am thinking that the lifetime cost of ownership of these devices is actually very, very high. The "environmental cost" is simply appalling if you throw them away after about 18 months and buy a new one, which actually seems to be the lowest cost way of running one.

**Bright Spark** · 20 July 2008, 08:59

I recently bought a brother MFC-7420 which is a laser printer,fax,scanner and copier, which is great, I haven't used the fax yet only copier printer, so far so good, I bought this for £130 from staples, just checked amazon are doing the similar offer for approx £145 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Brother-MFC-.../dp/B0009MUDHO.

**lilelvis2000** · 20 July 2008, 20:03

Will check it out. Probably need to run it on a network as there is no convenient place near a PC to put it. So may look into a printer server for it...Kinda ironic as we probably won't do any printing - only faxing and scanning. While some unit with a NIC claim to be network ready, it usually only applies to the printing and out-going fax.

**BolshieBastard** · 20 July 2008, 21:18

Cant you put a fax \ modem card in your pc? This way anything you prepare on the pc can be faxed direct.

**Spacecadet** · 21 July 2008, 08:05

Originally posted by Fred Bloggs View Post

(I should add here to be fair that the 4 toner cartridges for the HP (laser) machine will cost more to replace than the cost of a new machine when the time comes. Ho hum......)

Usually the toner cartridges that come supplied with the pirnter are only "starter" packs and are at most 20% full

**Sockpuppet** · 21 July 2008, 08:12

Cheap scanner and computer software.

I am currently using BT Ring Central and its very, very good.

**lilelvis2000** · 21 July 2008, 14:05

Silly me.

My wife reminded me that the photo copier also scans . we have a konica-minolta bizhub. After some time figuring this out...the manual has absolutely no information on this...I got it working.
I can scan-to-SMB - which doesn't seem to work to my SAMBA machine
scan-to-FTP which is what I used to get around this limitation.

It is lightening quick. Though I haven't tried colour..I think the scan is only B&W which is sufficient for our needs.

Scanning and Faxing recommendations