Brother MFC-8820D All-In-One Laser Printer

Pros: Easy to work. Has a 500 page ability
Cons: Size is rather large for a home office.

Here is our garage sale story success treasure hunt story . Hubby is a great hunter. He can find anything if its weird and missing. He takes me garage sailing on the week ends.He's not REALLY thrilled doing this but every so often he makes such a killing ...

Pros: Fast double sided laser printing, lot of functionality for a very reasonable price
Cons: Some hiccups on Mac's OS X operating system. No light/dark adjustment.

I've always been an HP printer type person. I bought my dad a HP Laserjet II maybe 10 years ago and it ran fine for years. But I've been sort of disillusioned with HP lately because they're starting to do silly things, like forcing you to replace ink ...

Pros: Legal size flat bed, duplex, big LCD, 32MB memory, print quality and more.
Cons: Power consumption, noise and a little too big.

My wife and I were looking for a decent fax machine with copy capabilities when our old Brother thermo fax machine finally decided to quit after many faithful years of service. After some researching, I decided to stop by the local Office Depot to check ...

Pros: Simple installation; auto duplexing; ADF scanning, copying and faxing; fast scanning and printing
Cons: Multi-purpose tray may not always feed properly.

I was very pleasantly surprised when I received my MFC-8820D. It was a snap to install, works smooth as glass, and is one of my best office equipment purchases! I hooked mine up using the parallel interface on my Windows XP computer, and have used it for ...

Pros: Smooth Fast operation, Easy setup, tons of great features, duplex printing
Cons: None

In the last 20 years of computer ownership I have owned 1 Apple printer, 7 HPs, and 2 Cannons, and I ...

Pros: Well-built, economical, easy to use, versatile. Print quality is good!
Cons: Software needs to be enhanced and made more compatible with Windows XP.

After extensive research on the Internet, I decided to buy this machine. I am glad I did. Print and copy quality are great and you can print on both sides of the page during fax and printing. Copying: you can copy several pages on one page but they will be small versions bunched together. The document feeder makes things much easier during copying or faxing and it works well. The machine is designed well and easy to use. The software that comes with the machine was compatible with Windows XP Professional installed on my computer. It did, however, knock the internal modem out. I went to "device manager", uninstalled the driver for the modem and Windows XP, as a result, was forced to reinstall a driver for it and that fixed the issue. Now the fax software on my computer has a choice of either using the internal modem in my computer or use the modem in the machine itself. Also, when this machine goes to "sleep", it uses very little energy. Five years down the road, I can see Brother making one with color laser. This would be a dream machine for me. Recommend highly!

Pros: Easy Use, Small foot print to conserve space
Cons: 500 page paper tray would be nice

I've bought several of these machines for
small office environments with no problems.

Easy software to install as long as your
interface via USB or Parallel cable is correct.

The scanner with feeder is very nice and if documents
are skewed after scanning the rotation in the software
allows for small increments to align. The duplex page
option works well.

Pros: Multiply functions ease of setup
Cons: rear paper feed access tray

Big machine for small price. From box to operational 20 minutes. Follow software installation to the tee. USB works much better than parallel.

Pros: Good Print Quality
Cons: Lousy interface to Win XP; Software is a mess

My old Brother MFC 9600 got zapped in a power spike so I thought I would replace it with the MFC 8820D -- something more Win XP compatible with document scanning ability. BAD CHOICE -- I will be taking the machine back to Office Depot tomorrow morning.

I have spent hours on the Brother Website reading the FAQ's pertaining to Win XP compatibility...without success. 1) The 'Smart UI' (not that smart) menu freezes repeatedly on the screen forcing me to reboot. 2) Despite uninstalling and reinstalling the software twice, two error messages highlight missing files causing the scanning operation to fail. Never got anything scanned successfully yet. 3) The wait while it 'Detects New Hardware' doesn't detect. 4) Finally, when the printer winds up it sounds like a jet engine on the desk.

I hope someone else had better luck getting this to work -- I've had it with Brother. I am going to pay the premium for Hewlett Packard.