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The Brother MFC-7340 is a multifunction monochrome laser printer designed for the small or home office user. Its wide array of features is impressive for the price. A few design missteps result in awkward functionality.
Brother managed to fit just about every feature under the sun into the MFC-7340 and still keep it tight and compact. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a few strange design choices, unlike competitor printers like the HP M2727 toner printer. When replacing the toner cartridges, the entire drum must be removed, which makes it a much more complicated process than most other Brother designed printers. The output tray is tucked in between the input tray and the scanning unit, making it sometimes difficult to get a hold of prints, especially a large stack.
Even though the Brother MFC-7340 includes printing, scanning, copying, and faxing capabilities, not all of the features are particularly well-implemented. Faxing, for example, is limited to 14.4 kbps. This is a little disappointing, but given that many multifunction units do not include any faxing capability, it is probably better than nothing. Scanning is generally good, and scan quality is excellent, but scanning speed is quite slow, especially for color scans. Lower resolutions and monochrome scans tend to scan much faster, so it is up to the user to decide how much quality to trade for speed. OCR (optical character recognition) software is included for converting scanned documents into editable text. This is particularly well-matched with the automatic document feeder, which has a capacity of 35 sheets. Using both together is a quick way to convert boxes worth of paper documents into digital formats for archival.
Print quality is excellent, with sharp and detailed text. The MFC-7340's different printing modes are all very sharp, even the toner-saving modes, with the only real difference being in the darkness of the prints. Print speeds are quite good at up to 21 pages per minute. The Brother MFC-7340 toner cartridge has a good capacity, with the standard cartridge at 1,500 pages, and the high-yield cartridge at 2,600. However, because the printer ships with a starter Brother MFC-7340 toner cartridge with the capacity of only 1,000, a cartridge may need to be bough soon after purchase.
Overall, the Brother MFC-7340 squeezes a lot of functionality into a compact and affordable machine. Not all of the features are well-implemented, but all of them are adequate. If you want color printing in addition to all the other functions, the Brother MFC-9420 toner printer is worthwhile to consider.
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