Brother MFC-8460N Toner Cartridges

The Brother MFC-8460N is a multifunction monochrome laser printer designed for the home or small office user. It is a powerful all-in-one machine with excellent print quality and inexpensive toner costs. Graphics quality is a little lackluster. To add color printing in addition to the other functionality, the Brother MFC-9420 toner printer should be evaluated.

The design of the MFC-8460N is very efficient. Brother manages to cram a lot of functionality into a very compact unit. The printer measures 18 inches by 21 inches by 19 inches and weighs around 48 pounds. This is quite a compact frame for a multifunction, and should especially appeal to small office users where space is tight. The MFC-8460N does have a strange design flaw in regards to printing on envelopes. It requires turning the unit around and opening a flap in the back for feeding envelopes through. If envelopes are not fed correctly with this process, they end up getting creased. This is okay for a personal user, but in an office environment it is unrealistic to expect multiple users to know this procedure and follow it.

The Brother MFC-8460N can print, scan, copy, and fax. It has an automatic document feeder which can automatically scan up to 50 pages for copying, faxing, and scanning. There is also a flatbed scanning surface for media that is too large for the feeder. The printer comes with OCR (optical character recognition) software included for turning paper documents into editable digital documents quickly and easily. The "N" version of the printer, the most popular version, also comes with a built-in ethernet port. This allows the MFC-8460N to be easily shared across a network of users, and is very easy to set up.

Print speed is quite fast, at around 21 pages per minute. With too many users, these printing speeds may begin to feel slow, but a small office will get along well. Print quality is excellent. Text is sharp and detailed, but graphics quality is a little below average.

The Brother MFC-8460N toner cartridges come in two sizes. The standard cartridge has a capacity of 3,500 pages and the high-yield version has a capacity of 7,000 pages. The high-yield cartridge is the more economical of the two, and buying third-party compatible cartridges rather than the more expensive brand name Brother MFC-8460N toner cartridge can reduce costs even more.

Overall, the Brother MFC-8460N is a solid multifunction device with a few design quirks, like the envelope issue, that make some functions more difficult than they should be.