Brother MFC-7840W Toner Cartridges

Brother MFC-7840W Printer Review

The Brother MFC-7840W is a multifunction monochrome laser printer designed for the home or small office user. It offers great text printing quality and a low cost per page, but no color printing, and some of its multifunction features are unimpressive.

The Brother MFC-7840W is capable of printing, scanning, copying, and faxing. In the most common version, the MFC-7840W, it includes ethernet and wireless networking. Setting up networking is very easy through the ethernet port, but setting up the wireless networking is a little less intuitive. The manual walks users through the process, but wireless networking is always somewhat challenging, as there are so many possible scenarios for setup.

Although the printer is monochrome only, the scanner can scan in 24-bit color up to a resolution of 600 dpi (2400 dpi enhanced). Scanning is a bit on the slow side, however, and scan quality is a little unimpressive. Scans generally look good, but color inaccuracies and other problems tend to crop up. The slow scanning speeds also affect copying and faxing, though not as much as color scans, as copying and faxing are monochrome.

Despite its affordable price and its target audience of small office users, the Brother MFC-7840W features some nice bonus features one might not expect in a budget multifunction unit. A 35-sheet automatic document feeder is included for quickly scanning documents in bulk, and the flatbed scanner allows for scanning of larger materials, such as books, that can't be fed through the ADF. A few advanced fax features such as fax forwarding and automatic redialing are included, which are not common in multifunction devices.

Print quality is excellent. Text is detailed, dark, and very sharp. Obviously, Brother put a lot of focus into making the MFC-7840W an excellent laser printer first. Print speeds are quite speedy, at 23 pages per minute, and rival many dedicated laser printers at this price. The standard Brother MFC-7840W toner cartridges have a page yield of 1,500. There is also a much more economical option of the Brother MFC-7840W toner cartridge which is good for up to 2,600 pages.

Overall, the Brother MFC-7840W is a very capable multifunction device with some well-designed features. Slow color scanning speeds and lack of color printing are its only major drawbacks. The Brother MFC-9420 toner multi-function printer is an alternative that also provides color printing.