Brother Printer MFCJ825DW Wireless Color Photo Printer with Scanner, Copier and Fax

As an university student I have the necessity of printing many many documents and hence I'm required to have a reliable printer. During the past years I have tried multiple alternatives. Alternatives ranging from Hewlett Packard, Lexmark, Epson, and Canon printers. Most of those printers worked good, but my major problem was the ink. I wasted a LOT of money on ink. Refilling the cartridges of those printers wasn't easy at all. My Hp, Lexmark and Canon printers had the color ink in a same cartridge hence if you managed to get them refilled their duration was literary minimal, not to mention that most of the times i ended up with a huge disaster of ink everywhere. I even used Walgreens and Walmart ink refilling services and results weren't good at all. My Epson printer was some kind easier to refill, but my experience with it was very bad as it ended up malfunctioning in a couple of months. Looking for an alternative I visited a couple of stores in my area. I checked the printers and the ink they used. I was looking for an easy to refill cartridge and a printer which at least included all my basic necessities, copying, scanning, and printing. Finally I found an alternative, a brother printer. So instead of buying it on the store I found a good offer here on amazon. And just so that all of you know, a year and some months later I'm still using the same cartridges included on the printer when I bought them, I'm still using the refill kit I bought here on amazon (cost was $14.19) and I have printed many many many documents. (Including book chapters, works, etc) After a year of having this product I have already bought two of them. One for my lodging and another for my house. Good things: -The printer have wifi, so I don't need to have cables everywhere, I just use my laptop and my router to print or scan anything wireless. - Printer have the three basic functions I need: Printing, Scanning, and Copying. - It prints in duplex mode automatically, so you don't have to do the manual work to print a paper on both sides. - You can print both on legal and letter size. - You can easily refill the ink. (I didn't included the details on how to do so here because I don't know if amazon allow this, BUT there are some nice videos on youtube explaining how can you easily fill them up, and please note that you can go even easier than what is described on youtube, meaning that you do not have to remove the cover of your cartridge.) -Printer have a nice touch screen window -Printer have fax (however I can't review this feature because I haven't used it) -Printer can print over printable Disks (again I haven;t used this specific feature Quality: The printing quality is excellent, but it might fail when printing many documents. However what makes me love this product even more is that you can solve the problem easily, simple go click the Home button, then on your touchscreen click the Ink levels symbol, click cleaning and click all. That always fixes any problems of quality. Speed: For me the printer works quite well. It is not ultra fast like my old HP, but hey we are saving hundreds on ink, so who cares of waiting a little bit more. Savings: Making calculations I wasted more than $60.00 monthly on ink, now a year and some months later of using this brother printer and having the same refill kit of $14.00 (available here at amazon). I'm saving more than $700.00 a year. Finally I definitively recommend this product to anyone who is looking to save money on ink without sacrificing great features.

Very impressive device for the price. Paper feed and duplex (two sided) printing is seamless as long as you load the paper like it says- even with the end of the tray without scrunching it with the paper guide. Photo quality is very good to excellent in Ubuntu if you configure it right. The scanner is very fast. The touch screen is very functional with ink levels visible, and the machine turns on and off efficiently. And to the reviewer(s) who complained that the paper tray is flimsy- not so. It is thin polycarbonate (for weight) that is quite flexible, making it feel flimsy, but it is actually quite durable. We had a similar Brother MFC crash down when a shelf collapsed and there was no damage. It has been happily chugging along for 2 or 3 years, self cleaning the print heads now and then at 2AM, and putting out crystal clear pages, even with after-market ink. I have not tried the FAX yet or the wireless functions on this one, but I expect them to work as well as the printer, photo printing, and scanner. The duplex and photo printing work so well, I don't care if the rest of it is non-functional for this price and the price of the ink. BTW- Don't forget to get the compatible USB cable- I got a 6 footer and wish I had bought a 12. You install it by lifting the top stack, plugging it in, and it threads through a channel and out the back of the machine (undocumented). Don't look for an external connection like the phone/FAX line. Do not get a cable with the big round inductor at the end- get the one Amazon lists or a similar longer one. The rest of this review is mainly directed to Linux users. There are only two printer makers that really support Linux, Brother and HP. And though Brother does not list Linux as a compatible OS in their sales literature, their support is pretty impressive. If you use Linux, look over this website before you buy http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/index.html. I use Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit, and if you follow Brother's instructions (including prerequisites) to set up this printer, it works very very well indeed. Look at the FAQs first and install the additional 32 bit libraries if you are using a 64 bit OS. Then step through the drivers lists for your OS and this particular machine and install them. There is an auto install script for the printer LPR driver and CUPS wrapper if you want to use it. When done, add 1 line to each of the 2 PID system files to set the default resolution to 600 DPI for high quality photos. (I was a little underwhelmed with the photos until I discovered that tip, but it made a big difference). For Ubuntu users, the drivers are Debian. I did not use the command line stuff Brother gives, but just right clicked each driver and opened/ installed with the GDebi Debian package installer that comes with Ubuntu. Study the website while waiting for the printer to arrive- it is too time consuming to write a 10 page step by step guide here, but Brother's website has all the info you need and most Linux users can sort it out. This is one case where Ubuntu/ Linux Forums could confuse you or lead you astray. Just follow Brother's instructions. I only have one problem I'm working on, and it may be a system bios issue (an old Core 2 Duo desktop system). I have to turn the printer off before booting the system or the boot process hangs trying to configure the USB. But if I boot with the printer off, after logging in, I turn the printer on and it is immediately functional. I cannot give the machine 5 stars yet because I have not tried all of its functions, but I suspect it deserves 5. UPDATE 6/11 1. The boot thing was a system bios issue. Had to disable support for "Legacy" USB devices, and everything is working fine. 2. I don't know about Windows, but the Linux driver does not allow you to select paper type- it must refer to the printer itself for that info. So before you print a photo, go to Menu/General Setup on the touch screen and select the paper type (use the Brother BP71 photo paper) and paper size (4x6). Then print the photo making any other selections on your system (i.e the driver). With HP Premium+ Instant Dry photo paper (similar to Brother's BP71 paper), I am now getting, without question, LAB QUALITY prints! The best I have ever seen. When done with photos, reset the printer to Letter size, Plain paper, and pull back the photo lever in the paper tray before you forget and go to print a document. This machine is one of the last that gives you these results with what I hope will be very reasonable ink cost. Other reviewers claim the printer does not reject after=market ink cartridges or refills. Can't wait until I run out of Brother ink so I can evaluate the independent product. 3. Support- I found the bios solution online, but beforehand I e-mailed Brother support. About 3 days later I got a response with a list of solutions, one of which was the one I used to correct the problem. So they are not asleep at the switch as some have claimed. Love this printer- hope it holds up like our other Brother MFC.

About a month ago my inkjet printer started to act up. It was time to start looking around for a good replacement. I don't print a lot, maybe a couple of pages a day. The odd time I'll print a 20 or 30 page PDF file to read. But the feature that I was needing the most was the ability to print on CD's and DVD's. So I did some research, and I found that the feature I was looking for wasn't that easy to find, at least not in the stores around where I live. At one point I was wondering if they still made printers with this feature. Now, I know I should have searched Amazon first. But for some reason it took me a week before I thought of looking here. D'oh! I found a great selection of printers that had the features I was looking for within my budget. And it didn't take me long to narrow it down to this Brother printer. I had to wait a couple weeks before purchasing it though since my wife's laser bit the dust and we needed to replace it first. Luckily I was already in the Amazon mode and we found a great printer for her here. I've had printers from HP, LexMark and Brother in the past. I've been pleased with all of them so I didn't have any worries about selecting this printer. The MFC-J825DW has the disc printing feature that I needed. In addition, it has wireless network capability and duplex printing which are features that I wanted to have. And Amazon had the price to seal the deal. A great price (with free shipping) and I was sold. The printer arrived a few days later and it was a breeze to set up although I had to read the unpacking instructions to figure out how to remove one piece of the packing tape that was inside the printer. The cartridges are pretty simple to install and the network setup was a breeze with the "one touch" networking. Note that your wireless router needs to have that feature available for this to work. Then I went to work installing the software. Once again, this is pretty straight forward, but I would have liked it if the installer had noticed I already had the productivity software installed (we'd bought the new Brother laser 2 weeks before and it runs the same productivity suite). But the process was straight forward and now I have this wonderful little unit sitting near my desk. The print is perfect for what I need. The printer is the quietest that I've had although it makes a bit more noise when running duplex. It sets itself down into low power mode and I hardly know that it's even here sometimes! I haven't done enough printing yet to see how well the ink levels last, but that isn't a major issue for me. It does allow you to change only the colours you need, so if you print a lot of pages with one colour you'll be able to replace what you use without wasting the other colours. Anyway, you know that this isn't a perfect printer, but for what I need this is an excellent fit. It works well, it's quiet and well within my budget.

Works for us, and is just so much better than our old Epson. Only needed for printing teens' homework and our personal stuff. Avg less than 10 pgs/day. Intuitive and easy to use. Compact design. Touch screen is a breeze. Nice to have fax/scanner too. Copier and printer is a little slow, but fine for the low volume that we use. Doesn't eat up too much ink, and the 4 cartridge system makes sense to me. We are frugal and knock off cartridges work just fine. Love the wireless. Works from 2 floors away. No complaints! Would buy again.

I've had this printer for over 3 years now and it's still working great. I've been using generic cartridges ever since the starter pack expired and haven't had a problem. Love the "cloud" apps that you can run directly from the printer (e.g. upload to Dropbox from Scanner). Will definitely be purchasing another Brother printer when this one finally bites the dust.

Works great for printing labels on disc.Not great otherwise.

Had this printer for a long time, bought it for the CD printing, just have to get used to it. Havent had issues with it at all and highly reccomend it.