Printer Reviews

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Just purchased this 15" LCG monitor and love it. I replaced a Sony CRT 17" and found the viewable area to be equal to the CRT. Colors are brilliant and text sharp. Plug and play, with no need to utilize any additional software. At 9# and slim depth my Desktop looks like a desk again. Set at 1024x768 32bit true color. I could'nt be more pleased

I upgraded just about everything on my computer, but this monitor was without a doubt my best purchase. Gone is the enormous 17" CRT that dominated my desk. Now I have a beautiful thin, space saving LCD screen and all kinds of free desk space. The image is outstanding. I'm driving the monitor with a Radeon 7500, and my 3D games look great. Text is crisp and clear and easy to read. I don't see any screen imperfections at all. Let me say again, best computer purchase I have ever made. I could not be happier.

This is a modified sewing machine.
Slow, frustrating, and poor in quality on all levels, its a staggering achievemnt in poorly designed machinery. I wouldnt recommend this to anyone who wishes to have intelligible printouts, or a machine that can print more than 1 page an hour.

Dont buy this under any conditions!

I was looking for a replacement for my scanner/PC fax software setup, as I was frustrated with missing faxes because my PC was hung or the software had bombed out.

I picked up the Brother MFC 7300c based on the fact that it is a great value for all the features that I needed:

- Automatic Document Feeder, 20 pages. Most multi-function machines I looked at supported fewer than 20 pages in the ADF compartment of the device. I find 20 pages will meet most of my needs.

- Higher than normal print resolutions. As other reviews here have stated, most multifuncion machines operate at the lower end of print resultion, but not this machine. 1200x1200 photo quality printing was the exception for all the multi-function machines I look at in this price range.

- Print speed. My primary printer is a laster printer which is fast. I didn't know if I wanted to live with 6 pages per minute like some multi-function machines. This device works at the 10 or 12 ppm range, must faster than other machines at this price.

- Paper Supply. Many of the alternatives I looked at have 50 sheet supplies, meaning that I'd have to load it up several times a week. This one has 100, above average for this type of device.

- Stand alone fax machine. Most multi-function devices at this price range do not include a separate modem, meaning that they must rely on a connection to a PC to send or receive faxes. The 7300c has its own stand-alone fax modem, meaning it will work when your PC is off, unplugged, down, hung, or away in the case of a laptop.

- Video scanning. This device supports video scanning, meaning I could hook my video camera up to it to print out frames from a video. I did not need this, nor do I know if I'd ever use it. The description here on this site under _technical data_ claims that this will allow you to print directly from compact flash media or smart media directly -- IT DOES NOT SUPPORT THIS -- I believe they've confused the higher model machine, the 7400c. Again, this capability is not available from the 7300C.

I have to add to this review, though, that Brother has a really bad reputation for quality of their printer products. They tend to be cheaper to purchase but much, much more expensive to maintain, both due to high consumable costs (you have to purchase more consumables, like cartridges, more often) and shortened duty cycles (time before the thing must go in for repair or parts replacement.)

What does this all mean? This may be a great deal if you can get it for a discounted price, as I did, and you intend on using it as a secondary machine. I use mine primarily as a full-featured fax machine, not primarily as a printer or scanner or copier. I do use it for those features; I just don't use it a lot for those purposes. If you are looking for something like this for constant daily use, I'd suggest that you look at purchasing individual devices for nearly the same price.

We never Owned a fax machine before, and were saving copies via a SCSI flat bed scanner. This item has worked well for us making copies, faxes, and the video capture function is cool. VERY FAST PRINTOUTS! Bought for Page per min (PPM) and the individual ink carts (which are each reasonably priced when compared to lexmark, etc.) You either pay now or pay through the ink.

I bought this printer not too long ago .. absolutely the worst buy I have ever made. This printer is noisy .. slow .. EXPENSIVE to maintain .. (ink finishes fast .. and if you don't use it for awhile ink dries up as well) .. truly a worthless piece of machinery.
Cheap design .. no on/off button .. Epson claims high resolution with this printer .. .. don't even bother looking at specs .. this unit is truly a waste of money ..
Definately not a crown jewel .. or a printer .. on any standard.

I thought that this printer was very easy to set up. The instructions in putting together the printer were easy. Also, the CD that is included makes installing the software quite simple, and it walks you step-by-step through installing the ink cartridges (which I'd never done before). The 6 page/minute is only on the fastest speed, however, which doesn't give the greatest quality -- the letters that it prints out at this speed have lines through them that aren't colored in; very unprofessional. On the normal setting it is a little slow, but still all right. It's quiet, which is nice. Okay, after actually USING the printer, I realized that, after only owning it for two months, and printing out a minimum of materials, the black ink ran out. Personally, I don't think thata "cheap" printer, in price, is that great if you have to buy an expensive ink cartridge for it every other month.

The Epson Stylus 580 is a great little printer for home use. It has good image quality and is fairly faster than models of comparable price. Its small size means it doesn't take much space on your desk. USB is always a plus too.

I got a brand new Lexmark Z35 a couple of weeks ago. This is my first printer. I am astonished by its bad performance. The print speed is so slow, almost 1 minute to print a single page. The black toner seems does not work, it can not print any black signs or letters on paper.

Same as "An Electronics Fan". Occasionally prints a document. On those occasions where it does not, it won't let you delete the failed document from the print queue. It says it's deleted, but when further attempts are made to print other documents, the print jobs just fill up in the queue, waiting for the first job to complete. The only way to clear the printer queue is to reboot. But there's another problem. The document that was holding up the queue gets printed during the reboot process. That's wasted paper, since by that time you no longer need the printout after having spent more than a few minutes deciding that you don't really need it (eg., maps from mapquest).

I've forgotten about failed print jobs only to find that when I rebooted my machine days later, the printout came out. This is a piece of junk. Perhaps there will be a software upgrade, if that is indeed the problem.

I'm currently shopping for a replacement my Z35 printer. It is junk. The first one fed paper in crooked every time, so I exchanged and the second one does the very same thing. Now it says it is out of paper when it isn't. The print quality is mediocre at best, the color reproduction isn't very accurate (using Pantone color references) and the toner is fairly expensive. Recently I have had two genuine Lexmark printer cartridges fail (very poor print quality). I won't buy annother Lexmark product, you shouldn't either.

I bought this printer in April 2003. For the price, the printer packed a lot of features. I've never purchased a Brother printer so I figured I'd give it a try. Well, after getting the printer, the quality of print was so so. But for all the features and the price, well, couldn't complain, until about 13 months later (1 month after warranty expired.) Got an error, machine error 22. Called Brother and they said it needed service and they wouldn't cover it since it's out of warranty. Reading other reviews on internet now, many people have gotten this error and the cost to fix the printer is almost as much as just buying a new printer. Last Brother printer for me. Going back to HP or Epson.

I bought this printer about a year ago and have been reasonably happy with it. I use it in a home business where i do print alot so it gets alot of use. I hate it that if you run out of one color it wont print black and white until you change the color ink. It prints pretty fast but the ink is really light sometimes. The tray on it broke right away with minimal use also.

If you're getting a multifunction, I personally think it's important to get one with a flatbed scanner. A copier that can't copy or fax pages from a bound book isn't of much use to me. I've tried quite a few multifunctions out there - lexmark, canon, HP, you name it. HP was the best of the lot in terms of speed, quality and life of the cartridges. I had almost made up my mind to get HP-2210 which was also appealing to me because it can print directly from a Sony memory stick.

Then I came across Brother MFC-5200 and it didn't take me much convincing to go with this one. Not only does this have great printing speed (I agree with the first reviewer that you can't go by the advertised speed, but that being said, it does print pages with text pretty fast), the copying and faxing is excellent. Moreover, this printer also has the PC-Fax feature that lets you fax a document directly from your PC rather than having to print it out first and then faxing it. That way, you save a lot of ink by not having to print pages you want to fax. The printer has a full-fledged photo-capture center that also accepts a Sony memory stick and a compact flash card as a direct input. What can beat this?

The installation was a breeze on my Win 2000 machine. The literature is extremely well documented and product packaging was very well organized. It comes with separate cartridges for each color - cyan, yellow, magenta and black. You can replace each cartridge separately as compared to some other cartridges where the colors are contained in one unit and you have to pretty much discard it when one color runs out.
I needed to hook this printer up on a LAN so it could be used by the other computers in my house too. This unit was advertized as being network enabled. But the problem was that the LAN board must be purchased separately and costs a fortune. So I connected it to one of my PCs and made it a print server. Serves the purpose.
The downside is that this printer is pretty big and shakes a little when printing, so make sure it's on a sturdy stand!!

I am using this as a stand alone, no computer connection.I have tried to get this to print black ink all the time. I have written the help center 8 times. They don't know how to do it. I don't want red ink only on every page I copy.

I have this printer for over 1 year now.
The printer, other than a paper jam once a while, it works fine.
The big problem is the paper feed of the fax. If you put more than 1 page, most of the times it will pull 2-3 pages together. I called technical support and was advised to feed it one page at a time, wait till it pulls the page in and then feed in the next page. The guy said it was not designed to fax more than one page at a time.
It also require you to feed all the pages before it dials the number, just to find out after feeding it 10 pages one at a time that the number you called is busy.

Bottom line - if you need to fax more than one page at a time, do not buy this printer.

The printer works well when it doesn't lock up our computer and refuse to print. We have Windows XP, and the printer and XP don't seem to like each other - often, we have to restart the computer when trying to print. We have had no issues with sending faxes but haven't tried to receive them. Copy printing works fine, too.

You do not want this printer. Paper pickup is unpredictable, color image is poor (even with new cartridges), and it occassionally just shuts OFF.

Pros: Great print quality, nice diagnostic tools (for Mac & PC), can print 11x17-size prints, stingy with ink. Post-Script compatable (Windows & Mac OS9).

Cons: Does not ship with a USB cable, frequently eats #10 envelopes, ink cartridges are ridiculously expensive, does not print as fast as other comparable printers, does not print well with HP glossy photo paper. W/respect to the last con, the rollers have a hard time "grabbing" the photo paper. I usually go through 5 sheets of photo paper with the photo 1/2 on it before one sheet that works. Then again, maybe that's part of HP's master plan to make $$$ on photo paper...

I've read all of the assessments below, and I must say that they don't reflect my experience. Then again, I'm using it with the Mac OS. I use it primarily for large format printing of musical scores, which are quite graphics intensive. I also now do a lot of photo printing. With music layout, it has performed brilliantly, producing copy that I find to equal that from professional houses. I've also found the photo production to be very fine, though at the best setting it will perform slower than some prefer. (This doesn't bother me.) There is also an occasional paper slippage when using glossy. (This does bother me, but hasn't occurred with enough frequency to damn the machine.) I've had no problems with the computer communicating with the machine.

All told, a terrific machine. I'd buy it again.

I'll keep it short and sweet: you buy cheap, you get cheap. I only purchased the 1100 Jetprinter as my Epson Stylus Color IIs died on me and I needed something immediately to print a report for school. What a waste of hard-earned money: don't even waste your time comparing this product to other printers, go with an HP or Canon instead. With the 1100, I experienced frequent paper jams, especially with size 10 envelopes, and it went through ink faster than my Epson Stylus Color IIs or my Lexmark z23. Drop this bugger and run for the hills!

I bought this printer three years ago due to a price-tag glitch that made it unbelievably cheap--one of those cases where the manager said, "Alright - give him one, but fix that sticker IMMEDIATELY". I can't believe anyone paid anything close to retail for it and didn't take it back. Even I should have demanded a refund.

First, it seldom ran right under Windows Me - the software that controlled it ran in the system tray and was annoying, popping up and shouting, "PRINTING STARTED!!!" at me in .WAV form if I didn't adjust the volume to minimum. Then, printing a page - at any resolution - would come close to bringing my system to its knees. I suppose I can blame some of that on the poor quality of Windows Me...but there's more.

The Lexmark 1100 came along at a time when cartridge prices went up, often above the cost of the printer, and these cartridges were steep, even at Sam's Club. The fact that it burned through the ink faster than any printer I've owned - even at low quality draft - was not a good sign. In 6 months I spent about US$120 in ink (two cartridges) doing mostly normal printing and only a few photos. Then, one day, the 1100 just quit printing properly - random streaks of green and blobs of other colors would cover huge chunks of the page despite changing the cartridge and cleaning/aligning the print nozzle & print heads.

As soon as I could afford to, I put it away and bought a new HP. The other day, I needed this unsellable thing and dragged it out again. It reminded me of the other problems inherent in the hardware. When you load a page, no matter how hard you try, it always jinks it to the left, then back to the right, zig-zagging it into place and increasing the chance your page will get mangled. Sometimes it'd auto-feed and not recognize that the page was loaded, requiring me to eject the page and try again. It also pulls two or even three sheets at a time, wasting paper and messing up the feed of the next page.

Ever since owning this I've avoided Lexmark's products entirely. It's the most disappointing, poorly-built and badly-supported (sometimes you have to use the 1000 drivers to get it to work) piece of hardware this side of the CueCat.

...this was a great printer. I had no problems using it. As time goes on, Lexmark has put out much better printers. Like everyone else, they upgrade the features of newer models. If I were buying my FIRST printer and wanted something simple..this would be it. However, as of the date of this review, Amazon is offering it at $++. That is toooooooo high of a price for a printer that has been out for years. As much as I LOVE Amazon, I would recommend you buying it elsewhere for about $30.00.

Unfortunately, the reviews below are spot on... I have the same complaint for the SMC2804WBRP-G -- the print server does not work well (I bought it for the print server). Per the recommendation below, I changed the Idle Time Out to 0 (in the SMC SYSTEM Password Settings page). Some improvement printing to my HP LaserJet, though inconsistent and it depends on the size/complexity of the file. The print server is VERY, VERY slow, hence the time out issue. The router will suddenly drop the internet connection sometimes when trying to print. Annoying. Customer service is quick to answer, helpful, though sometimes it is a challenge to effectively understand each other.

Strangely, printing seemed to work OK for me for a couple months. Then it died. Now, it prints about the top 2" of any documents and then printing stops. Sometimes the router needs to be rebooted to regain Internet access, but sometimes not.

I've tried upgrading firmware, to no avail -- even including some of the beta firmware versions floating around.

Otherwise, seems to be an OK router. But don't count on this baby as a print server.

After reading the reviews of this router, I was a little nervous purchasing it for a friend of mine. He specifically wanted printer server capabilities and many of the reviewers stated they had problems with getting the print server to work correctly and/or reliably. Other routers with print servers were $50-$100 more expensive (and reviews also indicated various problems printing), so we decided to purchase this one from Fry's electronics, confident that we could return if it had problems. I have one of SMC's original routers (the 7004WBR - with a parallel port print server) and it's worked reliably for the last 3.5 years ( I paid ~$299 for it back then, the price of early adoption).

My friend also wanted to go wireless with 2 notebook PC's, so we also purchased two SMC wireless cards. One of the notebook PC's was a relatively new Dell Inspiron, while the other was an old IBM A20 with just 128M RAM, 10G HD and a ~500 MHz CPU. Both the Dell and amazingly, the IBM had Windows XP running.

Installation of the router was fast and easy. Per the quick start manual, I installed the software from the CD, then checked the "wired" capability to the Dell. I was able to log into the router and check the settings. I did not change anything from the default (including security) before installing the wireless cards. Those too went quick. I was surprised there were no real problems with either PC. One reboot later and both notebook were wireless. I enabled some of the security features (WPA, discard pings from WAN, MAC Address filtering) and left the rest untouched.

The last task to do was to install and configure the print server. I had to pull up the full manual for this as I remember the process was involved for my old SMC router. This is not in the quick start guide. Following the instructions word for word, I set up the print server. Several "wizards" and related windows come up during the process, but manual is pretty easy to follow. My friend had a HP deskjet 940c, which was on of the many HP printers on the list. In fact, the list of "configurable" printers seemed very comprehensive. We printed a few documents without problems. The printer seems to print the last page first now, but otherwise worked fine. I set up both computers to print to the SMC print server and tested several documents. No problems.

Some reviews have mentioned reliability and the need for reboots as a problem. Well I cannot say one way or another as I just installed it, however my older SMC 7004 WBR has lasted almost 4 years with no reliability problems.

I gave it 5 stars because after only about 1 hour of setup I had both computers wireless and using the SMC print server without any problems at all. My friend was very impressed. I showed him some "cool" multimedia links (www.ifilm.com) and we watched a few movie trailers wirelessly from the kitchen. He was impressed and very thankful.

I'll update the review if I get a "support" call from him.

Purchased several, had problems each time I tried to install. Poor support. I do NOT recommend. never did get to work with XP!

Compared to comparable label printers this unit is a bargain at [$$$]The product concept of combining a hard plastic Mouse Pad and a Label Printer is STRANGE to say the least. But fortunately you can remove the useless mousepad.

Software is also quirky (you are advised to download the latest software FA-B30 from the Casio website which does support XP)

In it's default state after the software is installed it takes over the right mouse click context menu so that you can print
make labels out of whatever text that is currently selected instead of the normal right context menu for the application. (I'm not sure why they did not just add this function to the existing menu instead of taking over) - This feature can be disabled by properties.

The software is actually quite friendly in many ways, it shows the preview of the labels being printed, there are some pre defined BMP images that can be inserted to the labels, it even allows you to caputure a part of screen and insert it to the labels. The user interface is not very intuitive but I'm not complaining at this price.

All in all this is a useful printer at a bargain price

1. Got it at Fry's for only 14.99
2. It is overpriced at Amazon.com around $28.
3. It is cheap because Casio is only giving you
the printer and a USB cable. It costs Casio more to
manufacture the input keyboard associated with the
label printer.

Good product.