Review: Brother MFC-790CW Color Inkjet All-in-One Wireless Networking Printer
Pros: Easy to Setup/Use, Great Quality Picture Printing, Wireless, and Attractive Touch Screen
Cons: Scan Quality, Large Size, and Tendency to Jam If Paper Settings Off Slightly
The Brother MFC-790CW All-in-One Wireless printer gives your home or office all it needs for around $170.00. Despite the rather large size and what I considered poor scanning quality, this all-in-one printer is one of the best options for its price range. Overall, the MFC-790CW provides all the essentials you would except from a printer, with nice added features like a 4.2-inch color LCD touch screen, media drive slots (for photo prints), and a 4-cartridge ink system (allows changing only the colors that need replaced).
Main Features from Manufacture’s Web Site:
• 4.2” TouchScreen Color LCD Display. Easily navigate through the menu by selecting items on screen. Plus, preview faxes, preview/enhance/edit photos and view help menus.
• Built-in Wireless (802.11b/g) and Wired (Ethernet) Interfaces. Allows you to share the all-in-one to print, scan, PC Fax and access your digital camera media cards slots or USB flash memory drive.
• Digital Answering Machine. Holds up to 29 minutes of messages/ 99 messages, full duplex speakerphone and corded handset.
• Fast Color Printing on Demand. With speeds up to 33ppm black and 27ppm color. ‡
• High Quality Printing. With droplet sizes as small as 1.5 picoliters and resolutions as high as 6000 x 1200dpi.‡
• Unattended Fax, Copy or Scan. Up to 15-sheet auto document feeder.
• Send and Receive Faxes. Hi-Speed Super G3 33.6K bps fax modem allows black and white or color faxing with or without a PC.
• Direct Photo Printing on Demand. Print photos directly from your digital camera’s media card slots, PictBridge-enabled camera, or USB Flash Memory Drive.‡
• Flatbed Copying and Scanning. Easily copy and scan books, thick or odd shaped documents.
• 4-Cartridge Ink System. Only change the cartridge that needs to be replaced.
• Energy Star Qualified.
Additional Resources:
• Product Brochure
• View Demo
My Experience from Setup to Printing:
Printer Setup – Within about 30 minutes, I had this printer completely setup and configured for our wireless network. The directions were very easy to follow and for the most part, aren’t even needed. My first impression of the touch screen was that it’s very easy to navigate, but appeared to be lacking a certain richness that in my opinion would really make it pop. Setting up the printer through the touch screen was easy and straightforward. For most of the settings, the default is what you want anyways, and really the only things that needed changing was the date/time etc. Installing the 4 cartridges was incredibly simple. A nice feature on the touch screen as well software for the computer, is a cartridge gauge that indicates how full each separate cartridge is.
Wireless Setup - Setting up the wireless network was probably as complex as this printer gets, but still relatively easy. I switched the network settings to wireless and ran the auto wizard. Within seconds the printer found my home’s wireless connection as well as three of my neighbors. I then had to enter the WEP key to access my network (if you don’t know this number, you can get it by logging into your router). My WEP number is really long, but it was easy to type in—it’s similar to text messaging on your phone. After typing in the key, I could see the status signal on the touch screen displaying the strength of the connection and after about five minutes, the setup was complete.
Printer’s Software – I then installed the software and drivers that came with the CD, which required a reboot. The application software is relatively light compared to some printer software packages. Through the software, I could changed the settings of the printer through the wireless network just like on the physical printer itself, which is a neat feature.
Printing Text Documents - The first thing I printed was a rather large .PDF file. I chose this because some printers take a long time to process .PDF files, the MFC-790CW had no trouble with it at all. There was a couple second delay before the print job started, but it printed each page of only text in about 5 seconds per page, which isn’t fast by any means, but not annoying slow either. The quality was what you expect from a black and white print job.
Photo Printing – I then put two photos taken with my digital camera into Microsoft Word to cover most of one page and put in high quality paper to test the speed and quality of colored photo copies. It was relatively slow for both pictures to print, it took about three and half minutes. I was very pleased with the quality of the photos once printed however—not a whole lot different from those you have printed at Target.
I then took my memory card out of my digital camera and plugged it directly into the front of the printer (nice feature for photo printing) and I could then see all of the pictures on my camera through the touch screen. I selected one to print on glossy 4×6 paper and it took about 90 seconds to print. Again, I was very pleased with the quality of the print job and so was my wife, she took the picture I printed of our dog to work to put on her desk : ) A nice added feature is that the printer’s software has a lot of options to enhance pictures before printing, for example taking out red eyes. Printing from photos I had on my PC was pretty slick and there was no quality loss. Even though pictures are color intensive, the printer processed the photo as quickly as a simple word document.
Copying/Scanning – The copying function worked as advertised. The quality was good and because it starts printing before the scanning is complete, the process from start to finish was under 30 seconds. I wasn’t impressed with the scanning of this printer. The overall quality of the image I scanned wasn’t the best. The colors in the picture were weak with small lines throughout the picture, almost like it had an emboss effect. Although, it was pretty cool to scan an image in our loft and have it wirelessly appear on our laptop downstairs.
Additional Opinions – When the printer is idle for a long period, the printer is put in standby, but printing to it wakes it up and starts the wireless network. This is a great feature that saves energy and money. I did notice that after printing about 20 4×6 color photo prints, the ink was surprisingly low already. If you plan on printing all of your pictures upon buying this printer, you’re going to need to buy additional ink cartridges, which are relatively cheap at about $10 a pop.
A nice feature to this printer is that there is a separate paper holder for 4×6 prints that you can leave paper in and toggle back and forth between normal and photo prints through the printing settings on your computer. At the same time, I thought for the size of the printer, it should be able to hold more sheets of paper. The document feeder only holds 15 sheets and the pain tray only holds 100 sheets. Lastly, I had this printer jam up on my quite a bit as I was printing random items. I noticed that it’s very important to make sure your paper quality in your settings is accurate to the paper you are using, if not, you will experience jams.
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Comments
What a great printer!
Features wireless & attractive touch screen, technology now a days are cool!
I have to get one of this wireless printer. Brother printer is one of a kind.
my printer do not print black or red ink. I have tried the cleaning, and change the ink.the test page do not print black or red. I need help
You did a great job in discussing the details and the features of this printer. Excellent review.