My experience with all-in-one style printers is fairly limited. I own an HP 950psc. It is an all in one scanner, copier, and fax machine. It has Macintosh support, but it has been spotty at best. Driver downloads are large and infrequent. When it came time to buy a new machine for office use, I decided to try a multifunction printer made by Brother.
Being a diehard Mac user, sadly, I am rather accustomed to software that is more of an afterthought than a priority for products of this nature. My experience with my HP may have been a black eye I have yet to recover from, but HP is a big name and I expect solid support from a company with that much influence. When I installed the drivers for the Brother MFC-210C, I was in for a very pleasant surprise. Not only does Brother provide Mac drivers, but they provide kick ass Mac drivers!
Whoever was in charge of this project at Brother really did an excellent job. Every shortcoming I have experienced with my HP has worked as well or better than I expected on the 210C.
Scanning:
The HP included support for scanning to my Mac. It even came with a TWAIN driver for Photoshop. Regardless of that, no matter how hard I tried, I could never get the cropping of the final scan to match that of the preview scan. It was amazingly frustrating. The Brother 210C also includes a TWAIN driver for Photoshop, and it works as I expect it to. In fact, there are many preferences available within the interface. And, even more importantly, the pre-scan matches the final product.
Going a step further, I always wished that I could simply sit in front of the scanner and scan page after page, without having to go to the printer each time and select scan. Since I am too cheap to spring for a multifunction printer with a document feeder, it seems like a reasonable feature. Not so with the HP 950. But when I tried it with the Brother 210C, it worked just like I had hoped. It did take me a few minutes to find the location of the scans on my hard drive, but when I though about it later, the location was only common sense. All of my scanned images were located in the Pictures folder inside of my home directory. And, since the 210C does not presume to automatically crop my scans for me, it simply saves the entire contents of the scanning bed to the JPEG file. I like that, as I would prefer to crop the scans myself to guarantee that none of the image is missed.
Printer Sharing:
OS X currently has a very simple but elegant network printer sharing option built-in. It lets users hook up inkjet printers that lack network support to a single Mac via USB. That Mac then acts as a print server by making that USB printer available to other Macs on the network via Printer Sharing.
I installed the Brother drivers on two other Macs on my network, and decided to give network printing a shot. As I had hoped, it worked like a charm! The $120 Brother MFC-210C did not offer direct network support, but it is compatible with Apple’s built-in printer sharing. And thanks to the USB 2.0 support on the printer, the print jobs come through just as quickly as they would if there were network jack built right into the printer.
Faxing:
I never had much of a problem faxing with the HP 950, so I expected nothing less of the Brother 210C. In the end, the Brother actually surpassed my expectations. Not only can I fax right from the front of the machine, as I can on the HP, but I can fax from the print dialog of any application on my Mac. Then, rather than sending the print job to the printer, it sends it to the 210C’s built in fax modem (via the Brother printer driver). Impressed with that functionality, I had to experiment a little. I sent a print job to the fax from another Mac on my network. To my surprise, the fax went out, over the network, via the 210C! I was extremely impressed. My HP could not touch that. I now have network wide fax support!
Another step ahead of my HP, the Brother offers up to 10 speed dial memory locations. This makes faxing even easier for those who send faxes to common locations. Even more impressive, the fax drivers also allow the same feature in software. Going a step further, it is even possible to send the same fax to multiple fax numbers via the fax drivers on the Mac. Simply enter a list of destination phone numbers into the fax dialog, and the printer will take care of the rest!
And for those who have already taken the Voice Over IP plunge, the Brother works great with my Vonage VoIP line.
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As much as I was impressed with the features of the Brother MFC-210C, and its Macintosh support, not everything did work properly. In limited testing of its OCR functionality, I was unable to get any kind of useful data from the printer/software. For those unfamiliar with OCR, it is an acronym for Optical Character Recognition. This means that software is actually able to take a scan and translate any text to a format that can be edited in any word processor. Not an uncommon feature these days. But I simply could not get the 210C’s drivers to give me any usable text. I am currently waiting for a response from Brother tech support. I am hoping there is already a way to resolve the issue. And, to be fair, the HP does not have any direct support for OCR in the first place.
With exception to the OCR scanning support, I found the software package that came with the MFC-210C to be exceptional. It was fast and responsive where my HP 950 was slow and kludgy. The printer itself is small and easy to use. The control panel on the front of the device provides easy access to computer independent features such as copying and faxing.
The printer offers a standard USB 2.0 interface that makes it both fast, and flexible. It is very easy to attach to any Mac or PC equipped with a USB port. The printer also offers 5 different slots for digital camera media cards. This allows easy printing of digital photos without the need to first import them into a computer. Since I would never print a photo without retouching it in at least some small way in Photoshop, this feature was nice but did not appeal to me.
Sadly, many printer manufacturers treat Mac users as second-class citizens. And, while I appreciate Macintosh support in any shape or form from printer vendors, I am impressed when I see a company go the whole nine yards and offer complete functionality to Mac users. I am impressed with nearly aspect of the MFC-210C, OCR support not withstanding. If Brother offers the same class of support on the rest of its printer line, I now have a new favorite printer manufacturer. HP could stand to examine its competition in this regard.
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Amazon.com is currently listing the Brother MFC-210C for $129.00. A $30 rebate is also offered. Click here for more information.
| Print: |
| Print Technology |
Color Inkjet Technology |
| Max. Black Print Speed (ppm) |
20ppm Black |
| Max. Color Print Speed (ppm) |
15ppm Color |
| Print Resolution (maximum dpi) |
Up to 6000x1200 dpi‡ |
| Borderless Printing |
Yes‡ |
| Standard Input Paper Capacity (sheets)‡ |
100-Sheet Input Capacity |
| Standard Memory (MB) |
8 MB Memory |
| Optional Memory (MB) |
No |
| Standard Interface(s)‡ |
USB 2.0 Full Speed Interface |
| Optional Interface(s)‡ |
NC-2200W (wireless print server) |
| Printer Driver Compatibility |
Windows® & Mac OS®† |
| Emulation(s) |
No |
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| Fax: |
| Faxing Capability |
B/W & Color Faxing |
| Fax Modem Speed |
14.4K bps Fax Modem |
| Telephone Handset |
No |
| Total Auto Dial Locations |
20 locations |
| PC Fax Capability (send/receive)† |
Yes (send only) |
| Fax Page Memory (Brother Test Chart #1)‡ |
Up to 200 page fax memory |
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| Copy: |
| Copying Capability |
B/W & Color Copying |
| Design Style |
Flatbed |
| Max. Black Copy Speed (cpm) |
17cpm Black |
| Max. Color Copy Speed (cpm) |
11cpm Color |
| Reduction/Enlargement |
25%-400% |
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| Scan: |
| Scanning Capability |
B/W & Color Scanning |
| Max. Interpolated Scan Resolution (dpi)† |
19,200 dpi‡ |
| Optical Scan Resolution (dpi) |
600x2400 dpi |
| Input Color Scan Bit Depth |
36-bit |
| "Scan To" feature† |
Email, Image, OCR, File |
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| Photo Capture: |
| PhotoCapture Center® Capability |
Built-in Digital Media Card Drives |
| Media Drive Compatibility |
Compact Flash®, SmartMedia®, Memory Stick®, x-D Picture Card™, and Secure Digital™ media cards. |
| Scan to Media Card Capability |
No |
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| Other: |
| LCD Size (characters/lines) |
16 characters/1 line |
| UPC Code |
0 12502 61083 0 |
| Warranty |
1 Year Limited |
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