Brother MFC-215C Review

With a 6-in-1 function, including useful and functional features such as printing, scanning, copying and faxing, you’d be tempted to think that at S$200 (RM460) (US$128), Brother’s MFC-215C colour multifunction printer, is the best value for money you could ever get.

Perhaps, after using the machine for nearly two years now, I should be able to give the product my informed two cents’ worth, in case someone with a budget limit of US$130, was thinking about buying a multifunction printer. First, the pros. Consider the features below which I cut-and-paste directly from Brother’s webpage:

Print Speed up to 20ppm (mono) and 15ppm (colour)
Print resolutions up to 1,200 x 6,000dpi
8MB standard memory
Up to 100 sheets paper capacity
14.4K bps, approximately 6 sec*
Up to 70 broadcasting locations
Up to 170 pages memory transmission / out-of-paper reception
Quick scan that approximately scans at 4.72 sec per A4 page
PC fax sending available for both Windows® and Macintosh®

*ITU-T Test Chart #1, Standard Resolution

This multifunction centre also has a PhotoCapture™ Centre where you can plug-in your popular memory cards such as the Compact Flash (both type I and II) and print direcly from there.

For home use and for a guy who rarely faxes from home and one who uses the machine for printing mostly black text, I find the machine reliable although the printing speed of 20ppm (page per minute) for monochrome and 15ppm for colour as claimed above, are only for the lowest printing quality. For the best printing quality you’d be lucky get 3ppm even for monochrome.

Anyway, that is not my complaint. I have no problem with that. I prefer to print at the lowest resolution setting anyway (which is still come out quite good) to save on the ink. The MFC-215C has four ink tanks — black, cyan, magenta and yellow. The black ink costs about S$32 while the other cost S$18 each.

In short, in general the machine works fine, photo printing quality is okay even on plain paper and I don’t really care about the scan or the copy speed. I don’t scan or copy often. Not even once in a week. But here’s my complaint:

“O Brother, Brother, why art thou created a machine that drinks its own ink as though its life depends on it?”

Here’s what Brother says in the MFC-215C’s user guide: “To ensure good print quality, the machine will regularly clean the print head. You can start the cleaning process manually if needed. [...] Cleaning the print head consumes ink. Cleaning too often uses ink unnecessarily”.

The problem is I did not clean the machine too often. The machine cleans itself automatically, too often and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

With Brother telling me “You can start the cleaning process manually if needed”, you might think that I can manually set the machine to clean itself as and when I tell it to do so. Alas, that is not to be the case.

The option to clean the print head manually is “over and above” the amount of cleaning ups the machine automatically does to itself. And each time it does so, it consumes — drinks — its own ink.

Here’s what I think the reason is. Partly its my fault. It’s the way I use the machine. Since I don’t use it to receive fax, I switch it off most of the time. Then each time I wanted to print something, I switched it on.

The thing is, upon switch on, the machine would automatically clean itself before it starts the printing job. The only way to go around it, is to leave the machine on, all the time like a fax machine does, and when you feel there’s a need to clean the print head, you can manually tell the machine to do so.

The machine also stops all printing operations when one of its ink tank running empty. Even if you only want to print black text documents, and you still have a full tank of the black ink, you won’t be able to print anything if one or all of the other three tanks run out of ink.

With the frequent automatic cleanings, you will eventually run out ink even if you have never used the machine to print documents in colour.

In conclusion, I do find the machine useful — you can do things with it as and when you need it; i.e faxing, scanning, copying and printing. The only problem is that it can run out of inks too soon too often because of the automatic cleaning of the print head. That is my only complaint. Otherwise, it’s a good machine for S$200.

Perhaps one last thing, perhaps no fault of Brother, I also found some compatibility issues between the MFC-215C and HP’s Compaq NX6125 notebook — it won’t “automatically” print a Microsoft Word document from a NX6125, at least in my NX6125 anyway.

You can still print the document by long process — first you send the document to the MFC-215C and then reboot your NX6125. When the NX6125 finished loading Windows, the MFC-215C will kick to life and print the document. You have to do that each time you want to print a Word document from NX6125. There’s no problem printing other documents such as pictures, scanned documents, Wordpad or Notepad documents.

So, those of you who own the NX6125, you might want to take note of this.

So, if you have the money to buy the ink tanks on a regular basis or able to tolerate the waiting time for the cleaning up of the print head — which takes up to four minutes — then perhaps this machine is just the right one for you. As for me, it’s a love-hate relationship.

Which multifunction machine I would like to recommend? It really depends on the budget. But if you let me know the model and the make of the multifunction printer you had in mind, then probably I can share with you what we can expect from the machine.

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