Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

I’m a bit biased on this, so just a precaution.

We needed a new MFP to replace our aging fax, and so we purchased a Brother MFC-9420CN. My first impressions of this device weren’t really good. At first, it lacks a good display (HP’s M3027 is really good on this). This makes using the device much more complicated than it ought to be.

The biggest advantage of the MFC-9420CN is the fact that it is a color laser, with a rather low price point of around 1000 CHF. At this price point, it’s of course a multi pass laser and prints about 9 color pages per minute. Copying and faxing works, through network integration here is almost non-existant. You can’t fax through a web interface, there is no LDAP integration to lookup mail addresses for scan2email or fax numbers, you can’t scan to folders. Not active directory integration for authentication either.

If you have look to the right, you’ll find a screenshot of the web interface of Brothers MFC-9420CN. It doesn’t look current. In fact, even the copyright notice clearly shows that it’s not current. Add to that page load times of several seconds, a very convulated page structure and few available settings (much less than ever smaller HP printers like the CLJ2605) clearly shows that this device has aged badly.

I even checked Brothers Website to see if they have a firmware update available, but they don’t. At least they have drivers for Vista, but they also look rather outdated, and are not signed (though Brother claims that they’re WHQL certified). If you look to the right side, you’ll see a comparison screenshot between the driver for the HP CLJ 4700 and Brothers 9420. While HP took care to make their driver look polished (it’s the only software the end users will ever see), Brother’s drivers looks outdated (especially the 256 color graphic of the device).

There is no address book or even LDAP interface for sending e-mails - thus sending mails requiring you to type in the adress using a standard number block, similar to typing SMS on a mobile phone. HP’s M3027 provides you with a keyboard on it’s mighty touchscreen display, while Brothers device requires you to spend minutes trying to type up a single mail address.

Copying and faxing works fine, but the whole network integration barely exists. I think this is a huge disadvantage of this device. Even though Brother advertises it’s device as being network integrable, Brother’s device massively fails at this point.

This doesn’t make it a bad device. For 1000 CHF, you can get a color laser printer that can be used to print over the network, and can also act as a fax and a copier. While HP’s devices offer much more functionality, they’re only b&w and more expensive. As such, there is a certain market for Brother’s device.

I’m still disappointed though, because i expected Brother to put up more of a fight - it wouldn’t be hard to fix the cosmetical issues, offer appropriately signed drivers, and integrate more functionality into the device.