Brother MFC-9560CDW

works nicely

We're a small start up in Seattle. I'd say it's working fine.

We had to replace our dell, which broke after five years. Some of the functionality wasn't as easy as I'd like it to be out of the box, but once you set it up, it seems to work fine.

We have about 20 people in our company. So, it definitely meets our needs.

_

First Brother Laser MFC--WOW!!

I bought this MFC Laserjet for a client after exhaustive research and reviews of similar-featured products in a similar price class (~$500 - $750). Based on my install of the unit, client feedback, and my own research, I can confidently say the following about this MFC Laserjet:

1. Brother has the other printer brands outclassed in value, quality, ease of maintenance, and cost per page. This unit has more features, holds more paper, has better durability reviews, and cheaper toner than ANY other comparable machine anywhere near this price range! The most wonderful part about the maintenance is that the 4 toner cartridges(of which you can buy extra-large capacity) rest inside the drum unit. The drum unit simply slides out when you open the front panel and grab it! The paper tray is a good capacity, duplexing capability is included, can also scan and fax legal size paper in color through the top ADF. I could go on...

2. Between the toner prices and the ability to buy extra-capacity cartridges, Brother's cost-per-page for black prints is only about 1.8 cents/page + cost of paper (drum replacement at 25,000 page duty cycle factored in!), and color is only about 2.9 cents/page + paper!! Real figures based off current Amazon toner and drum pricing.

Must have for Small Office or Home Office

I purchased this product, because I need something that can print and scan legal size paper. But this product exceed my expectation, because after using it for a few weeks, I realized it has all the functions that a big printer / copier in my office have. It also scan both side of the paper in one pass. If you need an all in one MFC that can print and scan things that are bigger then 8.5 x 11, then this is the product for you.

Pretty Good Machine, but...

There's a lot to like about the MFC9560CDW. It prints well, faxes well, and makes good copies fast. We love the wireless feature so it's a snap to network it to our all Mac office. But....the product literature says that it will print from iPads, iPhones, and the latest iTouch. Nope. According to Brother, they have drivers for "some" of the MFC printers to do that, but not this one. Finding that out took me both emails to customer support AND talking to a support person on the phone. A big waste of my time because Brother is lame and lazy about accuracy in their product literature. Worse, inferring from what I gathered from the web and the support dude, the necessary driver will come out on the 14th of Never.
A disappointment and a blot on an otherwise good product.

Happy with it for my home office

Pros: Color laser, fairly painless setup, near-excellent printouts, great price (at C*stco), duplex scanning and printing, wireless
Cons: Somewhat slow from the time I hit "Print" to the time pages start getting spit out. That said, once it starts spitting out pages, it's very fast.

Overall: The best multi-function printer I've owned yet. Nearly perfect.

Paper Curl Problem

When my HP printer died, I bought the Brother MFC9560cdw. It was highly recommended by someone who does a lot of printing and seemed to have good reviews on other sites.

The pros:
The printer is quiet and prints fast. The color is decent and the set-up was easy. I'm not really using the wireless because my computer guy said it would slow things down.

The con:
Under the high quality setting, the paper comes out curled at the top. I needed to print out materials for a presentation and planned on getting it bound at Kinkos. When the pages came out curled, I thought, "no big deal" they'll flatten out. Not the case. When I took them to Kinkos, they even commented about the curl and suggested I first try and flatten the pages before binding them. So, I placed them on my conference room table with books on each page. The next morning, they were still curled. I called Brother and we did some quick trouble shooting - mainly to make sure I had selected the "no curl" option. Why would anyone want one? I had, so they suggested it could be the paper, however, the paper was brand new bond and flat out of the box. Apparantely on the high quality setting, the heat curls the paper.

Initial Review

If had to describe this multifunction device in one word it would be "incredible". Since this is a fairly complicated device I will not be able to cover all uses of it but hope to give people some useful information regarding it. This is somewhat brief review on usage since I just received it but want to inform people of my initial impression.

Background:
This MFC device is going to be used by Mac OS X systems that are connected to the local network via ethernet and Wi-Fi. The MFC is connected to this network via Wi-Fi through an Apple Airport Express Base Station. I am hoping to replace both a Canon CanoScan 8600F scanner and Canon Pixma Inkjet printer.

Size, Weight, & Packaging:
The box it comes in is fairly large and heavy. The location of the "handles" built into the box is designed for two people to pick it up and I would highly suggest having two people carry it. I managed to carry into the house myself but it was extremely awkward and difficult to do. Opening the box the printer is fairly well protected with formed styrofoam pieces. The weight of the machine by itself is almost 60 lbs. You will need fairly large areas to place this device. The actual desk space it takes up is 16"W x 19"D. The manual however recommends an additional 4 inches of air space on the left and right side and approximately 10" at the back. The height of this device with the scanner lid fully open is 36". I currently only have 26" of clearance so the lid does not open all the way. Once you get the device out of the box you now you get to spend the next 10-15 min removing all the packing tape and material! There is at least 20 pieces of blue plastic tape and plastic orange pieces protecting the device during shipment that must be removed before turning on the device.

Drivers:
For Mac OS X the drivers are installed automatically as soon as you "add" the printer from any Print dialog. The operating system will download the drivers over the internet and also be kept up-to-date via the normal built-in Mac OS X software update mechanism. I assume drivers are on the included DVD as well in case you don't have internet access.

Initial Setup:
I wanted to setup this device on a Wi-Fi network. It also supports USB and ethernet connections. One word of WARNING, the Wi-Fi on this printer only supports 802.11b/g. This means if you have your wireless access point set to only support 802.11n like I did you will never be able to get this device to access the Wi-Fi network. I had to switch my Airport Base Station back to supporting 802.11 b/g as opposed to just 802.11n. This results in a slower connection for all wireless devices since the base station switches to using the slowest wi-fi connection type that any of its clients are using. This would not be an issue for "dual-band" wireless access points such as the dual-band Airport Extreme base station.

The easiest way to connect the MFC-9560CDW to your wireless network is with the "automatic wireless mode". If your wireless access point supports this you simply tell the MFC to use this mode and it will automatically get the information it needs to connect to your wireless connection including password. To do this with an Apple Airport device you need to use the Airport Utility program and select Manual Setup from the Base Station menu. Once you select that you can then choose "Add Wireless Clients..." from the Base Station menu. This will then allow you to use the "automatic wireless mode" or AOSS that the MFC-9650CDW supports.

Printing:
Color photos printed from the MFC-9560CDW appear to me to rival that printed from the Canon iP4500 and is an order of magnitude faster.

Faxing:
I have not attempted to use this yet.

Copying:
Copying works as expected. I've copied book pages without needing any interaction with a computer. Simply place the facing book page on the scanner/copying glass and press the Copy button. You have options on the LCD to adjust size, contrast, etc. The lid is hinged such that a 2" book had no problem copying while still keeping the scanner lid flat. It should easily take thicker books but haven't checked how thick it can handle while still keeping the lid flat.

Scanning:
Scanning is supported wirelessly from Mac OS X using the ImageCapture application that comes with Mac OS X. Basic differences between the Canoscan I currently use is: the MFC-9560CDW can not scan legal size documents on the flatbed (the MFC-9970CDW can) and the CanoScan comes with plastic devices allowing you to easily scan photo negatives. I have used the scanning feature now a number of times and being able to scan wirelessly is quite remarkable. In ImageCapture the Brother MFC instantly shows up as a Shared device even when it is "asleep" (uses 9 watts when sleeping). Scanning at 100 dpi for black and white text documents is fast and produces small file sizes. A full page scan at 1200 dpi will take considerably longer then the 100 dpi scan and produce a file a couple hundred megabytes in size. I scanned a color magazine's front cover and you can easily pick out the individual ink drops of the magazine cover when zooming in on the scanned image.

Documentation:
The documentation was fairly thorough and had separate instructions for use in Mac OS X and Windows where needed. One thing I did not care for with the instructions is that you may need to reference multiple separate documents to find the information you are looking for. There was a Quick Setup Guide, Basic User's Guide, a PDF file of a Network Users Guide, and others. If everything goes well you should only need to refer to the Quick Setup Guide and later the Basic User's Guide.

Compared to the MFC-9970CDW:
You should compare this model to the MFC-9970CDW at Brother's website to fully see the differences but the main ones are: MFC-9970CDW supports legal size document scanning on the flatbed (9560 scans legal documents with the automatic document feeder only), has color touch screen, higher monthly duty cycle, 50 page automatic document feeder as opposed to 35, slightly faster printing and copying. Had I realized all the differences listed above before ordering this I would have purchased the MFC-9970CDW instead.

What's in the Box:
Besides couple manuals, warranty, CD with more documentation, the box include a power cord and telephone cable for the fax. There is no USB cable or ethernet cable if you are going to use that instead of the wireless to connect the device. The toner cartridges are pre-installed in the machine.

Toner cartridges:
The toner cartridges included are not starter ones but they also aren't the "high yield" versions either. The black is rated at 2500 pages, and the 3 color ones rated at 1500 pages each. For replacement cartridges you can purchase high yield black rated at 5000 pages, and the color ones at 4000 pages.

Power usage:
On a "cold" startup it (power switch was off) fluctuates from less then 20 watts to 970 watts for around 30 seconds. After that with LCD lit and waiting to instantly perform any function it stays at a steady 11 watts. I have it set to go into sleep mode after 2 minutes of inactivity (time until sleep is user configurable). When it goes to "sleep" is uses a steady 9 watts. There is also a Deep Sleep mode. It will not go into deep sleep mode however if you have the wireless network activated on the device. The manual mentioned this only happens for the MFC-9560CDW only but it isn't clear from the manual if that means the MFC-9970CDW goes to deep sleep even with a wireless network activated or what.

Update 01/31/11: Added What's in box, toner cartridges, more copying info, driver info.
Update 02/20/11: Added power usage and more scanning info
Update 08/19/11: Have been using it all this time and still no issues. It does not get used daily.
Update:12/30/11: Still no issues but found out the automatic document feeder does allow you to scan legal size documents! The flatbed does not (unlike the MFC-9970CDW)