Brother MFC-210C All-In-One InkJet Printer

I have had my MFC-210C for around a year now and have been fairly pleased with its capabilities. I have used it to scan items, print pictures and text, copy pages, and load digital pictures onto my computer. When I bought my printer I was looking to replace my scanner also and decided to try out an all-in-one. I read some reviews and heard great things about brother, like how little ink they use, and how affordable they are.

Scanner
As a scanner the 210C is adequate for the casual user but lacks some of the features and settings that most of the more advanced stand alone scanners typically have. I found it a little bit of a challenge to adjust the settings from the not so intuitive command center, and really missed other options that my old sheet-fed stand-alone had. While trying to scan three-dimensional objects the scanner really caused quite a few headaches. It took several attempts and adjustments to achieve satisfactory results.

Printer
If all you print is text and graphics and maybe the occasional low grade photo, you will be very pleased with the brothers abilities. It produces crisp black text and good quality graphics at a fairly fast speed. Pictures on the other hand are of a marginal quality but still print at a decent speed. Stated printing speeds for this model are up to twenty pages per minute for black, and up to fifteen per minute for color. Printer options are somewhat more user friendly than the scanner options and offer a more diverse range of selection. With a little exploration I was soon able to find most of the settings to fit my needs for a variety of different printing projects. While printing does guzzle ink, you should be able to find the cartridges for a reasonable price.

Copier
Copying with the 210C was simple and straightforward. It does a good job copying in both color and black & white, with only a slightly reduced color copy time. The only exception to a good copy being not so "photo-quality" photos. Again, ink consumption is quite high.

Media Card Reader
With a built in media card reader, you don't even have to turn on the computer to print out pictures from a digital camera. Convenient yes, but not quite appealing after purchasing the first few ink cartridges. I found it a lot cheaper to just take the media card to Wal-Mart and use one of the photo kiosks to print pictures. The card reader is nice however to load the pictures onto your computer.

Conclusion
When all is said and done the brother MFC-210C is a well packaged space saving design, as are most all-in-ones. It produces good, but not great, quality for a reasonable price. Although some of the components seem to be very cheap and flimsy, I have not had any serious problems. Except for the occasional paper jam the MFC-210C has served me well. As for ink, shop around and you can find all four cartridges for under thirty dollars.