Brother MFC-L8900CDW
It’s on the pricey side, but this versatile laser MFP has great quality, access controls and cloud support
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £538 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk
Brother’s MFC-L8900CDW laser is aimed at workgroups of up to five users – and even if they all have different needs, its versatility, speed and output quality should satisfy everyone. It’s well connected too, as it supports USB, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11n wireless, Wi-Fi Direct, AirPrint and NFC for tap-toprint services.
Scan, copy and fax functions are easy to use, thanks to a big 12.6cm colour touchscreen with clear icons. You can also customise the display by adding up to four extra screens, each offering eight shortcuts to predefined copy, scan or fax jobs.
The standard 250-sheet paper capacity will be fine for light printing duties, but if you need more it can be hugely expanded with an optional tower-style base unit that adds four 520-sheet cassettes. And although there are lots of consumables, running costs are reasonable. Once the supplied starter cartridges are exhausted, the super-high-yield versions work out to just 1.3p per mono page and 9.4p for colour.
Brother’s software package comprises a status monitor that lives in your system tray, a TWAIN driver, Brother’s ControlCenter4 (CC4) network scan and print utility plus Nuance’s PaperPort SE 14 OCR and document-management software. Installation is a piece of cake: the software installer immediately discovered the MFP on our network and loaded the driver and applications Windows 10 desktops.
It’s a decent driver too, allowing you to assign a security PIN to confidential jobs so they can only be released by entering the code at the printer. For more fine-grained access security, Brother’s Secure Function Lock 3 can be used to restrict public access, create lists of local users and dish out privileges.
You can also set up function profiles, which allow or deny access to print, copy and scan operations, set page limits, restrict colour printing and much more. The printer uses the logged-in user name at a PC to enforce security; our only gripe is that the driver doesn’t make it clear when a feature has been blocked by a security profile, which could lead to some confused support calls.
Cloud support is extensive, and easy to set up using Brother’s Web
“Black text is pin-sharp, even on cheap 75gsm recycled paper, and colour photos show good contrast and bright colours”
Connect portal. Simply choose from the eight supported providers, tap in your account details and enter the unique 11-digit code at the printer’s panel.
The CC4 app also lets you operate the scanner, so documents can be pulled in and converted to images, Office files or searchable PDFs. Alternatively, you can do it the other way, pushing scans from the MFP to any PC with CC4 installed.
The MFC-L8900CDW delivers good overall performance: our 31-page mono Word document was printed promptly in 60 seconds at both 600dpi and 2,400dpi x 600dpi interpolated resolutions. Colour printing is slightly slower: our 24-page colour DTP test document took 62 seconds at both resolutions, but the time to first page was never more than 10 seconds.
For double-sided printing there’s an integrated duplexer, but this halves the print speed, with a double-sided print of our Word test document averaging 15.5ppm. Copy operations using the scanner’s ADF were slightly faster with a ten-page single-sided copy coming out at 18ppm.
Output quality is great. Black text is pin-sharp, even on cheap 75gsm recycled paper. Mono photos also have plenty of detail; shaded areas at 600dpi had a slight cyan tinge, but this disappeared at 2,400dpi.
Colour photos are equally detailed, with good contrast and bright colours with almost no banding in large single-colour blocks. The scanner also gave good results with photos and glossy magazine covers, capturing plenty of detail and giving faithful colour rendition.
There’s a lot to like about Brother’s MFC-L8900CDW. It’s a highly versatile MFP that we found very easy to use. It isn’t the cheapest but it combines good speed and output quality with reasonable running costs, and provides a great set of access security and cloud features.
SPECIFICATIONS
600dpi A4 colour laser MFP 1,200 x 2,400dpi duplex colour scanner 800MHz CPU 512MB RAM 31ppm colour/mono 12.6cm colour touchscreen 2 x USB 2 Gigabit Ethernet 802.11n wireless NFC 33.6Kbps fax/modem 2 x RJ-11 duplex 250-page input tray 70-page ADF 50-page MPT average monthly cycle: 4,000 pages 495 x 526 x 549mm (WDH) 28.7kg 1yr on-site warranty RUNNING COSTS (EXC VAT) Extra-high-yield: K toner (9K pages), £98 C,M,Y toner (6.5K pages), £182 each; drum unit, (50K pages), £93 belt unit (130K pages), £38 waste bottle (50K pages), £15. Overall cost per A4 page: mono, 1.3p; colour 9.7p