The Brother MFC 3100c is a five-in-one inkjet machine. It can copy, scan, print, fax, and PC fax. Since this model has been discontinued, it may be difficult to find. The customer satisfaction rating for the MFC 3100c is only 37%, which is low. But there is a reason for this. The people who have been happy with the 3100c are those that knew they were buying a model with outdated features yet could still handle the basics and offer good value.
Hard to Find
If you were to find a used model you would be lucky as new ones cannot be found; those who jumped into buying the Brother MFC-3100C Inkjet Multifunction and expected features and stats that mirror today’s models were disappointed. The MFC 3100c isn’t a model you buy for high speed or high quality photo prints. It’s a model you should consider for home use. That said, I don’t want to sell this machine short. While the printer isn’t anything to brag about and the copier and scanner are decent, the fax machine is very impressive.
Click Here for Full Feature List and User Reviews
Basic Ability
The Brother-MFC 3100c can print up to 10 pages per minute black and 8 pages per minute color. This is slow. Prints can reach resolution as high as 2400 x 2400 dots per inch, which isn’t very high by today’s standards. Also, keep in mind that prints will take longer at higher resolutions. The copier can handle up to 99 copies at once. Resolution for copies can reach as high as 1200 x 1200 dpi.
Documents can be enlarged and reduced from 25% to 400%. The fax machine has 2MB of memory, has 40-station auto-dialing, can store up to 100 pages, can broadcast up to 90 locations, and at 14.4Kbps speed, it has the ability to fax one page every six seconds. Despite this printer being nearly a decade old, the fax function can definitely hang with fax functions on multifunction machines today.
There are a few other features for the Brother MFC 3100c that you should know about. One is that it has 100-sheet capacity. This is average today, making it an impressive number. This machine also has individual ink cartridges, so you will only have to replace the cartridge that runs out. This will help you save a lot of time, money and stress.
The MFC 3100c has parallel and USB interfaces and is PC and Mac compatible. There is a 20-page automatic document feeder, which will allow you to get more work done in less time. The Brother MFC 3100c comes with a 1-year warranty, although that might be difficult to find today.
There are a few negatives for the Brother MFC 3100c. The first negative is that this model has been discontinued, making it difficult to find and not offering you an opportunity to get help from customer service if you run into a problem.
Paper jams are an issue, but if you keep from putting the full 100 sheets in the input tray, you can greatly reduce this problem. Ink consumption is high, but not as high as for models today, so it’s debatable whether this should even be listed as a negative. Another negative is that some units have defective print heads, but it’s likely that those units have either been tossed or refurbished by this point in time.
If you ever see one advertised on line used then you would have got something simple to use at an extremely affordable price that certainly won’t over perform but would have suited a good many people’s requirement. Finding another old printer that is discontinued at a low price is rare. In fact in many cases they become a little more expensive as they become rarer.
Alternative Multi Function
So naturally I will lead you on to another discontinued model of the same ilk but sadly not as affordable but a far better performer. The Brother MFC-3360c Color Photo Inkjet All-in-One is another league performance-wise.
A brief rundown of its abilities and you will see you are getting more for your money. It prints at 25ppm black and 20ppm color. The resolution is 6000 x 1200 dpi with borderless printing and 100 sheet paper tray.
The copier can produce color with a resolution again of 6000 x 1200 dpi and can multi copy up to 99 documents with enlargement from 25% to 400% and you can go up or down 1%.
You can fax in color or black and white with a 20 page document feeder and faxes are delivered rapidly with the 33.6 Kbps Super G3 high-speed fax modem. You don’t require a PC and you can store up to 200 pages and 110-station auto dialing, and has a 16MB of total memory.
The scanner has color scanning at up to 19,200 dpi (interpolated) resolution, and up to 600 x 2400 dpi (optical) resolution. It has ScanSoft PaperPort SE with OCR Software for Windows and Presto! PageManager for Mac.
It has software that supports fax broadcasting from your PC, as well as network PC fax send and receive PC fax functionality compatible with Windows and Mac.
So why bring up another discontinued model? Well the price is right and a lot more ability than the MFC 3100 C. It can be found new for less than $200, which is not anything special by today’s multi function standards, but based on that figure a used model could possibly be found for about a third of that price. A much better performer than the MFC 3100C.
Watch this post in video format
loading...
About James Wikkee