The Pros and Cons of the Brother MFC 210C Printer

A good idea for anyone on a budget with the desire to get a functioning home office is to buy a used all in one machine.

Brother makes some of the least expensive and highest quality of these units. Brother is a good brand with affordable ink and long lasting products.

One nice starter to any new office is the Brother MFC 210C printer. This printer features a printing function, as well as a scanner, a copier, and a fax.

Let’s look at each function and see how it fares individually.

Print

The printing function works as well as any other printer. The quality is good enough to print off pictures and it does not take too long to print a page of text. For the price of this all in one device, its printing capabilities are top notch.

It uses Color Inkjet technology with a 4-cartridge ink system. Although this printer has been discontinued by Brother, and has come up with a newer model, the Brother MFC-290C, the inks are available online on sites like Amazon: the LC41BK Black Ink Cartridge at $9.51 per pack with a yield of 500 pages; the LC41C Cyan Ink Cartridge, LC41Y Yellow Ink Cartridge, and the LC41M Magenta Ink Cartridge – all at $4.99 per pack with 400 pages yield each cartridge. These inks are guaranteed smudge, fade, and water resistant.

Speeds are quite good at 20 pages per minute on maximum black draft printing, and 15 pages per minute on color, using maximum resolution up to 6000×1200 dpi. Capable of borderless printing for Letter, 4″x6″, 5″x8″, 5″x7″, A4, A6, 3.9″x5.8″ and 5.8″x7.8″ paper sizes, the MFC-210C has a standard input tray that can accommodate up to 100 sheets, and uses USB as standard interface with option for wireless printing with NC-2200W. It is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS with a maximum monthly duty cycle of 2500 printed pages.

Scan

The scanner on this printer works great. The software that comes with it allows you to scan to email, and to select various image formats to scan to your computer. You can choose between black and white and color as well. The quality of the scanned pages is exceptional and OCR software works fine with this scanner.

The maximum optical scan resolution is up to 600×2400 dpi, and interpolated scan resolution of up to 19,200 dpi. Software that came with the package includes Scansoft PaperPort® SE with OCR for Windows® and Presto!® PageManager® for Mac®. You may scan to Email, Image, OCR, and File saved into various file formats, i.e. TIFF, JPEG, BMP, MAX, HTM, PCX, DCX, PNG, FPX, and PDF.

Fax

Although I have not tested the fax out very much on this particular device, the couple of times that I did use it faxing was not that difficult. A few buttons pressed and my fax was on its way.

It is capable of B/W and Color faxing using a 14.4K bps Fax Modem speed, at approximately 6 seconds per page. A quick scan can be up to approx. 4.72 sec/page. The Brother MFC-210C has out-of-paper reception using a fax page memory that can accommodate up to 200 pages, and has PC fax capability as well on send only transmission.

Copy

The MFC-210C is capable of stand-alone B/W and Color copying on a flatbed, with speeds of 17 copies per minute on black and 11 copies per minute on color. The document glass size accommodates up to Letter/A4 only. It also has reduction and enlargement capabilities from 25%-400%.

Other Features

The PhotoCapture Center® Capability allows you to print off pictures from your camera directly using the Built-in Digital Media Card Drives on the front of the printer for accessing data. The maximum paper size is 8.5” x 14” or legal size. The unit measures 14.7″ x 15.7″ x 5.3″ (WxDxH) and weighs only 12.1 lbs.

Downsides

This all in one device is a great stepping stone in to office equipment. It will do everything you want it to even if it does not have all of the great features that some newer devices have.

It does not have an auto feed for the scanner or the fax machine. This can be very annoying when trying to scan a large number of papers because scanning takes around a minute a page. Sitting there swapping out the pages can be boring and tiresome but you get what you pay for. Although it will not scan a large stack of pages without you having to do anything, the pages that it does scan are very clear and detailed.

Another downside to this printer is the clean function. Even if you are not using the printer part of this product it will clean itself often and each time it does use a little more of your precious ink. In addition, when the ink has run out the machine will no longer function at all. If you try to scan or fax you will simply get ink error messages.

Summary

Overall, the Brother MFC 210C printer is a great device for its price. These days you can only get it used or refurbished for around $80. It will get done what you need it to do, and the results will be of good high quality.