This is an editorial review of the Brother 8680DN all in one print/scan/fax/copy printer that we purchased and use daily.
As most Multiple-Function All-in-One printers, Brother’s multi-function MFC-8680DN LaserJet network printer is quite a monster size wise. It’s not extremely heavy per se but its quite a handful to carry around and is not a little all-in-one printer you want to have on your desk like your small deskjets.
The good news though is that it looks like a big heavy duty professional machine and it also functions like one! The automatic document feeder has been a great time saver for scanning, faxing, and copying.
An added pleasant surprise is that Costco not only had it on sale for a couple hundred dollars less than most places, but it also came not with a cheap starter toner cartridge but with a high yield toner cartridge. (Brother recommends TN-650 or TN-620 toner cartridges yielding up to 8,000 pages printed.)
My biggest and really only complaint is that I couldn’t figure out a way to get the bundled software to do OCR (optical character recognition) on pages I had already scanned as images, so if I wanted to convert the text on images to editable text, I had to rescan the documents and choose OCR. The reason that irritates me so much is that this missing feature is not a technical limitation, but likely Brother only licensed the OCR engine software to work only on active scans but its a real productivity killer sometimes not being able to do OCR on already saved image scans.
Back to the good stuff now, the printer was easy to configure on the network, Mac people will have no problems easily finding and printing to most Brother printers. It was also easy on the PC, for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and even Windows XP. Also, it spits out your pages pretty fast! (And yes the Scanner function is not like a xerox machine but its not bad at all in ten seconds or so , much faster than the old time scanners!)
We love using the Duplexing feature, saving tons of paper by printing on both sides of the page. Even when you put single sided pages in the 50-page automatic document feeder you can easily choose to copy them into duplexed format using the menu to choosing 2pages-to-one-page duplex mode.