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The print quality of the MFC-5890CN is fair, but not exciting. Black text is reasonably clean though there are some signs of feathering into the paper, which is slightly odd, as in other places ink coverage is light, with some serifs left barely attached to their strokes. This is clearly visible under low magnification, but even to the naked eye the text looks fragile.
Good colour output - but fragile-looking text
Colour graphics are good, with smooth areas of solid colour and good registration of black text over coloured backgrounds. Colours are a little pale compared with those on-screen and those from a colour photocopy are more so, but our sample photos reproduced well, in the lighter hues. Dark colours, such as those in areas of shadow, merge to black in places, though detail throughout is good, thanks to the machine’s high resolution of 1200 x 6000dpi. Overall, results are workable, but not as good as from the likes of Canon and HP.
Scans from the machine’s flatbed or its ADF reproduced well, though colours again ended up lighter than the originals. The scan resolution is 1200 x 2400ppi, high enough for scanning photo prints, but there are no facilities for transparency scans.
Decent cartridge costs
The only consumables are the four ink cartridges and they are each available in two capacities, with the black cartridge running at 450 or 900 ISO pages and the colour ones at 325 or 750. These yields result in page costs of 2.0p and 5.4p for black and colour prints, respectively, using the more economic, higher yield cartridges. These costs are good for an inkjet in this class, with the colour cost one of the lowest we’ve seen in a while.
Verdict
If you need the facility to print A3 pages, this machine can save you around £70 over the full A3 scanning and copying model. It produces reasonable print, but not nearly as quickly as Brother would have you believe. ®
More Printer Reviews...
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Lexmark C543DN |
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Samsung ML-1630W |
Brother MFC-5890CN
COMMENTS
My $0.02
I recently purchased the mfc-6490cw. The only difference between the mfc-6490cw and the reviewed model is the mfc-6490cw has 2 paper trays (150 sheet and 250 sheet).
For a small office or home network, this is not a bad printer. I love it for having an large format ADF scanner. I couldn't find a stand alone large format scanner that was anywhere near this price point.
To answer the 9 questions above (based on the mfc-6490cw):
1 - yes
2 - yes
3 - have not tried
4 - ink level
5 - about 35 MB on my last install
6 -nope
7 - nope
8 - Don't know. I'm not the one who buys ink
9 - I forget.... not near the device now
The thing I love about this is that it works very well with Ubuntu. Brother provides nice easy to use drivers.
mac...
already a mactard.. and my epson rx640 still wanted to install a load of useless programming rubbish. I don't use it, and don't run it.
oh yes and out of the box the driver only supported maximum ink mode, can download a better one but out of the box useless.
N0 7. was aimed at Olivetti, where I have installed one of thier lumps of junk fro a relative, set up as a shared printer under windows.
peep 'a' prints on the laptop, to the printer on a desktop being used by peep 'b', peep 'b' can't work due to the full screen popup, still not worked that one out, surely its a background service?
frankly if a printer review doesn't include info on the refillability of the cartridges its a pointless review, since the running costs are a key statistic.
and for 'networkable' still trying to get round a wifi printer, where connecting to that means you loose the net. umm yeah cus thats useful.
Re: limitations
Agreed, these are all very valid questions. Safe for No.7 — get a Macintosh ;)
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