» Brother DCP-7020 Laser Digital Copier/Printer

Brother DCP-7020 Laser Digital Copier/Printer Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: not for office use
Comment: This is great for people who don't use a printer very often. Basically, this is a toy. It works fine until its first paper jam, and then you're in for some "fun". Allow yourself 30 minutes to figure out that the error message you are getting ("BACK COVER OPEN") has nothing to do with the back cover actually being open, because it isn't. . . . Get it ? If you need a printer for "adult" use (medium to heavy), buy something else. Otherwise, this is fine.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Good for the price, but some flaws
Comment: I chose this for the price, mainly, and there are some things that you have to deal with in exchange for its low cost. First, when you print multiple pages, they get gummed up in a hurry (less than 10 pages will do it) and your document comes out in a mangled mess on the floor. You therefore have to be present for each print job and take each page out as it comes. Also, I have a Mac and had some serious confusion on how to get it to scan and to where on the computer the file arrived. Customer support was friendly (but a long, long wait for Mac customers) and got the problem solved.

All in all, it's solid, but with shortcomings.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Cheap product for not-so-cheap price
Comment: We purchased our brother printer less than two months ago. From the get-go, we had issues, but mostly when we tried to use cardstock. The printer/copier consistently jams, and yesterday the paper feeder broke completely. Customer service has been non-responsive.

The price was cheap, but not that cheap. Other printer/copier/scanners in the same price range do not self-destruct within six weeks

I do no recommend this nor this company.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Super Value
Comment: I've had my Brother Printer/Scanner/Copier for over a year now. I like the software included with the scanner. The superb copies and speed make it a super value!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Awesome printer, copier, scanner; 4 cents a page
Comment: I was really surprised to see that this doesn't have a higher review. I needed a home office printer that provides:

+ laser quality and speed
+ standard office-quality photocopies
+ sheet fed scanning for OCR'ing and archiving documents
+ decent price

This met and exceeded my expectations on all points. Interestingly the most valuable part of the printer as priced is the toner and drum that it ships with. Here is my breakdown of the unit costs:

Toner: $45/2500 pages = 1.8 cents
Drum: $85/12000 pages = .7 cents
Paper: $4/500 pages = .8 cents
Printer (less drum & toner): $70/20000 = .35 cents

Total = 3.65 cents / page

Anyway, here's my response to the negative review that motivated me to add my 5 stars:

Okay, so what multi-function laser printer do YOU recommend that costs around $200 and prints high volumes at a cost of 4 cents per page?

I don't use mine to print envelopes, but while I can't say that your complaints are entirely off base, those issues never really bothered me:

+ It doesn't jam very often

+ Normally it's in sleep mode with a fast wake-up time when I do print. If you think that's loud, you should have been around when they had daisy-wheel printers!

+ I don't need to look at the display at an angle

+ I've photo-copied pages from books with no problem -- just turn down the contrast a notch or two

+ I never read the instructions, but it includes a nifty feature for double-side printing to prevent you from messing it double-sided copies

- It IS a bit of a pain to hit enter after every page scans. Hopefully they'll update the driver to allow multi-page scanning without interaction.

Overall, I think it's a fantastic printer that just reliably produces very fast, high-quality b&w printer and excellent scanning and copying for my purpose. It's also the price/performance leader for relatively low volume laser printers.

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