Brother MFC-6490CW A3 Multifunction Printer with Scan/Copy/Fax , Network, Wireless and 3.3 inch Colour LCD

I looked around a great deal before buying this machine for my little one-person publishing business, but after a few months of using it I really wish I had spent more to buy a better quality machine. Having said that, the scan quality is unbelievable. My previous scanner was a professional LinotypeHell, but amazingly this was well up for it on quality. The software options were very good as well. The first job I did on it was to scan a 200+ pp book for a reprint. I had already tried it on a couple of HP scanners, one part of a multifunction, the other a dedicated flatbed which is excellent for OCR scanning, but the results were unusable because they were greyscale scans, which made the page background off-white with text less than pure black. On the Brother I was able to do a black and white bitmap scan for the pages, then a second scan greyscale for photographic images, and put the whole thing together on QuarkXpress. Sounds longwinded but I was delighted to see, when the books came back from the printers, that I had an excellent quality result. So 5 stars for the scanning - it's beyond anything you have any right to expect for a machine of this price.
Considering that Brother have done such an excellent job with the scan facility, it is crazy that a company which is basically a printer manufacturer has done such a lousy job with the printing. I am fortunate not to have had (so far) some of the feed problems people have complained of in reviews, but the print quality is just so poor - you could buy an A4 machine for £30 with infinitely better print quality than this. The main job I wanted from the printer was posters featuring images of book covers. Text printing is fine, but the image printing is just sub-standard, even with hires images. I spoke to Brother about this and sent their tech guy my printout and the file. He printed it on the same machine his end and said the quality was the same, though he did say he got better quality by printing on inkjet paper. This is a higher quality print option but it is a real fiddle to get it because it only works on Tray 1 (and I don't recall seeing that in the documentation!). You usually have A3 paper in Tray 2, which means you have to switch the trays AND change the set-up manually so the machine knows you have done this. Then of course you have to change it all round again afterwards. I didn't have the time to mess around so I printed the poster A4 on an Oki laser and copied it A3 on the Brother. This gave better quality, but I could have done that for 10p down the local copy shop without spending the price of this machine. It is very disappointing that Brother have put out a printer of such poor quality. No stars at all for the printing.
If you want this machine for the A3 scan facility, and aren't bothered about printing, then I would highly recommend this machine. You wouldn't get a better A3 scanner for this money, or probably even a fair bit more. But if you primarily want an A3 graphic printer you would be wasting your money on this machine, because the image printing is not good. I doubt I will ever buy another Brother machine.
PS. I have just finished the wireless set-up - almost four months after buying the machine. Its a nightmare - unless you know the configuration source, communication mode, authentication type, encryption mode and WEP key off the top of your head! I set up an HP wireless printer yesterday in 10 minutes. This machine literally took 10 hours. Eidiculous! Its about time Brother got its set-up software into the 21st century.

I have bought one of these six months ago and it immediately began mis-feeding sheets, taking two three or more sheets, often staggering them and printing across several sheets. Paper jams were also frequent. After two months I sent it back for repair but was told there was nothing wrong with it. The supplier did, however, replace it with another sample of the same model. This started out quite well, with only the occasional mis-feed, but has deteriorated steadily, and all the old problems returned. It is now totally unreliable apart from simple prints on thin paper form tray2 - and even then mis-feeds occur. I really regret buying it.

Excellent. Bought this recently, plugged it in on my Cat5 network, followed the instructions and there it sat on the network, working prefectly on both Windows 7 and XP and Vista machines on the same network.
Good quality prints on A4 and A3. I use it for drawings and wiring diagrams on A3 and it's very good.