I was looking to create a home-grown electronic document management system for my personal papers, which are piling up faster than I can cram them into my overstuffed filing cabinet. My goal was to put together a duplex document scanner, a super-large hard drive for my PC, and a great shredder. I would scan the papers needing filing, their images would be automatically saved onto the hard drive, then I would shred the originals.

The Fellowes 3227901 shredder and the Cavalry 1TB USB/eSATA Hard Drive fit the bill perfectly, and I gave both high ratings. The Brother MFC-8860DN was another story. Although I have very happily owned Brother products in the past---in fact, I was replacing an older Brother MFD and a Brother laser printer---this device fell far below my expectations.

It claims to scan at 300x300, 600x600, and 1200x1200, and it claims to save in JPEG and PDF. It does all of those things---but it scans SOOOO slowly it completely removed my ability to make my process quick and easy. I am forced to scan at 300x300; anything higher takes about 2-4 minutes per side. Even at 300x300 I have to wait while each document scans, which could take anywhere from 2 minutes to 4 minutes for a multi-page two-sided document. If I get three such documents to scan each day, well...you do the math.

For what I paid for this, I would have expected much quicker scanning. I'm going to keep it because there weren't many other choices that would serve my purpose, but I will probably replace it very soon in the future after I forget how much I paid for it.

I've had my Brother MFC 8660DN for three days and up comes a "Fuser Error".

Arggh. Very expensive to replace. Piece of Junk

This multi-purpose machine replaces a Brother MFC 8840D which was damaged in a move and at this price it was more cost-effective to replace than to repair. Fast turnaround on the delivery meant that we were without a scanner for only a few work days. This newer model seems to print a bit faster and is noticeably quieter than the 8840.

Exactly what i wanted. Works beautifully with Linux. print fax scan email ftp. and cost effective too.

Love it.

We bought this machine last year.

It has been used extensively. The printing speed
is wonderful.

Only one minor issue with the paper intake. After
a few months usage the paper tray started to have
trouble when the tray was fully loaded. We need to
take out some paper and retry. Some times we had
to repeat the process several times before the paper
tray can be successfully installed. From time to
time when the tray is successfully loaded the papers
left in the tray is less than half of that the tray
can take.