Since Long time, HP has dominated printer market in India and is still a leader, but because of getting mixed reviews for after sales service, they itself are giving other companies room to give competition to them.

Those people who are happy with HP, continue to be with them, like i had one HP printer since last 8 months and its working fine for me since start with few glitches on eprint.

But overall, i feel people are willing to get hands on with other new companies as well, like CANON and ESPON who already doing well in corporate offices, however they failed to make good impression to reach common man household. Hence, companies are yet trying by coming up with new innovative products to make their place at home or small business offices.

Moving away from philosophy, this article is about reviewing Brother MFC-9140CDN multifunction color LED printer review. Brother printers is NEW in India, but a good old company in history of printers.

And as soon as eCommerce industry has started pushing them in sales, they are getting a great pace of awareness among consumers because of their user-friendly and good quality products.

So, few days back, Brother sent me this printer for reviewing purpose and i must tell you, it’s huge for keeping it at home. This printer is meant for small businesses offices and the best thing about it is user-friendly setup and usage.

Brother MFC-9140CDN Printer Review

These days people wants smartness in their devices no matter whether it’s a phone or even a printer. Everyone needs comfort and ease in using their devices. Brother ensured these points while designing their printers.

You can keep this printer connected to a PC or direct internet via LAN 24×7 to support printing even when you’re on the way out. Unfortunately it doesn’t have feature to remain connected via WiFi but we should not forget that this product is designed mainly for office purposes with fax options.

This printer is strictly for those who are looking for a good quality laser printer and scanner and are bored of using slow inkjet printers.

Brother MFC-9140CDN Design and Build Quality

It doesn’t bother me much about looks of a printer, but build quality of it does matter. This printer is made of sturdy quality plastic which doesn’t feel cheap or low quality at all. The product has got good finishing and has curved edges overall for safety.

At front, there are 2 trays for paper input. Bypass tray (supports 1 sheet at a time) which is at middle and is used to feed custom paper type like envelop, photo paper, post card etc. And at bottom is the main paper input tray which can keep up to 250 A4 paper sheets at a time.

Also at the top, there is an automatic document feeder (ADF) tray for scanning or copying multiple papers at a time like we get in big printers at the office. It can hold up to 35 sheets at a time for scanning or for photocopying purpose.

I love this feature so much and was surprised to get this feature in this mid-budget printer. That’s why we call it a multifunction printer. The LCD provided is 9.3cm IFT color touchscreen which offers a highly user-friendly GUI to users.

Moving further, it has a dedicated scanner too which can be accessed by pulling the scanner glass cover UP which you can use for scanning a part of book or other uses.

All ports of printers are provided at the back including power socket too. It has ports of Line-IN, Phone-Out at middle top and PC-USB connection and LAN connection at bottom right.

Brother MFC-9140CDN Features

This printer is packed with lots of feature any one could expect of. Even though it lacks connection by Wi-Fi, we should not forget that it’s for office purpose and keeping it connected with LAN also provides almost same wireless feeling because we still can send prints while on the way, no matter whether we are on same network or not, via Google cloud print, Air print or Brother iPrint technology which even has dedicated Android, iOS and windows phone apps.

Connectivity

You can send prints to this printer using numerous options available like by default keeping it connected directly to PC or in network through LAN and mobile connectivity includes Brother iPrint&Scan app, AirPrint & Google Cloud Print, Web Connect Print from. You can also send SCANS to Box, DropBox, Evernote,Facebook, Flickr, Google Drive, PicasaTM & SkyDrive.

Printing Speed

This printer is capable of printing 22 ppm (pages per minute) in both color and mono. If you give duplex prints, then you’ll get a speed of 7 ipm (images per minute) in both color and mono.

It supports printing in 2 quality which your PC will automatically detect, i.e. Normal (600 dpi) and Fine print (2400 dpi). It also supports few prints languages like PLC6 and BR-Script.

Fax Options

This printers has an inbuilt modem i.e. 33.6 kbps Super G3 which is used for fax purpose and for forwarding calls to phone.

You can also store 200 phone nos in pre-defined storage. It has an inbuilt page memory of storage up to 500 pages. And other major fax features includes Fax forwarding (to PC), remote access, fax retrieval, dual access, I-Fax, PC-Fax send, PC-Fax receive, auto reduction and group dials.

Copier

Again it can print upto 22 ppm in both color and mono with Normal printing i.e. 600 dpi. If you want multiple copies of something, you can define upto 99 copies of each page in stacks or sorts mode. Also, in precise, you can reduce & enlarge documents during copying from 25% to 400% using 1% increments. That’s pretty impressive.

Scanner

I am quite impressed by it’s scanning quality because it supports scanning up to 1,200 x 2,400dpi (from flatbed), 1,200 x 600dpi (from ADF), 19,200 x 19,200dpi (interpolated). Interpolated resolution can only be selected currently in windows 8, can be activated by accessing scanner utility feature inside Brother Utilities software.

And not to forget, using Pull to SCAN feature, you can send SCANS to email, OCR (optical character reader), image, file and even as searchable PDF. And using PUSH scan feature, you can send SCANS to network folder, FTP or even email server. For techy guys, it includes drivers of TWAIN, WIA, ICA and SANE.

Paper Handling

Standard paper tray can hold up to 250 paper sheets at a time and ADF tray (at top) can hold 35 sheets at a time. The manual or bypass tray is capable of holding only 1 paper sheet at a time, probably because that’s how company designed it to work for as bypass plus it also supports printing on some special thick sheets too like bond or glossy papers. You can also use manual feed tray to print envelope and label prints.

Supported OS

This printer supports a variety of OS like Windows, MAC or even Linux. For windows it supports XP, win 7, win 8, win server 2003 to 2012. For MAC, it supports version OS X 10.6.8, 10.7.x, 10.8.x. And in Linux, CUPS, LPD/LPRng (x86/x64 environment) are supported.

Extra Features

You can reduce up to 2, 4, 9, 16 or 25 A4 pages into just one A4 page for saving paper. This feature is called N-UP printing and is also supported on MAC. Or you can also enlarge 1 A4 sheet into a poster using 4, 9, 16 or 25 A4 pages.

Plus it supports adding predefined watermark and identifications on your prints as per your requirements.

It also supports printing of documents in A5 format to create a booklet. And, if you’re printing a PDF or any other file which has blank pages in between, you can instruct printer to skip printing those blank pages.

Brother MFC-9140CDN Printer Performance

During the review period, I used this printer for almost a month, and I am quite impressed by the speed of printing. Printing quality in Normal mode is also OK, keeping in mind that it tries it best to save printer ink too.

Since, I opened the seal-boxed printer, at start, it was printing out things with kind of low brightness (this could be a misconception to my eyes too because I am habitual of using an inkjet printer) but after few days, it started working normal which is expected from a laser printer.

You can not consider this as deal-breaker thing, as this printer is highly efficient in the task provided and provides great quality prints.

Brother Software User-Interface
Brother Software User-Interface

Plus, the user interface in the bundled software of this printer is quite user-friendly and even the GUI on printer too is very easy to use. Every proper manual from installation to operation and troubleshooting is provided with the printer and you’ll be able to find every information you’ll be looking for like connecting it to network or configuring fax and phone options.

I didn’t have a chance to use FAX option, since I don’t have the required connection. But i do used this printer over LAN by keeping it connected to direct modem. This how you go wireless, just by keeping printer connected to modem through LAN port, and if on same network, you’re using a laptop or phone, you can give you print with ease.

Also, since it  supports printing though Air Print, Google Cloud print or iPrint, you can anytime send your prints to the printer no matter wherever you’re. Printer all time when not printing will remain on power-saving mode and whenever it may receive any print via cloud services or by normal commands, it’ll print that immediately.

For Fax, you can configure the printer to either take out print immediately, or you can command it to send the fax in digital format to your PC. In this way, you can save lots of paper by eliminating unnecessary printing of useless faxes.

Videos of Brother MFC-9140CDN Printer

Final Verdict and Price

With a price tag of approx Rs, 26000, it’s not easy to gulp down the starting cost, but for the features it provides, that justifies the cost of this printer plus the kind of support you’ll get is another plus point for buying this printer.

If you’re looking for a cheaper alternative of this printer for usage at home, you can check out HL-3150CDN printer of Brother itself.

An optimist to the core, I always see the glass half full. I like to take life as it comes and not to become too serious on the harsher aspects of it. Apart from this, I am an Engineer, a Blogger & a Researcher....

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