Brother MP21C Mobile Ink-Jet Color Printer

Rating:
Summary: It Does the Job
Review: I travel frequently to remote locations and I sometimes find myself in a situation where I could use a portable printer with my notebook computer (Toshiba Satellite/Windows 98SE). Now and then I need a hard copy of a Word document, or digital photo print of a piece of engineering equipment, when I have no easy access to a desktop computer/printer. I often looked at portable printers in the shops but because of the price [price] and the inconvenience of carrying one around (especially if it needs an AC adapter), I never seriously considered buying one. However, a few weeks ago, I saw an MP21 on sale for [price]at an [company name], so I bought it.

The bottom line is that the MP21 does an excellent job for what a portable printer is really for. It weighs only 2.2 lbs, it is only 1/3 the size of my notebook, it runs entirely via a PCMCIA card (no bulky power adapter) and print/photo quality is excellent. Printing is a little slow (it takes about 30sec to print a Word Document and about 2min for a color photo) and you must feed one sheet at a time but these issues are of little consequence for my needs. Replacement ink cartridges for the MP21 (one black and one color) can be rather expensive [price] at a lot of places but I found them for online for [price] each [web page]P>The MP21 is definitely not a replacement for a desktop printer (frankly, it wasn't meant to be) but I certainly would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good little portable printer.

Rating:
Summary: does not work with win xp
Review: If you have a newer computer, the MP-21c will not work with Win XP. The drivers supplied by Brother will only support parallel printing, even though the printer does not have a parallel port. This forces you to buy a...cable and AC adapter from Brother, negating the convenient one-cable setup via the PCMCIA card.

Feeds single sheets only; a sheet feeder is an additional [cost]. It is as large as the printer itself.

Brother's customer support is awful.

Avoid this one and look to the Canon BJC-85.

My experiences only; caveat emptor.

Rating:
Summary: MP21C Portable Printer
Review: In one word the printer is " [bad]", I would not touch another Brother Printer again- having said that- when I tried to get it serviced I was totally disapointed with there approach. In short I got no Technical support at all with the printer being returned in the same condition that it was sent in. My advise is forget Brother Printers because if you have a problem then you are on your own.

Rating:
Summary: Great Product
Review: Makes my job easy, convenient & quick, whether at home or on the move in my car! Very good invesment! I hope it lasts a long time until another better upgrade is available.

Rating:
Summary: Brother MP21-C Lab Test
Review: This printer comes in a tiny black box, with color badges about some of the printer features on it. The box include in addition to the printer that weight only one kg and measure 30 x 10.5 x 5 cm, a small box contain two ink cartridge, PCMCIA card, connection cable, two floppy disks, user manual and quick setup guide and of course there is no power adapter. We followed the quick setup guide for connecting and configuring the printer; it was fast and easy job thanks for the PCMCIA card. So we don't need any more the slow IrDA connections, neither the battery nor the power adapter so this make the printer lighter. Also it consume a little of portable computer power, just 2.5 watt in printing and one watt in standby. Then we start installing the ink cartridge, it was different from other ink-jet printers that the first big cartridge contains the black color and also the cyan color, and the second cartridge contains both magenta and yellow colors. Also here it was an easy and clean job for both installing and removing.

The big surprise were when we turn the printer on, the color LED's start flashing in a continues serial way, after a long wait we checked the manual and it said that it will take about 8 minutes for filling the ink into the printer for the first time use.

When the dancing color show finish. We start installing the printer driver throw an easy SETUP program but it don't support uninstall function. By fast look to the driver we found that it contain all futures we found in a desktop printer driver like print quality, media and status monitor.

During test, paper loading wasn't easy, there is no input try, so you have to feed paper one by one slowly, and also there is no output try. The strong point was the printing quality, for a maximum resolution 720 x 720 DPI it was equal to popular desktop printers like HP695C in photo printing, color graphics and text only. But for the printing speed, you have to wait for the output, a single mixed graphics & text page took 2 minuets 15 seconds and more than 10 minutes for postal card size photo. For the text print it took 8 minutes 45 seconds for mono color text page in fine quality and 1 minutes 35 seconds for the same page in normal quality.

Finally we can say that Brother MP21-C improve the field with its quiet operation only 40 dBA, light weight, high quality printing especially as a mobile printer and also easy connection by single data and power connection which make it ready for travel and using every where. But we think that slow printing and limited paper handling will detract from its share in mobile printers market.