Rating: 
Summary: SAVE YOUR MONEY - DON'T BUY THIS!!!
Review: Ok so here I was ready for my first multifunction printer. I did all the research, shopped around and decided on the Brother MFC-5200C, mainly because I previously had a brother fax machine that was a workhorse and lasted me years! I loved that fax machine and when my research came down to a few that included a brother I thought I'd go with what I knew but from day one I had problems with this printer. It was still under the manufacturers warranty so I called brother to fix it. They gave me such a run around and then finally sent out a replacement. The replacement lasted about 5 months and then the printer broke. We couldn't receive faxes or do anything that involved printing. I ended up just giving up and buying a whole new multifunction printer by a different maker.
All I can say about my whole Brother experience is I have never been so disappointed in a product or manufacturer before!
Do yourself a favor and save your money!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Brother gone bad
Review: This was a huge disappointment as this unit replaced a great model 9200c. The unit is tinny sound..squeaky belts..most difficult for single sheet feed, due to a rear entry where a compartment must be opened..ends up jamming most of the time. Fax feature is also not very good as it disconnects transmission without reason, then redials. I would not recommend this model
Rating: 
Summary: Great Printer
Review: Have had nothing but outstanding luck with Brother products. This machine no exception. Worked great right out of the box - no problems at all. Print and copy quality are both excellent and the speed is as advertised. Installation of the ink cartridges was incredibly easy - the easiest I have installed. I even bought one for my dad. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely love it!
Review: If you're getting a multifunction, I personally think it's important to get one with a flatbed scanner. A copier that can't copy or fax pages from a bound book isn't of much use to me. I've tried quite a few multifunctions out there - lexmark, canon, HP, you name it. HP was the best of the lot in terms of speed, quality and life of the cartridges. I had almost made up my mind to get HP-2210 which was also appealing to me because it can print directly from a Sony memory stick.
Then I came across Brother MFC-5200 and it didn't take me much convincing to go with this one. Not only does this have great printing speed (I agree with the first reviewer that you can't go by the advertised speed, but that being said, it does print pages with text pretty fast), the copying and faxing is excellent. Moreover, this printer also has the PC-Fax feature that lets you fax a document directly from your PC rather than having to print it out first and then faxing it. That way, you save a lot of ink by not having to print pages you want to fax. The printer has a full-fledged photo-capture center that also accepts a Sony memory stick and a compact flash card as a direct input. What can beat this?
The installation was a breeze on my Win 2000 machine. The literature is extremely well documented and product packaging was very well organized. It comes with separate cartridges for each color - cyan, yellow, magenta and black. You can replace each cartridge separately as compared to some other cartridges where the colors are contained in one unit and you have to pretty much discard it when one color runs out.
I needed to hook this printer up on a LAN so it could be used by the other computers in my house too. This unit was advertized as being network enabled. But the problem was that the LAN board must be purchased separately and costs a fortune. So I connected it to one of my PCs and made it a print server. Serves the purpose.
The downside is that this printer is pretty big and shakes a little when printing, so make sure it's on a sturdy stand!!
Rating: 
Summary: Great Copier, Great Fax, Not So Great Printer
Review: I purchased the 5200 after plenty of research and comparison shopping. It is the big brother to the MFC-5100c which looks very much the same... but there are some big differences. The 5200 has the stand-alone digital media print capability (can read Compact Flash, Smart Media, Memory Stick) but also has more built-in memory and a print system that works almost twice the speed of the 5100. It was this speed that I was after, and so it was the speed that I will focus on here. Both models use the same ink cartridges, which separate the colors to save you money.The advertised print speed of around 20 pages per minute black and 16 color should not be considered realistic. All advertised print speeds are basically fabrications that use "draft" print setting and low complexity document types to get best possible results... not the world I live in. That being said, the 5200 really is fast in two departments -- It can copy faster than any all-in-one inkjet I've ever seen, and it spits out faxes like a machine gun. I timed the copy speed using the cover of a children's book as the source (lots of color and about letter-size) and hit my stopwatch the moment I hit "copy"... I used the "normal" setting. A very nice quality copy was produced in 28 seconds. This is a far cry from the 12-16 pages per minute color copy speed advertised, but you will have to take my word for it when I say this is fast for a multifunction machine. The reason for the speed is a very wide print head that can cover nearly 3/4 of an inch on each pass over the paper. As a comparison, the HP 6110 (nearly identical to the Brother in specifications and capabilities) took 56 seconds for the same copy job at the same settings. The HP print heads cover a much smaller path, requiring many more passes to get the job done. The 5200 seems to love fax and copy jobs more than anything else, because the manual and software focus on these jobs to the near exclusion of everyday computer printing. In fact, the software was not very impressive and included an image management package that I didn't want, but couldn't elect not to install. Now, on the the one problem that I encountered and don't want to live with -- Print speed for computer printing. I thought my old Lexmark z52 was slow printing in color, but the Brother was worse. Printing a 4x6 inch color picture (jpeg format) on plain paper in "normal" (one step above draft) print mode took about 4 minutes. After calling and e-mailing Brother support, I finally got a technician that said, "That's the way it is supposed to work... nothing's wrong." What is maddening about it is that it makes a sweep with the print heads, then stops for between 5 and 15 seconds waiting for data to stream in and get processed before sweeping across again. I know that the USB port is capable of sending large amounts of data very quickly, so it doesn't seem like there should be such a bottle-neck. Is it the speed of the printer's own processor? I don't know. I tried altering print spooling settings, I tried it on another computer, I tried using the parallel connection instead... all gave similar results. Printing a larger image at a somewhat higher print mode left me enought time to make a sandwich and catch a little t.v. I just expected faster printing. Comparing to the HP 6110, the same picture took only slightly less time (about 25% faster) but the print heads of the HP never stop moving back and forth waiting for data. A better printer driver might fix the speed issue, or maybe the machine I got was not performing properly... I can't say. Anyway, it is a really nice machine that is capable of some really nice output, but I wish the folks at Brother would spend as much time and energy on machine to computer interface as they have on stand-alone faxing and copying (which are very good).
Rating:
Summary: Stay away from this product
Review: Within the first six months we had to replace it twice and it has been the worst experience. I asked them to substitude this product for something else but they said it is not their policy. My advice - get HP and stay away from this product.
Rating:
Summary: All Brother's suck
Review: I am a printer repair tech. I just stumbled across this reveiw on a search for brother printheads. Brother's work fine untill the printheads clog up. Then it will cost more than the value of the printer to replace. My suggestion is to buy an HP product. Like every printer manufacturer HP makes some cheap printers, but at least they also make some good ones unlike Brother. When shopping for a printer just remember, what you pay for is what you get
Rating:
Summary: This printer Sucks!
Review: I had a really hard time installing the ink cartridges in this printer, I called the 800 number that Brother provided and was told this is a very common problem...defective machines! I bought this printer after careful research (as I assume that you are doing)...but all I can say is you're wasting you time and money in buying this printer.
Rating: 
Summary: Worked fine for little over a year
Review: I loved this printer, until it was out of warranty and the print head went out. Quoted $200 to replace a Brother print head. Told by the tech that Brother is famous for this.
Rating:
Summary: Scanning Feature
Review: The only problem that I am having with my MFC 5200-c is the fact that the software that they provide for scanning will not let you scan a document as a PDF File, which many people commonly use these days for scanning documents.
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