Brother MFC-8890DW

I have a home based business and I had a fax/copier machine that broke and needed to upgrade to a machine that could also scan documents so they could be emaiedl at what I considered a reasonable price. I did as much research as I could and went with the Brother reputation I read about in other reviews. I could not find any reviews on the MFC-8890DW so I decided to write one.

I did need a machine that could handle Vista and XP and several kinds of connections including USB, Parallell and Ethernet from 3 different computers. This machine was able to handle each of those tasks easily.

I purchased the additional paper tray because I use both legal and letter paper mixed in the same print request so the auto paper select is great. It works with printing and faxes. I have found copying and printing to work exactly as expected. I especially like the scanner as I can put a pile of legal and letter size documents in the feeder and everything is scanned to a file on my computer so I can send it as an attachment to my emails.

I am a shopper and purchased the machine and additional tray at different places.

This model is unsuitable as a FAX machine because it lacks a basic capability found in earlier models: it loses the current date and time after even a split-second power interruption, Due to the heavy power draw of the laser in this model, you can't plug it into an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), so anytime you send or receive a FAX, the time could be wrong -- especially if you receive FAXes.

I've had earlier Brother MFC models and all of them possessed the capability to preserve the date and time after power outages.

No where in product literature does Brother disclose this degraded functionality for the MFC-8890DW. What's even more bizarre, is that this model is loaded with network features, so it would have been absurdly simple for Brother to build in Network Time Protocol (NTP) support -- but Brother's product manager for the MFC-8890DW chose for Date and Time services to be irrelevant.

Brother obviously decided that FAX on this model was not important, so if FAX is important to you -- look elsewhere.