It’s reasonably quiet, it doesn’t need to re-align the print heads after every print job like the last HP used to, so it’s reasonably quiet both when printing and between print jobs.

The text when put side by side to our monstrously large HP color laser is easily rivaled in black. The color images that we have printed with this printer are nothing to sneeze at but they are certainly not the quality that one gets by taking your photos in somewhere to print them. But more than acceptable to send to family, friends and business associates in my opinion.

The printer comes with Scanport 11SE which now works on Vista (my old Brother printer had Scanport 9 which wouldn’t work with vista), which to me is a big benefit to keep my scanned documents organized and right at my fingertips (so to speak).

It’s got all the right camera memory stick ports including CF (The HP 6500 decided not to host the CF card slot for some reason and it’s the one all our Nikon cameras use). This printer is very large however, that is probably the only thing I can say bad about it. But I guess it’s got to be large to be able to print out 11×17 pages. It’s definitely not for the dorm room if any of you college folks are thinking about getting it unless you’ve got a nice sized desk area as it is LARGE!

The first one we bought would not print black right out of the box, no amount of print head cleaning could coax it to print with the black ink so we returned it for another one (same make and model) and it worked right out of the box perfectly.

It’s nice to have it hooked up to our LAN network so that any of our computers can use it to print if they so wish. Wireless would be nice but at the price of $129.98 (staples price) I don’t honestly expect them to put in a wireless network but wired is fine and it’s faster for large documents.

The only oddity about this printer is the quick dial, and what I mean is that there is no removable faceplate that you might print the names next to the numbers so that you remember who is on what quick dial, instead it is silkscreened onto the plastic of the printer, so one wouldn’t exactly want to add a quick dial and write the person name on their printer, because what if you want to change it, how would you remove the ink writing from the plastic printer body? It seems strange that it’s not an insert of some kind that you can write on. Maybe Brother expects me to put a piece of tape over it and write on that. I dunno, it’s strange.

One other thing. It would have been nice if the paper tray could have held more than 150 pages. For people like us that print a lot of pages (and why else would you buy a printer that is rated at 2500 pages a month unless you were going to use it), the 150 page paper tray is a bit skant, I would rather it had held 250 like the HP 6500 does.

Apparently Brother still can’t make a printer that can keep printing in black when the color cartridges are empty for some reason, that is their biggest problem for me.

Next type in shell:

rpm -ivh mfc5890cnlpr-1.1.2-2.i386

rpm -ivh mfc5890cncupswrapper-1.1.2-2.i386

This will install the printer as a USB printer.

In CUPS web GUI at http://localhost:631 you can modify the printer to a network printer.

This will change DeviceID to something like: socket://192.168.1.108

Or you can change /etc/cups/printer.conf directly.

Restart CUPS on SuSE with: rccups restart

You cannot find this information on the web site of Brother.

The printer works great.

Everybody on the network can print directly to the printer without the need for a PC as print server.

Print quality is excellent and the printer is so quiet, so can harly hear it.

Both USB and LAN connection are under the printer cover.

The main problem I encountered was that Brother has not included drivers for Microsoft 7 on the disk. But they are available for download on the Brother website. And once tech support talked me through that the rest was easy. I’m waiting to see how it does on ink consumption, as I’ve been told that the print heads clean themselves (i.e. use ink) before each use and there’s no option for “use black ink cartridge only” when printing grayscale.

All in all I’m glad I decided on this printer!