Brother's MFC-L8390CDW sits near the top of the Japanese manufacturer's revamped range of SMB color laser devices. It is a multifunction that covers prints, scans, copies and faxes. With a maximum speed of 30 pages per minute and a recommended monthly volume of 4,000 pages, in theory it could be the only printer you need in a small office or business.
Although not a particularly high-end device, the MFC-L8390CDW has some excellent features that make it even better suited for this role. Its attached input tray can hold just 250 sheets of paper, but it's complemented by a 30-sheet multipurpose front feed, which adds a bit of flexibility when it comes to letterhead and other media. Duplex (double-sided) printing comes standard.
This MFP becomes more impressive when you consider the top-mounted 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), which also scans double-sided. Together with the printer, this allows you to make double-sided prints, scans, copies and faxes without lifting a finger, saving paper and hassle, and helping to produce more professional-looking reports and other brochures. This scanner could be particularly useful in offices that handle a lot of mail, where its duplex scanning speed of 32 images per minute (ipm) is enough to make light work of a heavy mailbag.
Wired and wireless network connectivity makes the MFC-L8390CDW easy to share in the office, but also enables compatibility with various network and cloud services, including SharePoint, Google Drive, and Dropbox. These are set up and accessed via a large, easy-to-use color touch screen, where you can create shortcuts to the functions you use most frequently. There is also a USB host port that allows scanning or printing from an inserted USB memory stick.
The final specification of this multifunction printer comes in the form of comprehensive security options accessible through its web settings menu. These include intrusion protection, secure encrypted communication and user-level access control via passwords or NFC cards, read on the NFC keypad integrated under the display. That's a lot of very business-friendly features for this price.
Brother MFC-L8390CDW Review: Setup
Today, many color laser printers arrive almost ready to go, but the MFC-L8390CDW is protected by a generous application of blue shipping tape. Your supplies ship in place, but you'll need to open the supplies compartment and remove each toner in turn to remove the plastic shipping material. There is also a large desiccant packet in the paper cassette. This isn't a particularly large printer by color laser MFP standards, and at 50 pounds, it's not too difficult for a single person to lift into place.
Brother has stopped sending driver CDs, but it's easy to download and install a full installation of the software from their UK website. We're pretty excited about Brother's print driver, which provides a full set of options in several easy-to-understand tabs, but its TWAIN scanning driver is perhaps too simple and leaves out basics like the ability to modify colors in a preview before committing to a full version. scan.
If you prefer, you can use the iPrint&Scan application, which allows you to print or scan documents. You can also define basic scanning workflows, such as sending documents to the cloud, an application, or a particular PC. Confusingly, this multifunction printer is not compatible with the Android and iOS versions of iPrint&Scan; instead, you must use Brother Mobile Connect. However, it is still a decent app that offers easy support for printing and scanning.
Brother MFC-L8390CDW Review: Printing
Brother claims to have made its new line of laser printers significantly quieter, and it certainly makes less noise than we expected. For a reasonably fast printer, it's surprisingly quiet and thankfully free of particularly harsh wines or major shocks or vibrations. This is great for this MFP's target application, where it might be in a central location among a small group of workers.
The MFC-L8390CDW compared reasonably well to Brother's claimed speeds in our tests. From standby mode, it could wake up and display a first page of monochrome or color content in 18 seconds. After an hour of deep sleep, the same tests lasted about 10 seconds longer, which isn't bad for a laser and helps keep this printer competitive for short, infrequent prints.
Our print tests include the time it takes a host PC to process and queue the print job, so printers rarely reach their rated speed. The MFC-L8390CDW produced 25 pages of black text at 23.4ppm, while this increased to 28ppm for a 50-page document. It hit 19.2ppm in our challenging color graphics test, and rose to 23ppm in a less challenging 20-page job. It even achieved a decent 11.2 ipm when printing double-sided black text. In short, it wasn't far from Brother's claims of 30ppm and 12ipm.
The rapid results continued during our scanning tests. Connected wirelessly, the MFC-L8390CDW delivered a preview in just seven seconds and scanned each A4 page at 150 or 300 dots per inch (dpi) in nine seconds. At 600 dpi, it captured a 10 x 15 cm color photo in 11 seconds, and even at a maximum of 1200 dpi, this challenging job was completed in 30 seconds.
With a fast scanner and printer, it's no surprise that copying was fast. Individual black pages completed in 11 seconds, while it cloned 10 black sides in 31 seconds. There was an odd pause between scanning and printing a color page, but this was still completed in 22 seconds, with 10 color pages done in just 37 seconds. Inevitably, double-sided copying was slower, but the MFC-L8390CDW reproduced 10 double-sided sheets in just under two minutes.
Fortunately, the results were quite good in all aspects. Sharp black text is almost a given on a laser printer, but this device also produced above-average graphics. The colors in some photographs and illustrations were perhaps a little warm, but they matched the skin tones particularly well. Solid color fills and transitions were not without traces of banding, but these were not overly pronounced, while in all prints the toner had a soft gloss finish.
Some Brother scanners disappointed us, but the one installed in the MFC-L8390CDW is quite powerful. Captured accurate colors in photographs and office documents. While their focus wasn't the sharpest we've seen, the documents were good enough to archive. It showed good dynamic range, easily preserving and distinguishing lighter colors like sky blue, and only struggled with the three darkest shades in our test target.
The only real disappointment came with the photocopies. While the color prints were fine, the monoprints were too dark at the default intensity, resulting in loss of shadow detail in the darkest regions of the original. We could correct this through the device settings, but unfortunately they reset between copy jobs; It's a shame you can't permanently change the default exposure.
It's worth mentioning a couple of small but excellent details that increase the versatility of this MFP. You can stack some jobs effectively, for example, starting with five color copies of a document and then ordering three black and white copies of the same original while the first job is still in progress. It also supports multitasking, for example, allowing you to scan, copy or fax while the printer is busy performing a print job. The latter in particular could be an important way to reduce queues for a widely used office device and avoid productivity bottlenecks.
Brother MFC-L8390CDW Review: Is it worth it?
Unfortunately there is a 'but'. Brother ships the MFC-L8390CDW with starting toners of 2,600 pages in black and 1,400 pages in color, which are not unreasonable at this price. However, even using the 'Super High Yield' replacements of 4,500 pages black and 4,000 pages color, running costs amount to 10.3p (excl. VAT) per full color page, of which the black component represents approximately 1.8 pence. .
That's just for the toner. While extra imaging drums and the occasional transfer belt or waste toner bottle increase the cost almost negligibly, they make this MFP more complex to maintain and mean you may need to source up to seven separate supplies (the drums come in a pack of four only) to keep it going.
All in all, that's a strong argument in favor of exploring Brother's PrintSmart Essential managed printing offering, which ranges from 500 to 1,000 pages per month in a 50:50 split between color and monochrome. This has the advantage of automating the ordering and delivery of supplies, but only reduces the monochrome cost per page to a minimum of 1.4p or 9.1p for colour.
It is a pity. This is a compact, capable and versatile all-in-one printer. It's pretty fast and delivers pretty solid results. For the price, it has an excellent specification that ticks all the boxes for any busy small business looking for an all-round device. What a disappointment, then, that its running costs make it a low ownership value proposition for all but very light duty printing.
Brother MFC-L8390CDW Specifications
| Technology | Color laser multifunction printer |
| Maximum print resolution | 600×600 dpi |
| Dimensions (height) | 410x462x401mm |
| Weight | 21.9 kilos |
| Maximum print size | A4/Official |
| Warranty | one year RTB |
