Brother is a brand known for products that implement much of the latest technological gadgets, bells, and whistles. You will often find luxurious convenience features included in MFC Multifunction Centers that make using the hardware not only effective, but user friendly. You will not find any of those here. The Brother MFC-9700 is a bare bones piece of hardware designed for output, not frills.
Prerequisite knowledge of printer controls are a must with the MFC-9700, which sports such bare minimum features as a super tiny LCD display capable of displaying a single line of data. At 7/16ths of and in by 2 inches, with only 17 total possible characters, scrolling through over a hundred possible auto dial locations (108) one at a time can be grueling on the fingers. That being said, there are benefits to simplicity.
Though fax mode settings and custom print/ copy selections will most certainly be a chore initially, they will remain embedded in the on board memory, theoretically never to be fiddled with again. If your needs are very straightforward, and constant shifting around of custom settings are not required for your needs, then the tiny LCD should serve you just fine. Brother also includes a hard copy of the quick setup guide to help you initially get started.
When examining the features you will find a very bare bones layout. Standard options. Very little expandability. Again, if your businesses print demands are extremely straightforward, this should absolutely suit you just fine, but if versatility is a must, look elsewhere. The 8 MBs of memory built in is just enough to conquer basic tasks, and cannot be upgraded. The same is almost true for the paper input capacity. It comes at a standard 250 sheets, and offers the option of expanding to a second tray of equal size, but price alone restricts this option, as an additional tray could literally cost you more than you’ll pay for the printer. If space limitations are absolutely crucial, expansion might be an option worth considering. If you’ve got the room, however, buying a second printer would probably be the better choice.
With the limitations of the MFC-9700 out of the way, it should be said that, as an assembly line work horse, it actually performs quite well. The low quality 600 X 600 dots per inch print resolution should suffice when printing text, though graphics will suffer. The 50 sheet automatic document feeder is actually quite large, and scanning is available in color, though only at 24 bit depth. At 15 pages per minute your documents will plug along at a decent speed, and both USB and Parallel ports are implemented for both Windows and Mac compatibility. The 14.4 K modem isn’t top of the line, but should handle single pages of fax quite nicely in about six seconds.
Scanning, copying, faxing, and printing features are pretty basic with this hardware across the board, most of them being set at the bare minimum for the category. The Brother MFC-9700 is designed with a particular user in mind, specifically the one interested in basic functions and none of the frills.
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