Brother DCP-8045D Toner Cartridges

Brother DCP-8045D Printer Review

The Brother DCP-8045D is a multifunction monochrome laser printer and copier designed for the home or small office user. Its fast print speeds and excellent print quality will impress, but lack of networking support may disappoint some buyers. For those who need color printing, the fact that it only prints in black-and-white may be a downfall too.

Brother bills the DCP-8045D as a copy machine with other features, but it is truly a multifunction device. It can print, scan, and copy, and does all of these functions extremely well. Some users may buy it to use it as a standalone copier, and it will function quite well at this task, but that would be underutilizing an excellent machine. The unit features a 50-page automatic document feeder, which can scan multiple pages automatically. It also has a flatbed scanning surface for media types that can't be fed through the automatic scanner, such as books or stapled pages.

The scanner has optical resolution of up to 2400 dpi, and produces excellent quality scans. The DCP-8045D includes PaperPort software for managing documents, which also includes OCR (optical character recognition) software, allowing users to turn scanned documents into editable text. This is perfect for archiving paper documents into digital copies that can be searched easily.

The Brother DCP-8045D can connect via USB or parallel, but has no built-in networking support. This isn't surprising, as the DCP-8045D is geared toward individual users, but some users might prefer to share it across a network. This can still be fairly easily accomplished with a print server or a host computer if desired.

As a printer, the DCP-8045D is excellent. Text quality is extremely sharp and defined, and the combination of the unit's excellent scanner and print engine produce crisp copies. Print speed is faster than might be expected for a multifunction at this price, at about 21 pages per minute.

Brother DCP-8045D toner cartridges are fairly inexpensive and come in two sizes. Using the high-yield toner cartridge, with a capacity of 6,700 pages, will save even more money over the standard Brother DCP-8045D toner cartridges, with a capacity of only 3,500 pages.

Overall, the Brother DCP-8045D is a very impressive multifunction device that works equally well as a standalone copier or as a printer and scanner. Fast speeds and great print quality are better than expected.