EXCLUSIVES

By Scott Dewbre

Some hardware manufacturers tend to pay lip service to the Mac world, making their products just Mac friendly enough that they can claim the product is "Mac compatible" when "Mac barely tolerable" would be a more accurate description.

Unfortunately, the MFC-5200c multi-function device ($349, Brother International) falls into that category so far. However, in this case the manufacturer is showing signs that they want to remedy the situation.

Like other multi-function devices, the MFC-5200c combines a printer, an inkjet in this case, with a scanner/copier and a fax machine. A couple of nice additional features are a 30-page sheet feeder for the copier and a set of memory card readers.

Printing: Quick, Adequate Quality

The MFC-5200c has a very short paper path that, when combined with already speedy inkjet technology, should make for a very speedy printer. The manufacturer's claims of up to 20 pages per minute (ppm) black-and-white and 16 ppm color print output led us to believe the device was remarkably fast.

Unfortunately, we could not get our test machine to post numbers anywhere near that good. In tests with Word and PowerPoint documents, the MFC-5200c printed at an average of 10 ppm black-and-white and 8 ppm color, which is half as fast as the manufacturer's rating for the device.

However, the MFC-5200c really impresses in the copying category. With the convenience of the automatic sheet feeder, the device copied a 20-page document in slightly over 3 minutes. While that's not anywhere near commercial copier speeds, it's right snappy for a consumer device. Speaking of the sheet feeder, through several weeks' worth of testing, it did not jam once.

The quality of the print output, particularly color print output, put us off a bit. Overall, colors were somewhat muddy and not as vivid as we would have liked. Increasing the print quality settings improved the color reproduction to a limited extent. Higher quality paper and special ink cartridges might make a difference. Our test machine came with the standard cartridges only, so we were unable to evaluate those possibilities.

The MFC-5200c has on-board memory card readers and copy-and-print functions especially for use with memory cards, which sets the device up to be a photo printing center. People who buy the device for that reason may be in for a bit of a disappointment. Generally speaking, we found the print quality fine for everyday documents but lacking for photo reproduction.

OCR? Not with OS X

The MFC-5200c is billed as having one-touch scanning capabilities, including scanning directly to an email or optical character recognition (OCR) application. Sadly, none of that works with a Mac. The device comes with a copy of PaperPort 5.5 and, through that application, the ability to scan and OCR a document directly into a word processing application, but that only works under OS 8.6 or 9. We even tried to OCR a document from the MFC-5200c while running PaperPort in Classic mode under OS X. No dice. So, what can you do with the device's scanner under OS X? Not much, as it turns out. With the latest drivers available on the manufacturer's web site, you can scan directly into a TWAIN-compliant application, such as Photoshop. There are OCR packages available for OS X, such as ScanSoft's OmniPage Pro X. But, considering that OmniPage costs more than the MFC-5200c itself does, buying additional software doesn't seem like much of an alternative.

Image scanning using Photoshop 7 running under OS X (10.2.2 to be precise) was fast and accurate. The MFC-5200c is capable of scan resolution of up to 9600 x 9600 dots per inch (dpi) and 24-bit color. Image adjustment options during scanning are limited, but the limitation is minor considering the image tweaking options that abound in applications like Photoshop.

A Few Unpleasant Quirks

During our testing, we noticed a few things about the MFC-5200c that we felt deserved mentioning. First, the paper capacity is limited to 100 sheets. Fortunately, the paper tray is easy to get to, which is good considering how often you'll be refilling it.

Another issue we had with the MFC-5200c is the location of manual feed slot on the back side of the device. This means you'd need at least a foot or so of clearance behind the device to manually feed paper. Such an arrangement seems to be asking for paper jams.

Speaking of paper jams, its jam clearing and recovery cycle is another issue of ours. The MFC-5200c has a self-purification regimen that would make a Buddhist monk jealous. After a paper jam, the device runs through a 4 minute cleaning cycle that doesn't start until the next time you try to print. Worse yet, the device conveniently forgets all about that page it ate, so you'll have to go back and resend the missing page or pages to finish your print job.

Bottom line

The MFC-5200c does some things well and other things not as well. This device would be well suited to someone who needs to print and make multi-page copies in color and black-and-white, scan images and send multi-page faxes. The automatic sheet feeder is a nice convenience feature. However, if OS X compatibility, OCR and photo quality printing are important to you, you'd be well advised to shop around.

Item: MFC-5200c
Manufacturer: Brother International Corp.
Price: $349 MSRP
Web: http://www.brother.com/usa/fax/info/
mfc5200c/mfc5200c_ove.html
Pros: Sheet feeder makes copying a breeze; fast printing speeds
Cons: No OCR under OS X; color printing quality adequate but not great