Brother MFC-6800 Driver Download

Reviews– Built around a laser print engine, the Brother MFC-6800 ($ 500 street) offers a strictly monochromatic output, but this is almost its only limitation. (Note that the HP OfficeJet G85, revised on September 1, 2000, is the primary competitor of this Brother drive.)

The MFC-6800 is a printer modem, color scanner, copier, fax plain paper and PC fax (without data modem function), and makes few compromises. For scan, copy, and fax, the unit comes with a table and a 30-sheet feeder. The printer includes one-touch buttons for easy use and comes with software that allows you to send faxes from any program. And its laser print engine delivers a high speed of 10 pages per minute.

The installation consists of removing the packaging materials, slide the toner cartridge into place, install the software and connect a parallel cable (neither of which comes in the box) or USB. We use a USB connection, which makes the rest of the process automated almost in its entirety.

In addition to the printer driver and PC fax driver, the installation routine installs a Twain driver, so you can scan from any program that Twain knows. A control program allows you to scan, fax or copy a menu on the screen. In addition, the routine is installed a document management software, ScanSoft PaperPort, which forwards the scanned documents to other programs. PaperPort also includes an OCR module that uses the ScanSoft TextBridge OCR software.

We tested each of the main functions of the MFC-6800, from printing with the default resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi). The performance has met the demand, reaching an average of 10 ppm on our page 30 Microsoft Word file. Photos also print quickly, in about 40 seconds for an 8-by-10-inch image.

The output quality was adequate for resolution. The lines in the text and graphics were crisp and well-formed, with readable text font sizes as small as 4 points. In the graphics, the solid areas were filled in solid form and the fine lines of light held well against a dark background. The blur in the graphics and photos was relatively subtle, and the shading changed little by little, as it should be.

A paper handling problem that affected the copy and fax reception was printed bent production significantly and got in the way of subsequent sheets. Brother would not have seen this problem and suggests that it may be limited to our particular unit.

Separate sets of buttons on the front panel allow you to send faxes just as you would with a dedicated fax machine or copy as you would with a dedicated copier. Similarly, a scan button allows you to start a scan and choose a destination in your word processor, graphic editor or email.

You can also start a scan by placing the paper in the sheet feeder to start an on-screen menu with options for copying, faxing, or scanning to a file program, e-mail, OCR, or graphics. After choosing the destination, you can change the settings, such as resolution and then scan. You can also easily change the default destinations.

Use the on-screen menu to test OCR and found that this method has worked reasonably well for Times New Roman text but not other sources, a speed of 3 ppm for the entire process in our seven-page test file. One drawback is that you can not use this menu on the screen, which has a simple focus to change the settings to scan from the flatbed. But you can use PaperPort to scan and direct the scanner output to a program.