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Brother MFC-8420

The Brother MFC-8420 is an ungainly yet curiously endearing multifunction device (MFD) that is top-heavy in both design and price. Home-office users with a generous equipment allowance may be tempted by its fast, sharp, laser-printed text, but busy small-office folks will not be happy with the MFC-8420's slow copy speeds and subpar scans. Inkjet-based multifunctions, such as the HP OfficeJet 6110, offer a better buy, because of the more consistent quality of their components. The Brother MFC-8420 resembles a giant, pale-gray, rectilinear mushroom. The printer body acts as its base, and the flatbed scanner sits atop it. The MFC-8420's plastic automatic document feeder (ADF) forms part of the lid of the flatbed scanner. We noticed that the ADF rattled every time we closed the lid. The printer's output tray sits in the middle of the unit, just beneath the control panel. At the bottom of the unit is the printer's main input tray. The entire stack measures 21.3 inches wide by 17.8 inches deep by 18.8 inches high--hefty even by multifunction standards. The MFC-8420's control panel, which juts out the upper front of the machine, has as its centerpiece a five-line LCD and three buttons labeled Fax, Copy, and Scan. The buttons, which light a greenish glow when touched, let you activate each function without computer intervention; navigation buttons to the right of the LCD let you sift through the menus for each function. To the left of the LCD panel, there are 40 speed-dial buttons, plus small clusters of print- and fax-specific controls. On the right side are copy-specific buttons, plus a numeric keypad (for dialing numbers the old-fashioned way) and On/Off buttons.