Today I’d like to write about the reasonaly priced MFC-5890CN A3 printer, scanner and fax machine. Brother have done their part of research when they decided to release this model, featuring most popular requirements in an A3 printer and doing that for just about $190 is quite remarkable. When chosing a printer that can produce A3 pages the pool of choices shrink fast, if you add the criteria of ability to print in color you are left with an even thinner list.

The Brother MFC-5890CN does print A3 and A4 in black and white and color modes, while scanning is only available in the smaller A4. With this printer Brother has achieved to produce a printer that doesn’t clog up a whole office desk, utilizing the fact that A3 pages are as wide as A4 pages are long, so by making the tray 1.41 times bigger they made printing both sizes possible.

The printer itself has two card slots to be able to read most popular memory card formats, CF, Sd and MMC. An USB 2.0 connector is fitted on the casing to read usb keys, and Ethernet connectivity is ready to take RJ45 plugs.

The printer works on four different color cartridges, all of which can be easily reached by opening a small door on the front of the unit. These cartridges are also rather cheap to replace around $12 per color.
The paper tray can take up to 150 papers, but it would take quite a while to use all of them, because Brother’s claim at print speeds happen to be a bit optimistic. They claim the unit to be able to print 35 pages of black and white pages or 28 when colored. Under test circumstances the printer proved to have the ability of churning out 4-5 pages a minute, which is not that close to 35 a minute. Brother apparently have measured their data under lab circumstances and by using draft mode.
Now I don’t know who is printing in draft mode, but I don’t catch myself doing that very often. Standardization of measuring methods are really desirable now.
The printouts of the device are nothing exceptional. Decent text in monochrome mode, and good colors when printing photos. Text looks a bit fragile though but I think that is to be expected for the amount of money this multifunctional A3 printer costs.
Scans are of a proper quality both fed from the flatbed or the 50 pages document feeder.
Brother has done nothing extraordinary with this printer, but for the price this is something to consider for your small office or home environment.

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