I recently bought one of these. It's the Brother MFC-6490CW all-in-one. It's a printer. It's a fax machine. It's a copier. It's a scanner. I haven't figured out how to use it yet to rotate the tires on my car but I'll bet it can do that, too. And win a gold medal for Curling at the same time.
This all-in-one may be of particular interest to folks in the comic book field because it can print, scan and copy up to 11" by 17", which is the size to which a lot of comic book originals are drawn. 11-by-17 scanners are beastly expensive. I know folks who've spent $1200 for theirs and all it does is scan. The Brother MFC-6490CW can be purchased via an Amazon affiliate for $275 and that includes shipping. It's a bigger printer than the Lexmark I had on the stand before but the Lexmark would only scan up to 8-and-a-half by 11, so I also had an 11-by-17 flatbed scanner I can now get rid of. Thus, I'm gaining a little space in the upgrade.
Printing-wise, it seems fine. Copying-wise, likewise. The automated document-feeder, so far, remains unjammed, even copying 11-by-17 originals. And here's a biggie: I've found that the top paper tray (it has two) will handle thicker paper than the manual says. I was able to copy onto the kind of two-ply drawing paper that we usually use in comic book production. That info will probably excite someone reading this. In theory, what I could do would be to lay out a page on my computer, place all the panel borders and word balloons, then print out the drawing paper with all of them in place so an artist could just fill in the pictures. I can think of other uses, as well.
Set-up on my network took a while, including one phone call to the Brother tech support folks, who couldn't have been nicer and more effective. It does look though like a machine that's been priced way low because they figure to make a heckuva profit on selling me ink cartridges for it. That seems to be unavoidable these days, at least with any printer that will service all or most of my needs. One feature I may miss from my old Lexmark is that the Brother doesn't do automatic two-sided printouts. But if you need that, wait a week. Now that I've bought this machine, they're sure to come out with a model that does that.
As for scanning: The Brother interface, which I access through a piece of software called ControlCenter, does a nice, quick-and-dirty job of it without things like cropping or sophisticated color correction. If I address the scanner through Adobe Photoshop though, it does all the fancy stuff. The Brother claims to be able to go up to a 1200 by 1200 dpi scan, which is a lot more dots per inch than I've ever needed. The art I scanned for my Jack Kirby book was plenty detailed (and the files sizes were almost too big to work with) at 600 by 600.
So far, so great…but don't buy one just because I'm happy at this moment. I wouldn't want your purchase on my conscience if the thing went kablooey next week or it turned out that the $100+ I just spent on ink cartridges will only last 'til Thursday. I would think though that if you have need of an 11 by 17 scanner, it might be worth the purchase just for that. Even if the copying and printer functions didn't work at all, the thing is still a lot cheaper than the cheapest 11 by 17 scanner on the market these days. I'll post more about this as I learn more.