Probably The Best A3 Printer of The Cheap Club
Brother MFC-5890CN is one of the better cheap a3 printers, it looks like Brother has done some research before releasing this model, doing what they did under the $200 mark is quite remarkable. They’ve included fax, scanning and A3 printing both in color mode and black and white. When looking for a decent color printer, options are endless, but once you keep adding requirements the list shrinks fast. With A3, Color, multi-purpose, cheap, decent print quality expected all at once there aren’t many printers around to compete with this particular model.
With MFC-5890CN color and monochrome printing is available both in A3 and A4 forms, but scanning on this model only works in A4. For A3 scans you’ll have to go for the big brother of this printer. Brother managed to produce a device that doesn’t clog any office desktop at once, with its reasonable size you can expect to have some excess room next to it.
The printer is equipped with USB 2.0 connector, SD, CF and MMC card reader and ready to work as a network printer with the RJ-45 connector at the back.
It uses four colors of ink with four separate cartridges which makes it simple to swap only the color that is out. These cartridges are relatively cheap at $12 per color for the lower (450 pages) capacity units. The paper tray can take 150 sheets of paper, which the printer uses at a claimed 35 pages per minute when working with black and white draft mode documents and 28 pages run through a minute when printing draft color. Brother used a bold pen when it wrote those numbers because tests indicate that real life performance may be closer to 10 pages in black and white and 6-7 in color.
I don’t really catch myself printing in draft mode all that often so I’m not sure if manufacturers should continue to disclose their pages per minute values assuming draft prints. I suggest some kind of ISO standard for print speed measurements.
Print quality coming from this model is nothing to jump around. Color mode produces decent colors and filled look, but text in monochrome looks fragile, serifs almost falling off of letters.
Scans are done in proper quality either fed from the flatbed or the 50 pages document feeder on top.
Brother has done nothing really extraordinary with this printer, I could even say it is easy to forget. That’s why I’d like to remind everybody with this article: Brother MFC-5890CN may be mediocre, but for its price it is a true champion.