Finally got my new scanner to work.
The scan quality if fucking awful.
I need an all-in-one for my desktop because of space constraints. I had a cheap $30 Cannon for a while that worked alright. Print quality was decent, and I was able to make quality scans from it. But I got tired of the ink cost. It was $25-30 per ink cart, and they didn't last long at all. Even with gimped settings, and printing mostly text with an occasional color picture, they ran out way too fast. The refill kits are a pain in the ass, and eventually you can't refill the cart anymore. When the ink is empty the printer will lock out and you can't even scan until you put new ink carts in.
So a couple months back, after reading reviews of various printers, I picked up a Brother MFC-J450DW. It got good reviews. The high yield ink carts apparently last a while and aren't expensive at all to replace. It takes three separate color carts and one black cart, so that saves you some money. It's got all these bells and whistles but I'm really only interested in printing and scanning.
The print quality is fine. Text comes out looking as good as you'd expect. Photos come out looking better than my $30 Cannon. But what the fuck, it apparently scans like shit hole. Even when I tweak the settings and set the resolution high, photographs come out looking HORRIBLE. There's brightness and contrast issues, it looks all washed out. Scanning documents looks just fine. Black and white text looks real crisp and just fine. But anything in color sucks. I guess this really is just made to be an office printer.
I wasn't too happy when I first unboxed it. I don't like anything that makes you install anything other than drivers. For a printer or scanner, I want to just install a driver so I can use it. This Brother printer made me install Brother software that I don't need or want just so I could use basic functions. I hate that. But whatever, I got over it. What really sucked is that I couldn't scan for a while. Usually I scan things in Photoshop. When I'd use the scan tool it would lock up for a while then tell me something else is using the scanner. I tried to scan with the Windows and Brother utilities but with no luck. So I was messing around this morning, I don't know what I did but I finally got it to scan. And then I find out the quality is garbage.
It really is a great light-medium duty office printer, and I would highly recommend it for that. It has an auto document feeder, and you can scan to file (such as PDF). It has fax and WiFi functions, duplex, etc. The ink cost is minimal as far as inkjets go. It's perfect for the office.
For the home though... I guess it would be nice for some people to have the WiFi printing, but I will never use it. And when was the last time you had to fax something at home? The print quality is decent. Not top notch, but decent. Ink cost is low. But my god, the scan quality is garbage. Unless I'm doing something wrong, but I've scanned plenty of times in the past so I kinda know what I'm doing. I'll have to check to see if the Brother software settings are set to something that's overriding what I'm trying to do in Photoshop, and maybe that's why? I don't know. Fuck.
/rant
(It's thisand i know it's cheesy but hey it worked for the class and the person who found it 
