Cheap Computers

brother 490
bought a 465 and thought it couldn't get any better (compact, works great) even though wired. Then bought the 490 for the office and for office layouts in which wired may not always provide the flexibility you need, with this one of course, you're not confined to wires and proximity. It proved to meet my needs just fine. It works great (just bought it about a month ago); auto shut off (or sleep mode) so you don't have to worry about it in that respect; compact compared to other AIO's (same with the 465 but that's a little bigger); very easy set up; replacement cartridges not too bad price; lid lift scanning instead of feed produces a little better quality. Great product all around (for my needs).

Nice Printer! Great Price!
We bought this printer not long after it first came out to replace two HP's that broke. Overall very pleased. We like the fact that you only replace the specific color ink that is needed and the price is reasonable and it seems to last a nice amount of time.
Using the Brother ink that came with it the print quality was great and even the pictures were very good especially considering the price. Honestly we were amazed at how nice the pictures came out on the correct material. Regular paper was decent. Set up was quick and simple right out of the box. The view screen is a great feature and it walks you through all the steps. The printer seems to be solid and as another person mentioned the paper tray seems a little flimsy compared to the rest of the machine but appears to be more than sufficent.
When it came time to replace the ink we went with generic. The print quality has decreased now. It's time to get more ink so we're going back to oem and see if that helps. Also we are now having a problem getting it to print on anything except regular sized paper. We keep getting the message to insert the correct size of paper although it does have the correct size in it. I even dug the manual out to see if I was doing something wrong. Still no luck so we can't print smaller (4x6, 5x7) pictures anymore. Thankfully I don't print many pictures but it is an annoyance.
Even with that problem I recommend this printer. Solidly built, ease of use and set up and good quality all at a wonderful price.

Pretty Good Machine
Overall, the Brother MFC-490CW is a pretty good machine. The print quality is not as good as the HP I had that recently died. The FAX is not as easy to use, but this machine appears to use less ink (hence the quality difference?)and the wireless connection was easy to set up and is very handy. With the FAX I needed to dial a 1-800 number to get long distance and could not figure out how to do that and send a FAX with this machine. I called customer service, but the lady I spoke to in the Philippines did not understand my question at all and could not get me a supervisor. Eventually I did find a solution myself, but it took a while. This machine is worth the money, but not much more.

Lasted about a month
It lasted about 1 month. After a brown out, the machine would not turn on again (even though it was connected to a surge protector).

good way to waste your time and money
This printer appears good on the ratings, but in reality it is really bad. Until today, it uses ink like crazy. I have had to set it up twice, as it loses it settings. Today, I cannot even install the setup. It's simple to use when it works, which is about 50% of the time. In the last 6 months, I have spent over 10 hours just trying to get it to work again.

To set this up over the network, the instructions actually tell you too drop your security and firewall. I never got it to work over the WiFi and I had to keep the printer directly connected to a computer to use it.

If you want to spend your time and life messing with your printer, then this is the printer for you. My rating is POS.