Apple Reviews

I've been using Bryce since it was ported to Windows at version 2.0. My impressions were, this is great but I can spend a brief eternity waiting for it to render. As features were added and stability was addressed we get to Bryce 5 which does a nice job of creating interesting 3D images. Created to be a nature designer Bryce 5 offers import and texture mapping of several 3D objects. This is important as it's nice to sometimes add buildings, animals or humans to pictures you design. The modeling tools are designed for natural scene creation but it is easy to create indoor scenes, 2D style studies and combinations of styles.

The renderer is excellent with many options for developing your world. Bryce's interface has always been unique but intuitive. Still you will want to read the bland manual. After market books are poor to acceptable - beware of books depending on you purchasing modeling packages or 3D clip art.

The animation options are acceptable for a program in this price range but aren't really suitable for much more than short clips, say 5 to 30 seconds. Even with a very fast, highly tweaked computer Bryce can crawl when rendering.

Some solutions are to keep your animations simple and turn off the antiailising, on smaller frame sizes it is harder to notice and saves between 20 to 60% of render time. If developing stills make your picture slightly larger and don't use antiailising, go into your favorite graphics editor and resize. You will get faster renders and usually no jagged edges. For fun and small projects Bryce is great. It is priced to be appealing to the home user that isn't necessarily an artist but will certainly learn as they compose and develop scenes and animations.

Bryce 5 is getting old and lacking in many modern features including the inability to take advantage of modern processors. Still, it is fun to work with and can create some of the most realistic landscapes or abstracts you can imagine. Bryce 5 expects little from the user, even it's learning curve is simple, especially for a 3D program, and has impressive results. Because of it's slow renderer it is not really a good professional solution although pro quality landscaping tools for high quality 3D programs cost three times Bryce's price and demand a general purpose 3D program well into the high hundred dollar to multi-thousand dollar solution.

If you were curious what you could do in the visual arts but currently don't have the talent you can realize many of your ideas in Bryce 5. Much of 3D graphics have more to do with physics than artistic skills. If you are good at visualizing Bryce 5 is an excellent and modest costing program.

If your on any kind of budget and start choking when you see $500 or $1,000 for 3D software this is an excellent product. Bryce 5 has an easy to learn interface that allows you to move and alter objects, change atmosphere, and change camera views without having to beat it with a stick. The program lets you save objects, textures, and atmospheres you've created into the program so that they're always there when you come back. It also comes with alot of preset object and textures you can use, so you can create an image the first time you open the program. This isn't the program you want if your trying to do complex character animation, but it's really good for landscapes, architecture, and background. If your not sure this product is for you go to a few 3D sites and look at images people have made with Bryce 5. I've been using it for a year and I'm really happy with it.

I began using Bryce 5 at my school and soon bought a copy of my own because I love this program. I have spent endless nights creating new enviroments and such.

I bought this less than 2 years ago. All of a sudden it has started printing a light gray background on all printed pages. I am using high yield toner cartridge and it is not showing toner as being low. I tried cleaning the toner/drum components with compressed air - it doesn't help. Has anyone experienced this?

I bought this machine 2 months ago for my small business. We use it both as a fax machine and a laser printer. So far, it has handled just about any type of task we have thrown at it flawlessly. It handles hundreds of pages of "normal" size documents every day. We were especially impressed when we printed on hundreds of "odd" size envelopes with various thickness and had only four paper jams. (that's when we pushed it's limits)

The machine is efficient and very fast. Print quality is adequate for text but only fair for photos. The availability of a high yield (6000 pages) ink cartridge is a plus. It is only slightly higher in price and it's capacity is unmatched by competitors.

The only major fault with this machine is, all of it's functions can not be used with windows XP. Hopefully, Brother will update it's current XP software on line. Long term reliability is unknown.

Good luck.

I have owned this printer about 2 months now, and could not be happier. It is silent when not in operation, warm-up is only 2-3 seconds, and a single sheet pops out in seconds. Have done print jobs as large as 300 pages or so, and the printer really does crank them at 10-12 pages/minute. Print quality is excellent. Mac OS 10.1 works great with the printer; kudos to Brother for staying up-to-date. Don't know about long-term durability, but seems solid enough. The Fax works fine. Can't go wrong at this price.

I bought this printer about a year ago and have been reasonably happy with it. I use it in a home business where i do print alot so it gets alot of use. I hate it that if you run out of one color it wont print black and white until you change the color ink. It prints pretty fast but the ink is really light sometimes. The tray on it broke right away with minimal use also.

I purchased the 5200 after plenty of research and comparison shopping. It is the big brother to the MFC-5100c which looks very much the same... but there are some big differences. The 5200 has the stand-alone digital media print capability (can read Compact Flash, Smart Media, Memory Stick) but also has more built-in memory and a print system that works almost twice the speed of the 5100. It was this speed that I was after, and so it was the speed that I will focus on here. Both models use the same ink cartridges, which separate the colors to save you money.

The advertised print speed of around 20 pages per minute black and 16 color should not be considered realistic. All advertised print speeds are basically fabrications that use "draft" print setting and low complexity document types to get best possible results... not the world I live in. That being said, the 5200 really is fast in two departments -- It can copy faster than any all-in-one inkjet I've ever seen, and it spits out faxes like a machine gun. I timed the copy speed using the cover of a children's book as the source (lots of color and about letter-size) and hit my stopwatch the moment I hit "copy"... I used the "normal" setting. A very nice quality copy was produced in 28 seconds. This is a far cry from the 12-16 pages per minute color copy speed advertised, but you will have to take my word for it when I say this is fast for a multifunction machine. The reason for the speed is a very wide print head that can cover nearly 3/4 of an inch on each pass over the paper.

As a comparison, the HP 6110 (nearly identical to the Brother in specifications and capabilities) took 56 seconds for the same copy job at the same settings. The HP print heads cover a much smaller path, requiring many more passes to get the job done.

The 5200 seems to love fax and copy jobs more than anything else, because the manual and software focus on these jobs to the near exclusion of everyday computer printing. In fact, the software was not very impressive and included an image management package that I didn't want, but couldn't elect not to install.

Now, on the the one problem that I encountered and don't want to live with -- Print speed for computer printing. I thought my old Lexmark z52 was slow printing in color, but the Brother was worse. Printing a 4x6 inch color picture (jpeg format) on plain paper in "normal" (one step above draft) print mode took about 4 minutes. After calling and e-mailing Brother support, I finally got a technician that said, "That's the way it is supposed to work... nothing's wrong." What is maddening about it is that it makes a sweep with the print heads, then stops for between 5 and 15 seconds waiting for data to stream in and get processed before sweeping across again. I know that the USB port is capable of sending large amounts of data very quickly, so it doesn't seem like there should be such a bottle-neck. Is it the speed of the printer's own processor? I don't know. I tried altering print spooling settings, I tried it on another computer, I tried using the parallel connection instead... all gave similar results. Printing a larger image at a somewhat higher print mode left me enought time to make a sandwich and catch a little t.v. I just expected faster printing.

Comparing to the HP 6110, the same picture took only slightly less time (about 25% faster) but the print heads of the HP never stop moving back and forth waiting for data.

A better printer driver might fix the speed issue, or maybe the machine I got was not performing properly... I can't say. Anyway, it is a really nice machine that is capable of some really nice output, but I wish the folks at Brother would spend as much time and energy on machine to computer interface as they have on stand-alone faxing and copying (which are very good).

If you're getting a multifunction, I personally think it's important to get one with a flatbed scanner. A copier that can't copy or fax pages from a bound book isn't of much use to me. I've tried quite a few multifunctions out there - lexmark, canon, HP, you name it. HP was the best of the lot in terms of speed, quality and life of the cartridges. I had almost made up my mind to get HP-2210 which was also appealing to me because it can print directly from a Sony memory stick.

Then I came across Brother MFC-5200 and it didn't take me much convincing to go with this one. Not only does this have great printing speed (I agree with the first reviewer that you can't go by the advertised speed, but that being said, it does print pages with text pretty fast), the copying and faxing is excellent. Moreover, this printer also has the PC-Fax feature that lets you fax a document directly from your PC rather than having to print it out first and then faxing it. That way, you save a lot of ink by not having to print pages you want to fax. The printer has a full-fledged photo-capture center that also accepts a Sony memory stick and a compact flash card as a direct input. What can beat this?

The installation was a breeze on my Win 2000 machine. The literature is extremely well documented and product packaging was very well organized. It comes with separate cartridges for each color - cyan, yellow, magenta and black. You can replace each cartridge separately as compared to some other cartridges where the colors are contained in one unit and you have to pretty much discard it when one color runs out.
I needed to hook this printer up on a LAN so it could be used by the other computers in my house too. This unit was advertized as being network enabled. But the problem was that the LAN board must be purchased separately and costs a fortune. So I connected it to one of my PCs and made it a print server. Serves the purpose.
The downside is that this printer is pretty big and shakes a little when printing, so make sure it's on a sturdy stand!!

I had this machine for 2 years. It worked fine, ink cartridges went quickly though. It's on it's 2 year anniversary and the head is broken. It costs $300 to replace. Out with this and in with a new one. I will buy extra warranty on my next one.

I bought this machine specifically for scanning using the automatic document feeder (ADF) to eliminate paper filing. After very poor experiences with HP scanners for this purpose (they are terribly slow), I am impressed with the Brother. It scans 200 dpi black & white at around 8 pages per minutes and hardly ever misfeeds. For that alone it is worth the money. The next step up is a $600+ ADF scanner from Visioneer or Fujitsu.

Note that there is no TWAIN driver for XP; you use the built in Windows WIA driver (which is Microsoft-grade sh*t). It gets the job done but requires you to make a few extra clicks because it doesn't store default settings. For Windows 2000, there is a TWAIN driver which works great and eliminates this problem. Still, I use it in XP and it works well enough.

The fax works fine. The autodial interface is a bit clunky and the memory is limited in terms of entering calling card info (takes 2-3 buttons). But it does send and receive reliably.

The print quality is so-so in black and white and worse in color. It's ok for drafts, but not for polished work. This is not my primary printer. Color scanning of photos is not great but decent for non-pro work. Ink consumption is very very thrifty. I'm on the original cartridges for months (although I do not print that much on it).

I also use this with Mac OS X and OS 9. Support is good and it works well in both Mac OS's. The drivers are much more well written than HP's were (abysmal!).

Overall, I am happy with the machine as a scanner. It makes a decent all-in-one for a great price if scanning is important to you.

3.5 stars.

I just picked up one of these Brother units almost on a whim, as the several that I played with in the stores were unacceptable with extremely poor print quality, for both text and graphics, color and B&W. I was worried that the description given by the one-star reviewer below was accurate. However, I gambled (well, not too much - the store has a 14 day return policy) that the demo units in the stores did not have anything close to the optimum settings, clean print heads or full ink cartridges. My gamble paid off, as the contrast between the well-used-if-not-abused store demos and my new machine is huge.

First, as a frame of reference, I had an old HP Deskjet 500 (the original inkjet printer) and currently own a five year old HP Deskjet 712 I use for text printing, and a two year old Epson Stylus Photo 780 that I have yet to master and attempt to use for photo printing.

I thought the 5100's set up and software install went about as quickly and well as I could expect - the directions were clear and simple, and I encountered absolutely no problems at all. I'm running Win 98SE, though, so I cannot comment on the complaints about XP compatibility. There are separate detailed instructions for XP installation but some of the scanning software (a third party's, not Brother's) may not be XP compatible. However, it does seem that Brother specifically addressed XP issues with the current models. It should be simple if you follow the directions exactly, rather than just diving in and mucking around.

As far as text printing goes, this unit has average, acceptable quality for an inkjet printer. If one looks closely, the individual pixels are somewhat visible even at the best print quality. I would say its text quality is nearly identical to that on my Epson Photo 780 and similar to what a 300dpi laser printer from a decade ago produced. It's sufficient for business correspondence and probably just good enough for printing resumes, but it's not as crisp as the text printing from my HP 712. However, I have never seen any inkjet print better text than the 712, old as it may be, including the newest HP's I've seen in stores. If text quality is of paramount importance to you, no other inkjet printer brand on the market can compete with HP, so you should stick to that brand. The MFC-5100 is twice as fast at printing text as my HP 712.

Copy quality is this unit's biggest shortcoming. It has pretty low resolution on the B&W setting, roughly what I got from my scanner printing out on the HP 712, or draft on the venerable HP Deskjet 500. It's debatable if the copy quality is sufficient to use for sending copies to other parties with business correspondence, but is ok for maintaining personal or home records. In the black and white mode, I see almost no difference in print quality between the Fast, Normal and Best copy quality settings, which may be a minor defect with my unit. It's pretty fast, though - prints in about 30-40 seconds from hitting the copy button, with subsequent copies coming much faster - figure five copies per minute in the real world beyond the first copy. Color copies are pretty nice and at a higher resolution than the monochrome ones.

I haven't done any color printing of signs and such, but have printed some photos and have been quite pleased. I've managed to get a few excellent, highly detailed photos lately with my 2.1mp Canon A20 digital camera and they came out very nicely on the Brother, much better than anything I could print with my 600dpi HP 712. At 5" x 7" size, pixels were only noticeable at close inspection. Larger 8.5" x 11" photos had very similar resolution and beyond a distance of 18" appear to be as good as any enlargement I have seen from a 35mm autofocus camera. My Epson Photo 780 prints at a higher resolution (2880x720 - individual pixels are not noticeable even on close inspection of an 8.5" x 11" print) but has lousy, inaccurate color (at least as far as I've been able to tweak it). The MFC-5100C's color is vivid and very accurate and I prefer its photos to those from my Epson at this point. I'm not sure if I'm printing at the 5100's claimed 1200 x 2400 dpi highest resolution, though, as the settings don't allow for that specific of finetuning. The generally thorough manual is a bit lacking on photoprinting, but I think I've been using best photo settings. The individually replaceable cartridges (black, cyan, magenta and yellow) are also a nice feature and black cartridges are a third less expensive than HP cartridges.

The fax function works perfectly and is as simple as anyone could want. The document feeder works like a charm, also.

In summary, this is a pretty nice unit for the price and there is nothing in the market comparable until you spend 50% more. If this Brother only had print quality comparable to the HP units, I would give it an enthusiastic five stars. The HP 6110 is the cheapest HP multifunction flatbed with a document feeder, it does print noticeably better copies and text than this Brother, and appears, from what I saw in the stores, to have fewer compromises. In fact, despite the fact that the HP 6110 costs 62% more than I paid for the Brother, I liked its better print quality and faster fax enough that I ordered one, will compare it to the Brother MFC-5100 and update this review soon.

I've just tried a few basic functions and encountered the following problems.

(1)Color reversal-with the factory packed cartridges in the correct spot, red turns into yellow, yellow turns into red, blue turns into green when copying.

(2) Scanning makes very loud clicking noise

(3) Envelop printed out in the reverse direction when feeding according to the diagram on the feeder.

I have not tried other more sophisticated functions yet...

Brother customer service couldn't solve the problem over the phone. I took it to Brother authorized repair shop which took 3.5 days to find out all the replacement parts they have to order. Then the technician said he cannot guarantee that once the replacement parts arrive from NJ, he won't need to order more parts to fix all the problems. So I decided to just return it and purchase something else. I cannot be out of office machine for a month.

This Brother is quiet, and fast with high resolution. I have found it to be everything they promised, and in a sleek executive style package. The only reason this multifunction printer is not 5 stars is; since it is a flatbed, faxes need to be placed on the glass one at a time instead of sheet feed.

I rarely by an electronic device without reading all reviews but being that this is a new product on the market I decided that it was my turn to be the guinea pig and write a review. The 4820C has everything that I wanted in a small neat design and the price was terrific. All that was left to know was how it performed.
I've had the machine for three weeks and it has been most enjoyable. Keeping in mind that you just can't have everything, this machine is a great all-in-one and does the job nicely. I can't say that the print qulaity is better than any other inkjet printer but it is just fine and the color copies are impressive. The black copies only look nice when set to "best quality" otherwise they are grey and fuzzy.
Scanner and fax are good. As you know from the description, multiple pages first have to be scanned one by one, so if you send a lot of multiple page faxes, this may not be the machine for you.
This is not a powerhouse for any of the functions but for home and home office use it is really great to have it all in one small machine.
Oh, and unless you really need the phone and answering machine built-in (due to lack of space), you may as well go for the model without the phone because this feature is far from top-notch. The speakerphone is no good and the message center registers all calls even if a message was not left. You may come home one day and find 5 messages of just beeps. This is annoying.
I gave the machine 5 stars not because it is a wonder but because it is everything I expected. For $250 it is terrific value!

I liked this printer at first because I was able to insert my CF card from my digital camera right into the front of the printer. It would then download all my pictures.
Soon I found the ink clogs so easily that after about 5 pages printed the black ink was only half there. It was very light and smudged. I would have to get it to run a cleaning cycle. Sometimes it had to clean 3 times or so before the black would work. It also happened with the colors several times.
The photo printing was so-so.
Then I got an "error 41." This says to unplug the printer and call brother. Great. Its a generic catch all error I've found and it can mean your printer is now useless. This happened to me after only having the printer 5 or 6 months.

I researched these machines until the cows came home ( literally , I live on a farm) . I had a 5yr. old Brother MFC that provided good service but was no longer compatible with my new computer's Windows XP . I worried about reviews about low print quality . After 6mos. of service I find the only thing I don't like is my inability to copy from a book . It may be that I'm doing something wrong . Everything works great ! It fits nicely on my computer station , is quiet , fast and easy to operate . I even figured out how to scan pictures to file and to email !! I'm just your everyday shopper/emailer/info researcher so this machine is everything I need .

I have been very pleased with this multifunction printer. It is very quiet and has everything you need. One feature that is really nice is that you can hook your digital camera memory card right to the printer and print the pictures without having to go on the computer. I am comparing this printer to our old one, which was loud and wasn't a multifuncion, but the quality of this one is so much better and I love having the copier without having to scan things to the computer. I really reccomend this multifunction printer.

The machine is OK, the support... there is none. The software is a hack job, again no support. I loaded it on Win 98 & it created all kinds of conflicts with other software (Publisher from Microsoft in particular).

These machines are known for placing random ink marks on your paper after a jamb. If you have paper jamb inside the machine (as opposed to in the feeder), you will inevitably have random black marks on every page thereafter. It has been a continuing problem and since Brother doesn't have a fix for it, they tell you to replace, you guessed it, the $160 drum unit! That's over half the price of what they sold the machine to us for. Think twice before buying. As stated before, the scanning and copying on this unit leave a lot to be desired.

Considering that the street price on this machine is under $...(plus a... rebate) you are getting a lot of bang for the buck. What I was looking for a was a reasonably priced multifunction laser printer that would be used primarily for printing text, occasional faxes, and document imaging. I found what I was looking for in the Brother MFC-4800.

Looking at it function-by-function, the laser printing quality is excellent (and fast) when it comes to text, but achieves only average quality when printing graphics. For my fax needs the MFC-4800 fits the bill and even provides features that I'll never use (broadcasting, and fax forwarding, come to mind) .

The quality of the scans is acceptable for my uses (archiving phone, cable, and credit card statements, etc.) However, the document feeder does seem to be overly sensitive to slight misalignments, thus creating a scan that is at a slight angle. Copy quality is significantly worse than average, but acceptable for making copies for archival or backup purposes. If you need to make copies where appearance matters, e.g., of handouts for a presentation, definitely consider going to a copy shop, or even a convenience store.

As far as installation goes, I'm using Windows XP Pro SP-1 and installation was uneventful. XP drivers and software were included on the installation CD-ROM that was included in the package. Buyers of units that have been on store shelves for a long time may need to download the XP drivers from Brother's web site. The included OCR software works with XP. In a review on another site, and even on Brother's web site, I read that the OCR software was non-functional under XP, but I am able to scan a document and edit the resulting text with no problems.

Even if all you need is an inexpensive laser printer, the MFC-4800 should be considered especially since it is in the price range of most other single function printer only units. If you decide on buying it, you will probably find its additional functions to be icing on the cake.

This is, without a doubt, the best 17" PowerBook G4 case ever. Not only can it carry my G4, it can also carry my Tapwave Zodiac, and most of my school stuff. It's comfortable to wear and convenient. If you need a case for a 17" PowerBook, this is it.