I love my Brother 6490 Wireless Printer. I love it enough to do a video review of the 6490 for sure.
I have used many different brands of printers throughout my lifetime and I doubt that I will ever change brands again. Brother multifunction printers just plain work and they work outstanding.
I first used a Brother laser printer a couple of years ago and it was one of the larger models. The only problem, I didn’t own it.
When it came time to buy a new home office computer, I searched Amazon for one brand and decided upon the 6490 CW
I’ve owned this printer for almost a year and I have had zero problems with it. My first requirement is that it was wireless so that I could print to it from anywhere in my house. The wireless setup on the 6490 was a breeze and works perfect. You can set it up for multiple computers and it works Mac & Windows. Because I work with some graphics programs, I wanted a computer that printed in 11 x 17 and the 6490CW prints the larger size paper perfectly. The ink cartridges are super easy to replace and the cartridges are affordable.
I make a lot of photo slideshows and it requires me to scan a lot of old photos. One of the cool features of this mfc6490 printer is I can pull up the scan screen on my laptop and crop the picture before I scan it. This saves me an immeasurable amount of time and was a HUGE selling point to me. You can do the same if you need to scan photos for any reason. The 6490
What some buyers have said about the Brother MFC 6490:
- Full 11×17 scanning surface, great for scanning portions of full size drawings.
- Dual paper trays, didn’t realize this when I ordered it, great surprise.
- Quick, especially for an inkjet. I haven’t timed it but it makes short work of 11×17 Gannt charts (project schedule).
- Maybe the ink level sensors are optimistic, but I’ve run off maybe 50, 11×17 Gannt charts and another dozen or so 11×17 plan prints, and it’s yet to show a dent in ink levels.
- Quiet, cannot hear it over the air conditioning (although the AC is pretty loud).
- Setup was a breeze, I’m an ex-IT professional, but I’m pretty sure that anyone with basic network awareness can set it up. I was short a network cable so I connected to the wifi, set a static ip (although it initially grabbed one via DHCP) and then ran the installer, which located the printer and installed flawlessly. As a bonus the installer package was a small download (especially compared to HP’s), the status monitor doesn’t use much in the way of resources (3MB or so of RAM) even though it’s monitoring two network printers on this job (Brother 8480DN) and plays nice with druvers from a Brother 7340 from another site and a HP C6100 at home (yech).
I have found that this printer is very good on ink. It doesn’t use a lot and it’s inexpensive. Possibly my favorite feature is the fact that the Brother MFC6490 is wireless and works flawlessly in my house. I’ve never owned a printer that worked this well. I definitely recommend that you give the MFC Brother line a printers a good hard look and pick the right one for your situation.