Brother Intros Green, Cost-Saving Smart Printers

Brother USA launched a new line of printers for the small business market, designed to offer a high quality, inexpensive printing option. According to a study by Brother last year, businesses can save 60% on costs by printing in-house, instead of making trips to a local copy center.

The new MFC-9000 Series of desktop printers has a compact footprint of approximately 2-square feet. Depending on the model, they can print from 19 to 23 color pages per minute (ppm), at a resolution of 600 x 2400 dpi.

These printers are also all-in-ones offering fax, scan and copying, in addition to printing.  They can hold up to 250 sheets of paper at a time.

These new smart printers include a 3.7” color touchscreen display. Users can access social media and file-sharing accounts to print directly from Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Evernote, Dropbox, Skydrive, Google Drive and Box. It helps save time because users don’t have to first convert or move a file. The printers are equipped with wireless printing capabilities as well.

Brother boasts the toner in these printers as cheaper “high capacity”. The company says it will reduce the cost per color copy by 7.5% compared with the cost of using standard toner. A machine using lower cost toner could reduce costs even further.

The unit price of these printers ranges from $399 to $450 MSRP. This will make them attractive to small businesses which do a lot of printing of catalogs, booklets and other marketing materials.

When not in use, the printers consume less than two watts of power and automatically power off. Therefore, they can be an ideal option for green-minded businesses.