My grandmother has been asking me to write her for a while now. I think it’s strange how the internet culture makes sending a letter so foreign, if not almost difficult to do. With the advent of email, blogging, instant messaging, and so on, sending mail just seems… strange.

The tough thing about sending a letter is that it’s still tough to convey everything you want to, especially to my 89 year old grandmother who doesn’t really do email, even though video conversations through iChat is something she’s familiar with. So with this monster of a printer that we have in the apartment right now, I thought I would put something together to send her.

The print quality of all the pictures really turned out well. I didn’t think that it would be too much of a problem, but it still surprised me. Using Google Docs, I can write something and then wait to get home to print it on our sweet Brother Printer.

I’ve finally gotten around to getting our Brother MFC-9440CN printer setup. As you may or may not know, we’ve been given the opportunity to test drive this sucker out. And let me tell you, this puppy is a honking piece of machinery. By that, I mean that it’s large and heavy. We don’t have much room to spare in the apartment, so it’s on the floor in the corner of the dinning room/area. It’s secure and slightly raised off the floor, but generally in a good space.

Setting up the printer to work with our iMac was a bit tricky, but that was only because I thought the printer was supposed to have wireless capabilities. The single ethernet port on the back should have been a clue, but I swear someone told me it had wireless. No big deal as I had a spare cable to run from our router to the printer. Once I downloaded the driver for it, we were in business.

My first impression is that it takes a little long to start the actual print out. The data gets zipped straight over, but the time it takes to actually start printing is a bit lagging by about five to ten seconds. Perhaps adding more memory to it would help, but with its size and weight, you think it’d be a tad faster.

Also, the printer tends to make the paper curl just slightly after it’s done with the final product. That could be a symptom of the type of paper, but it’s interesting to note nonetheless. It’s nothing that can be dealt with, but just addressing things that I’ve noticed at first pass.

Printing out something with color in it has been impressive. The resolution is fairly good, and I’m sure I could set the printer to be even better. I just haven’t got that far. On top of that, I tested out the copying capabilities with the same printout. That’s considerably quick with matching quality. Having a printer is one thing, but the fact that you basically have a copy machine is pretty cool. That alone makes me pretty impressed with this unit.

The one thing about having this printer is we weren’t looking to buy one, and that was mainly because we didn’t have a need or a purpose to really use one. We already have a desk jet and scanner, separately, in the house, but it’s a painful process to get it all to work together in a roundabout, ten step process. Now that we have this Brother, all-in-one center, there might be more uses that we can find for it. I know that we were looking to do some photocopying some time back, and it does get a little annoying when you have to go to the post office to get it done. The quality this machine has is very comparable that you would get a five cents per copy at a store.

This is just the first foray into this printer, but at first attempt, I’m pretty impressed. Now we just need a better place we could put this thing. Would love it if someone gave us a nice set of workspace furniture to “try out” that could make the space in our apartment more efficient, wink wink nudge nudge.

Wow, is that ever the geekiest title I have ever put into a post. To give you a bit of back story, let me have this illustration that Darren Barefoot sent to Rebecca and I explain it further.

Photo credit: miss604 on Flickr

I’m not exactly sure how long we get to test drive this thing, but the honking Brother MFC-9440CN showed up while we were in the states. After UPS called us, we got it delivered to Rebecca’s office. At that point, I had to meet her on my way home to get a taxi van to help us get it home.

Wanna see how big it is? Let me have this illustration explain it further. (I took the pictures. hehe)

Photo credit: miss604 on Flickr

I’ll do my best to document the experiments that we’ll put to the test on this bohemith, and it will use some creativity to figure out how to do that. My guess is that when it’s time to give this thing back, I’ll understand that saying of not knowing what you got until what you’ve got is gone.

Interestingly enough, I was just scanning through the MacNN headlines when I caught, “Brother unveils color multifunction lasers“. Is that…? Yeah, it is! So not only has Brother unveiled these new printers, but we has gots one.