Earlier this year I bought a Brother MFC-2700DW all-in-one printer/copier/scanner/fax from Staples for $170. My plan was the scan in the many photographs that my family took in the previous century. I didn’t know at that time that my sister had thousands of pictures more of her family that she wanted digitized. And I didn’t know I would be spending months and hundreds of dollars in the process.
I had a small, cheap Samsung b/w laser printer that I gave to my sister. I put the much bigger Brother MFC in its place in my computer desk. It wasn’t easily accessible so I took it and a cheap Dell Core i3 laptop down to my sis’ place and set them up on her dining room table. That was four months ago, and three thousand pictures later I still have at least thousand left to scan.
I started out with black and whites, some almost a hundred years old. Lately I have been scanning mostly color photos, some old enough to be faded in one or more colors, so I have to spend more time adjusting the color balance. I have been using Irfanview, which despite it being free, does a decent job with the scans. I have been spending 2 to 4 days a week mostly scanning, staying overnight most of the time.
Sometime in the last few weeks, with over 2000 scans completed, I have been noticing that occasionally some photos with normal color have been scanned in with a purplish color offset over the whole photo. At first I corrected for the offset. Then I had to correct several photos in a row, so I opened the top cover while it was scanning and I noticed that the scanner bar’s lamp had a purplish color. No wonder the photo had the magenta offset!
I noticed that it was okay when I first started scanning or if it had been several minutes since the last scan. When I first started correcting, I found it took several minutes, which gave the lamp a rest and slowed my scanning down a lot (too much!). I saved the corrections in the setup file so I could load the needed one in when I needed it. This helped speed scanning up, but then the lamp was not getting a rest and the magenta offset got worse. The photos didn’t look right after the corrections. I thought that the scanner lamp was ‘used up’, so I took a break and searched online for a lamp to replace it.
A few companies had scanner lamps, but were not specific about which lamp was needed for my scanner, and I couldn’t find any prices for them. So I looked for a new Brother all-in-one.
Last weekend I found I could buy (almost) the same Brother, model MFC-L2700DW, from Staples.com website for $150, cheaper than what I paid for the original. By the time I got to the store Monday, the price had gone up to $200! I talked to the salesdroid about that, and he said ‘we will price match for any of the big retailers, including Amazon.’ So I checked Amazon and they were selling the MFCL-2700DW for $110! He took one up to the checkout and price matched Amazon, and I walked out of the store with the new Brother for $118 and change, including sales tax, and I saved $90!
So now I’m back in business scanning with a new MFCL-2700DW. I had to reload some drivers which were on the included CD. I noticed that on the first few scans there was some purplish color offset, but that went away and hasn’t returned. I am going to search and find if this problem is an issue for Brother scanners, other brands, or if it is just a lifetime limit on scanner lamps in general.
I am over 2800 actual scans, and over 3000 if I count all the rescans and goofs I have had to redo. I hope I get done without any issues with the new scanner in the Brother MFCL-2700DW all-in-one. It has been a huge amount of work, but the reward will be that I can give anyone in the family a DVD with all of the photos on it, and they will be able to browse it and see any of the family photos. They can also load all of the photos onto their hard disk and set their screensaver to display a slide show of all of the photos. That is what I am doing right now with the laptop.
Update – I took the printer over to an authorized Brother printer repair company, and talked to the guy. He said out of warranty repair would be about $130.00, which is more than I paid for it. But it has a 1 year warranty, and I showed him the receipt, and he said I could get it fixed under warranty. But it will take more than a week to get the parts shipped and just a half hour to do the replacement. I said I could live with that, so I guess he will have it fixed next week. I’m glad I kept the receipt.