Brother Products. Specifically the MFC 240C multi function printer/fax machine. Used primarily as a fax machine. It does a good job of sending faxes and is great for scanning multi-page documents. Bought machine May 22. Appeared to work fine. After a week received faxes with intermittent problems, partial pages, compressed lines of text. Copied made from the machine were just fine. Brother said was other fax machine or line problem. Had six other offices send faxes and all had same problem. Put different fax machine on my line and all worked perfectly. Called Brother and they said it was other machines fault and after three times of saying what I had done to check out the problem they finally said that the machine had a problem but it is not mechanical so have to use an authorized service center, but if the service center couldn't find the problem I would be billed, I guess trying to scare one off of using the warranty. Nearest service center is a 20 mile round trip and they had a recording they were closed until at least July 11, today is June 30, meaning machine wouldn't even be looked at for at least a week. Called Brother, they said still have to bring to a different service center which is a one way of 25 miles from me, meaning two round trips for 100 miles at 20 miles per gallon plus 2.5 hours in road time. Called Brother again and they had me do many different things to the machine, none of which worked. They said if it was a mechanical error they would ship another but they couldn't tell for sure. The last Brother representative was in the Philippines, really means nothing, and like all their rep's they keep saying we apologize, which actually means nothing, so it may be good to stop saying it all the time. I now have to go to a "normal" phone line to see if the machine works, as the rep said there may be an issue with using Vonage, which is a digital line. Told him my other two fax machines have no problem with Vonage. Appears it is the "always the other companies fault syndrome." Brother produces a fax machine with possible phone service incompatibilities and it is the phone companies fault for not making the phone line for Brother. I put the fax machine onto a regular Verizon line and the problem is the same. Bottom line is not so much whether Brother makes a good product or not, their warranty service is very substandard. I have had several Epson machines and they always exchanged the machines out when there was a warranty problem as has Canon. I spent a total of 15 minutes on initial call hold and 1 hour 42 minutes with the representatives and no help at all other than they apologize. I did the math and is cheaper to throw the one month old machine away than go through getting it repaired "under warranty." Sticking to Epson, learned my lesson.
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