Low cost of ownership is a very strong suit for the Brother MFC-8420. Although its price is the same as the other multifunction printers in this roundup, its rated cost per page is 0.1 to 0.5 cents below the competition. A difference of 0.1 cents may not sound like much, but if you print just 50,000 pages over the printer's lifetime—about 67 per day, 5 days a week, for 3 years—that 0.1 cent per page difference will save you $50. And the more pages you print, the more you'll save.

The MFC-8420 delivers good to excellent print quality, and it tied the HP LaserJet 3300mfp for first place on our scan quality tests. And at 5 minutes 4 seconds total for our general-purpose performance test suite, it was significantly faster than the second-fastest MFP. It was also in or close to first place on our high-quality performance suite. Even the scan speed, at 40 seconds, earned it a solid first place.

Other notable features include a hearty monthly duty cycle of 20,000 pages—twice as many as any of the other three MFPs—a bundled proprietary version of PaperPort (optical character recognition software), and a very convenient front panel, which offers prominently labeled buttons for scanning, copying, and faxing.

Brother has hit all the right notes with the Brother MFC-8420—more than enough of them, in fact, to earn our Editors' Choice.