Review Product design has clearly moved on leaps and bounds since the early days of popular multifunctional devices (MFDs), judging by the Brother DCP-375CW. Not only does it look rather swanky in its dual-finish matt and shiny black casing, but it is extraordinarily compact at just 150mm high, 390mm wide and 360mm deep. How Brother managed to cram a full A4 scanner in there is still a mystery.
Brother’s DCP-375CW: certainly stylish, but watch out for finger marks on that shiny plastic
The scanning plate is hidden under the curved top of the unit, the lid fitting flush with the rest of the plastic case. If you didn’t know the scanner was there, you would think the DCP-375CW was just a printer. The lid itself rises, rather than just hinges open, thereby allowing you to scan thick originals while keeping the lid flat. The active scanning area is 297 x 215.9mm, minus 3mm on all edges, which you may conclude is an acceptable sacrifice: it caused us no practical problems, anyway.
Towards the front of the scanner lid is the main control pad. This principally comprise a set of copy buttons that control functions such as resizing, quality and quantity, along with Colour and Mono options and clearly labelled Stop button. Read the rest of this entry »
Review It is to Brother’s great credit that the all-in-one MFC-6890CDW packs in as many wishlist features as reasonably possible without hitting buyers with an unfriendly price. This combined A3 colour inkjet printer and A3 scanner with a full-size glass plate is a big unit at 540 x 488 x 323mm, but not particularly heavy at 15.6kg. You asked for A3, so live with it.
Brother’s MFC-6890CDW
As standard, the MFC-6890CDW is fitted with an automatic sheet feeder, dedicated fax functions, automatic duplex (two-sided) Printing, a choice of Camera card slots, and 10/100 Ethernet and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connections. And, as we found out, both the print quality and scan quality are excellent – far better than you would normally expect from an MFD. Read the rest of this entry »
Review While paper dominates most Printing issues, there are those who need a different kind of beast to print on plastic to produce long-lasting identification and warning labels. The old embossed Dymo tape of yore, adorning dad’s tool drawers and just about every fuse box in the land, while still going today, has had to give way to more intricate labels with stylish fonts. A case in point is Brother’s P-Touch 2100, a self-contained label printer, which can produce a wide variety of print effects on cut-to-length PET tape.
If you’re used to a printer being a big, heavy thing that sits in one place on a desk, churning out pages of black text and colour graphics, the P-Touch 2100 will come as a bit of surprise. Yes, it is intended for a very different kind of Printing, but it also ably demonstrates what can be done to make a light, compact, self-contained printer, which can go where the work’s needed.
The P-Touch 2100 is about the size of a PrintingDesktop calculator, the kind with a hard copy print roll. It has a nearly full Qwerty keyboard set into its sloping front surface, with ‘dead flesh’ rubber keys, which are still quite adequate for the small amounts of text likely to be typed on them. Read the rest of this entry »
Review You’re in very cramped quarters and need a machine that can print, scan, copy, fax and handle photos, but it would also be good if it had a phone and digital answering machine. Brother’s petite MFC-990CW has the spec for this, but can the metal and plastic match up?
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Brother originally got into inkjet all-in-ones from the fax end rather than the printer side of its business – its printer division is nearly all lasers. This is one reason why the styling of its multifunction machines still has them looking like fax machines. The MFC-990CW is no exception and has the sloped top cover that has become something of a trademark. Read the rest of this entry »
