Brother MFC490C Printer Review
Make/Model: Brother MFC-490CW
Type: Home/home office, inkjet all-in-one
Web site: www.brother.co.uk
Typical online price: £109 (£95 ex VAT)
One day Brother will introduce an all-in-one which doesn’t look like all other Brother all-in-ones. The MFC-490CW isn’t one of them. The squat, gently-curved top of the machine is very similar to its stable mates, even though it has an Automatic Document Feeder built into the lid of its scanner.
In front there’s a full-width control panel, with a wide-screen LCD display. This screen, unique to Brother printers, provides a lot more room to display information than a screen with a regular aspect ratio and also enables photo thumbnails to be displayed alongside menus of options.
To the left of the display is a number pad for fax dialling and to the right are mode selection buttons and a four-way navigation cross. Under the front lip of the control panel are memory card slots and a PictBridge socket and below these is a plastic cassette, which takes up to 100 sheets of paper and 20 photo blanks in a second tray, set into its lid.
At the back are sockets for USB 2 and Ethernet, but many people will go for the WiFi link, also provided. This is easy to set up from the control panel and the rest of the software supplied with the machine includes Nuance’s PaperPort 11SE document management and OCR software, Brother’s MFL-Pro Suite and a driver.
The four separate ink cartridges slide in behind a door to the right of the paper tray, but the machine is restricted to working with standard-yield cartridges, even though Brother makes high-yield versions which physically fit the machine.
Brother rates the MFC-490CW at 33ppm for black print and 27ppm for colour. Although these ratings are for draft mode print, they are still ludicrous when compared with the results of real-life tests at normal print speed. Our five-page black text print took 1:49, a speed of 2.75ppm and even the 20-page job only returned a speed of 3.0ppm. A five-page colour print took 2:04, a speed of 2.4ppm.
Black print is a little insipid, as are some of the colours produced when printing business graphics. Things are worse when you copy, as colours come out very pale, in comparison to the original sources. Photo prints on glossy photo paper are acceptable, though not as bright or clear as images from Canon or HP devices.
Verdict
If you need a true multifunction device with a small footprint and some useful extras, such as a WiFi connection, then the MFC-490CW is certainly well-equipped. Like several other Brother all-in-ones, though, colour print is only ever average and colour copies in particular look insipid. Print speeds are poor, too, but print convenience is certainly there.
Running Costs: 10/10
Speed: 3.0ppm black, 2.4ppm colour, measured 6/10
Print quality
Text print: 7/10
Text/Graphics: 6/10
Photo 7/10
Features: 9/10
Overall: 7/10
