Brother MFC-990CW
Make/Model: Brother MFC-990CW
Type: Home/home office, inkjet all-in-one
Web site: www.brother.co.uk
Typical online price: £195 (£170 ex VAT)
This is one of Brother’s top of the range all-in-one machines and has all the extras you might expect, and a few you probably wouldn’t. Coloured in gloss and frosted black and with an integral DECT phone attached at the left-hand end, this is a machine that should do just about anything for a one-person or home business.
Working from the top down, The MFC-990CW has a 15-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) built into the top cover of its scanner – unusually, paper is fed from the scanner cover to a pair of support arms sitting above, so the opposite way round from most ADFs.
The most obvious feature of the control panel is its widescreen, colour LCD, a feature of many new Brother all-in-ones. This one is special, though, as it’s a touchscreen, so many of the menu functions can be controlled directly by tapping points on the screen. Even so, there’s a number pad for fax dialling to the left of it and big, mode buttons to the right, together with buttons to start and stop copy, scan or fax jobs.
To the left of the fax number pad is a column of extra buttons controlling the digital answering machine, which is also built into this Brother device. This can take up to 29 minutes of phone messages (longer than most standalone machines) and combined with the cable-free phone, which has its own back-lit, three-line LCD display, adds two useful features to an already multi-talented device.
The 100-sheet paper tray is supplemented by a 20-sheet photo paper feeder, which sits on top, but has to be pushed into the machine manually every time you want to print photos. At the back are sockets for USB and Ethernet connections, as well as for phone and fax lines, but many people will choose to connect the machine wirelessly. This is easy to do, using the wireless wizard from the touchscreen and the Brother software integrates with it well.
The four separate ink cartridges slide in behind a flip-down cover to the right of the paper trays and offer good economy.
Print quality with manufacturer’s ink is average on plain paper, with some slight bleed into the paper, but photo prints are of good quality and a 15 x 10cm photo completes in about 1:40. Some colour is lost in colour copies from both flatbed and ADF. Plain paper prints are slow, with black text pages producing a speed of about 3.8ppm and colour giving 2.3ppm.
Verdict
The Brother MFC-990CW certainly has all the extras you might think of adding to an all-in-one, but the print engine is the same as on less expensive Brother models and is slow and gives only average print quality on plain paper. If space is limited, though, this machine certainly packs a lot of features into a small case.
Running Costs: 9/10
Speed: 3.8ppm black, 2.3ppm colour, measured 6/10
Print quality
Text print: 7/10
Text/Graphics: 7/10
Photo 8/10
Features: 9/10
Overall: 8/10
