Brother DCP-9045CDN Review June 27, 2011 11:10 by Matt Bird

Overview

The DCP-9045CDN is a versatile office workhorse from the Brother stable. It’s easy to use and turns out great results in all printing modes. It includes a thorough range of duplex options, including full double-sided copying. Double-sided scanning requires patience though, as it’s laboriously slow and despite its large physical size, the machine includes no fax facilities. Reasonably expandable, it also includes a 50-sheet multi-purpose tray as standard.

Ratings

Brother DCP-9045CDN

Main Review

The Brother DCP-9045CDN is a heavyweight workgroup laser multifunction printer and is about as big as a desktop machine can be. It includes an impressive 50 sheet Automatic Document Feed, which can scan both side of the paper in one job. The only common function the machine lacks is fax. Most of the control keys lie to the right of the 16-character, 5-line LCD display on the control panel. These provide navigation and Start and Stop commands, as well as a number pad for secure walk-up printing. Three mode buttons, including an illuminated one for direct printing from USB and PictBridge, sit to the left of the panel. There’s a front-panel socket at the top of the front panel. Below the control panel are two paper trays – one for 250 sheets of standard paper and the other for up to 50 sheets of specialist paper. An optional 550-sheet tray is also available. Main data connections at the back are for USB and Ethernet. Software includes Nuance PaperPort 11 and Brother's MFL-Pro application. The DCP-9045CDN comes with emulated drivers for PCL 6 and PostScript Level 3, in versions for Windows and OS X. CUPS and LPD/LPR drivers are available for those using Linux. Our printing tests returned moderate speeds. Black text came out at 12.5ppm for a 5-page job and picked up to 15.6ppm for 20 pages. We timed a colour text and graphic print at 9.7ppm, which is half Brother’s claim. Though the speeds appear slow against the published spec, they compare favourably with the DCP-9045CDN rivals, like the Dell 2145. Both text and colour graphic samples were high quality, with clean black text and bright colours. We were also pleased with the results of photo prints, which were natural looking and well detailed. Duplex printing turns out well too, but is pretty slow at 6.9spm. as well as printing both sides of the paper in a single job, you can copy a duplex document from the ADF and convert single-sided originals to a duplex one, Maintaining the machine is complicated by its use of four individual consumables (toner cartridges, drums, transfer belt and waste toner bottle. Each of the four sets of components has to be replaced at different frequencies. You have to factor in the costs of toner, drum, transfer belt and waste toner bottle when working out the cost per page and this comes out to 2.7p for black (2.4p using compatibles) and 8.1p for colour. Both these costs are good, in comparison with other colour laser multifunctions in this price range.