Brother MFC-7225N review

If you run a small business or a home office, a multifunction device is a godsend. These all-in-ones combine a printer, scanner, copier and fax, cutting down on the expense of buying several devices, as well as saving space.

Brother's MFC-7225N is tiny for a laser multifunction device. It has both USB and parallel connections, so hooking it up to your PC is no problem. Alternatively, you could use the built-in Ethernet port to connect it to your network and share it between several PCs.

At least, that's the theory. Although the device can theoretically talk to a DHCP server (the server that assigns IP addresses to new devices on your network) it couldn't get an IP address from our DHCP server, despite repeated attempts. We did fix the problem by using Brother's setup software - but manually assigning an IP address would be a chore for a non-technical user.

We were impressed by its print speed. The Brother printed our black text documents at 19.5 pages per minute (ppm), and delivered our mixed-colour document in greyscale at 12.5ppm.

Unfortunately, charts and photos both printed far too dark, and the driver didn't offer a way to lighten them. The same darkening occurs when you copy - but the front-panel controls allow you to lighten things up.

The sheet feed scanner is great for saving time on print and copy jobs. Its very low resolution wouldn't be an issue for many office needs, but it's very unusual to be limited to greyscale-only scans.

The basic nature of its scanner means the Brother is more of a flexible fax machine than a multifunction device. It's fine for faxing and printing text documents, but we'd recommend spending a few pounds more on an alternative with a better scanner.

Author: Simon Handby