Brother DCP-7010 review

Multifunction devices (MFDs) are rarely petite, and laser MFDs can be fairly substantial. Brother's DCP-7010 is a welcome change. Although it has a mono laser and a flatbed scanner, it's barely bigger than most budget laser printers.

Like the Canon LaserBase MF3110, the DCP-7010 will print, scan and copy, but isn't able to send faxes without a host PC. Brother claims a top speed of 20 pages per minute (ppm) for the DCP-7010, which is fast for this price. It produced our five-page text document in 23 seconds, and our single page mix of text and business graphics in 11.5 seconds. These results place it almost level with the Canon MF3110, but the DCP-7010 was slower to print an A4 photo, at 24.5 seconds.

Text output was fine, but photos and graphics were disappointing at the standard 600 dots per inch (dpi) setting. Although this is the maximum true print resolution, the driver is able to emulate increased detail with its HQ 1,200 setting. Photos looked better using this, but dark shades came out black, losing subtle differences.

Because of the tortuous route it takes through the DCP-7010's body, any paper that's been printed on ends up slightly curled. This could be a problem if you need to print on both sides. We experienced a couple of paper mis-feeds when we tried double-sided printing like this.

The DCP-7010's scanner kept pace with the Canon MF3110's previews and low-resolution scans, but began to lag behind as we increased the resolution. It took 43 seconds to capture an A4 document at 300dpi, which is fairly slow. Scan quality also fell behind at higher resolutions.

Light users should find the DCP-7010 cheap to run, but after 12,000 pages its imaging drum will need replacing, pushing long-term costs above 2p a page. We'd recommend it only where space is an issue.

Author: Simon Handby