Brother MFC-885CW review

Brother's MFC-885CW is relatively expensive for a colour-inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP), but it has plenty of features to justify its price.

It's a business-oriented MFP, so it's able to send and receive faxes. It also has an automatic document feeder (ADF) and - unusually - comes with a cordless DECT phone.

We were slightly disappointed by the absence of an automatic duplexer, but everything else you're likely to need in a business printer is present, along with a few features that you probably won't need, such as a memory card reader and a dedicated 6x4in photo-paper tray.

Unlike the similar-looking trays found in some of HP's Photosmart printers and MFPs, the photo-paper tray doesn't move into place automatically. Instead, when you select 6x4in photo paper from the driver's printing options, you're prompted to move the tray into position manually. You do this by pulling out the entire paper tray and moving the small format section inwards. While this isn't a particularly elegant approach, it's effective, and we were pleased to see that none of our photos suffered from the thin white border that we've seen previously on prints made by Brother inkjets.

Wireless networking is increasingly common in printers and MFPs, and Brother has implemented this effectively in the MFC-885CW. The full range of printing and scanning functions is available over both wireless and wired network connections. This is impressive, as scanning has proved problematic for other wireless devices we've seen.

The helpful and detailed manual made installation simple. The printer's menus and 4.2in colour LCD screen made it easy to select our wireless network, and the WPA key can be entered using the numeric keypad for non-predictive text entry. The printer performed poorly on networks with a weak signal, resulting in print jobs that refused to start, or stopped halfway through. If your network's signal strength isn't strong enough, you could use the USB or Ethernet interfaces.

The scanner has a maximum optical resolution of 600x2,400dpi, and produced sharp, accurate images at high resolutions. Even at 300dpi, our mixed colour text and graphics document scans looked sharp at 100 per cent magnification; 150dpi scans were slightly fuzzy at full magnification.

The scanner interface doesn't have many options, but at least it stayed open and retained our settings between scans. It had trouble automatically detecting page sizes, leaving us to position the capture area ourselves with the help of a handful of preset paper sizes. As a result, some of our scans suffered from slight white borders.

There were no major flaws in any of our correspondence-quality text, mixed colour or photo print tests. Draft prints were legible although rather pale, and photos were accurately coloured with minimal grain. Unfortunately, the MFC-885CW's good print quality comes at the expense of print speeds. Six 6x4in photos took almost half an hour to print, while mono text documents emerged at a leisurely 3.2ppm, and mixed colour prints were even slower at 1.7ppm. Photocopies weren't as slow as we expected, at 32 seconds for a mono copy, 44 seconds for colour and four minutes 20 seconds for 10 mono pages using the ADF. Copy quality was poor, though, with fuzzy text and little differentiation between dark shades in mono copies.

While there's nothing hugely wrong with the MFC-885CW, it failed to excel in any area. Print costs are reasonable at around 6p per page of mixed mono and colour if you use high-yield cartridges, while a mono page costs just 1.55p. Despite its extras, the frustratingly slow print speeds mean we can't recommend it.