Brother HL-P2500 review

Working from home certainly has its advantages.

No commuting, and no battles over who's turn it is to make the tea. You can sit in your garret and work in cosy isolation. The problem is, to fit out your home office you're going to need a tonne of kit - a PC, photocopier and printer. Maybe a fax, too. Suddenly, your small office is cramped and overrun with wires.

The cure for this clutter has for a long time been the multifunction device - a machine that combines a photocopier, a fax and a printer in one box. Brother's most recent example is this rather imposing device: the HL-P2500. Paired with your existing modem, it can be made to do all the above, and integrates with your e-mail too.

Its layout is logical. Beginning at the bottom, there's a 250-sheet standard paper cassette, with a manual feed above it. On top of this is the flap providing access to the toner/developer unit. Moving upwards, you come to the output tray - capable of handling around 100 sheets. Above that sits the scanning head, which incorporates a smoked-plastic document catcher to the front, a somewhat Star Trek-ish control panel, and the document feeder to the rear.

As ever, the power and data ports are arranged along the back of the machine - including the USB port that makes life so easy. And that's about it. Setting it up is child's play, a process that is admirably covered in the minimalist documentation that accompanies the unit, and should take no more than ten minutes to complete, followed by a further quarter of an hour while the P2500 sorts its internals out and sucks toner around the place. It's well worth waiting for this to complete before you attempt to install the drivers, or you might think the machine's duff.

Software installation is very Plug-and-Play (as it should be). Thereafter, you can simply use the myriad buttons on the control panel, which include scan to file and scan to e-mail, provided you opted for them at install time.

A word of caution here. The scan to e-mail feature scans an image of an A4 sheet and sends it as an e-mail attachment. This sends shivers down my spine: don't do it, please don't do it. A 600x600dpi scan takes up a couple of megabytes, and the person who has to download it at the other end won't thank you if all it conveys is a brief text message.

The control panel is so well laid out that everything is easy, especially photocopying. It's simple to select an enlargement or reduction. You can even photocopy four A4 sheets onto one. It's also possible to alter the density of the copy, change document type, paper size, and (more impressively) set the thing up for a fully-collated multiple-sheet, multiple-copy job.

The scanner sucks sheets in from the bottom of the (face down) stack first. When photocopying, there's an inevitable slight delay - around six seconds - before printing, as the data moves over.

As a scanner, the Brother does have a few flaws, the most galling is that it only scans in black and white. This makes it ideal for scanning documents for optical character recognition. But if you're a colourful creative type you're going to be disappointed.

As a printer, it's excellent. Based on the same mechanics as the splendid HL-1240 (reviewed August 2000), it can output 12 good quality pages a minute. In our tests, the time to first page output is commendably quick - it took less than 20 seconds from when we clicked 'OK' in CorelDRAW for our standard newsletter to appear. Subsequent copies do, indeed, exit the printer at five-second intervals.