Brother DCP-8065DN review

The DCP-8065DN is one of four laser MFPs Brother has recently released. It can print and copy black and white documents, and make colour scans. It can't send or receive faxes, but for another £39 you could buy the DCP-8860DN model, which can.

Like Dell's Multifunction Laser Printer 1815dn on page 26, the DCP-8065DN can print automatically on both sides of each sheet of paper. This is great if you want to print professional-looking booklets or just save paper. The DCP-8065DN is also the first multifunction device we've reviewed that can scan both sides of a document loaded into its automatic document feeder (ADF). As both its printer and scanner have duplex capabilities, it can also make duplex photocopies.

This MFP's wide scanner sits on top of its printer like the lid of a pie, making it look a little top-heavy. It's easy to set up, but you need to fit the printer's consumables before it's ready. The supplied drum should last for around 25,000 pages and the standard toner's 3,500-page capacity is good. When it's empty, you can buy 7,000-page replacements for just £53 including VAT, giving the printer low running costs.

The DCP-8065DN has USB and parallel interfaces, but we conducted our tests using its wired Ethernet port. Brother's install program detected it automatically over our Labs network and completed the process with no problems.

We were impressed by the DCP-8065DN's performance in our print tests. It got within 2ppm of its rated 28ppm when printing draft or normal quality text and was able to produce our graphics-rich Normal speed document very quickly. Text was crisp and black, and the printer's greyscale photographs and graphics were impressive.

This MFP took just 31 seconds to copy a 10-page document loaded into its ADF, which is the fastest result we've seen. In duplex mode, the DCP-8065DN's time of two minutes and 35 seconds is very reasonable. Copies were a shade darker than the originals, with the loss of some detail from dark graphics, but they were otherwise good.

Given the print and copy performance, we were a little disappointed by the results from the scanner. It was able to capture office documents with acceptable results at low resolutions, but photos scanned at the maximum 600dpi resolution suffered from a digital noise pattern. This was more noticeable in the results from our Q60 scan target, making the scanner unsuitable for regular high-resolution work.

The DCP-8065DN has a couple of quirks, the most irritating of which are its insistent warning bleeps each time you open its paper tray to load more paper. Still, apart from its basic scan quality, it's an excellent MFP that would be a worthy addition to a busy small office.