Brother DCP-9010CN review

1 / 4

Brother’s DCN-9010CN doesn’t have any fax capabilities, but it does have everything else you’d expect from a small business MFP. It even comes with Nuance’s PaperPort 11 SE document management suite to help you organise and collate your scanned documents. It’s worth noting, however, that this is a heavily cut-down version and many options simply prompt you to upgrade to the full version.

Brother’s installer simplifies the process of setting up the printer’s full driver and software suite (with or without PaperPort), which means you can go away and let it do its thing. It also offers to change your Windows firewall settings automatically if necessary and detects the MFP on your network.

The printer’s built-in control panel interface works well enough and the menus are clearly laid out, but the buttons are widely spread and oddly positioned. The OK button, for instance, is located below the directional buttons, rather than the middle of them. Plus, the arrow keys act as both Confirmation and Back buttons, and this makes it a little difficult to tell what they’ll be doing at any particular point in time. We also found it particularly hard to retain changes made to settings such as copy brightness. There are separate banks of additional buttons to control scan, copy and print settings, but these can be a little confusing. The Scan to PC option is clear and easy to use, however.

There’s also a HTML interface through which you can adjust the printer’s default paper settings and set the default brightness, colour and contrast of the copier with ease. You can also use it to control the printer’s network presence.

The printer’s fairly well built, but its automatic document feeder feels a little flimsy and tends to pick up multiple pages unless you riffle and stack them very carefully before scanning. A pull-out special media tray lets you print on envelopes or card, but the default paper source doesn’t switch automatically when you open it, so we had to open the printer’s properties to select the manual tray to do this. Unfortunately, our envelope test print came out curled and somewhat crumpled at one corner.

The DCN-9010CN’s scan interface is a no-frills affair that has just a few extra features to tweak your scans, but it covers the basics. Scan times are quick up to 600dpi, but a 1,200dpi photo scan took over a minute to complete. More importantly, the quality was good, having sharp detail and accurate colour, although some areas of delicate shading weren’t rendered with complete accuracy. Photocopy quality proved less inspiring, though, with our mono copies appearing very dark, even at maximum brightness. This effect was less marked on colour copies, fortunately.

We have no complaints about this laser’s overall print quality. Although its colour prints lack the glossy sheen produced by some laser printers, the colours were accurate and text was sharp. Print speeds were also good, being 15.3ppm for mono text and 10.4ppm for a page of mixed colour and mono printing. Unfortunately, high toner costs and a massive number of consumables make the DCN-9010CN incredibly expensive to run. Although mono costs 2.4p per page, a page of mixed black and colour printing costs a wince-inducing 18.8p. The price of separate drum kits also adds to the running costs, making this one of the most expensive MFPs to run for medium or heavy users, and it doesn’t stand out as one of the cheapest for light users either.

The DCN-9010CN does well in some areas, but struggles in others. Its mixed colour printing and consumable costs are a bit high too, so compare your expected long-term running costs with other printers before buying. Consider the HP LaserJet Pro CM1415fn instead.