Product Reviews

Amazing is an over-used word in magazines such as ours, but recently we've been truly amazed by how much Lexmark has squeezed into a multifunction device for less than £100. Take the X75, which includes all the wonders of a flatbed scanner, colour inkjet and copier for just £88 - including VAT! So with the Brother MFC-890 costing four times that amount, what, we asked ourselves, does it have to offer?

Well, for one, you get a big Brother. The 890 towers over the X75 when they're placed side-by-side - and this is an accurate reflection of the extra hardware you're getting for your money. In particular, this is a serious standalone fax machine - the X75 could only perform fax duties when attached to a modem-equipped PC.

Brother doesn't stint on the amount of fax-related features either. There's the ability to 'broadcast' your fax to up to 150 different locations, speed-dial access to 100 numbers, automatic redialling if a number's busy and enough memory (8MB) to store up to 400 A4 pages.

Another great feature - and one we haven't seen in a multifunction device costing lesse than £400 - is an automatic document feeder. This can store up to 30 sheets, making it easy to send long faxes and to scan in multi-page documents. After all, this is a 600dpi flatbed scanner too (600x2,400dpi is its full optical resolution).

As a copier, Brother claims the MFC-890 can produce mono copies at up to 15 pages per minute - it reached 12ppm in our tests. But the more important figures are how long it takes to produce a single copy. In Draft mode, the 890 kept us waiting 13 seconds, while Normal and Best stretched this to 20 and 32 seconds respectively. On those occasions when you want colour, you can add another 2-8 seconds to those figures, depending on the quality.

We

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were quite pleased with the end results, too. Blocks of colour were printed solidly, with no banding and plenty of richness, text was legible and photos - though speckly - still looked like the originals. As we dropped down in quality settings, though, the richness and sharpness started to suffer.

As a printer, the MFC-890 falls behind dedicated inkjets for overall quality. In particular, text looked fuzzy and photos were over-saturated. We were quite pleased with its printing of graphics, though, with blocks of colour and graphs handled well. It also produces acceptable photos on glossy paper. Just don't expect amazing speed - an A4 photo took seven minutes, while we waited just over a minute for our five-page, text-only document to emerge.

We were generally happy with the quality of scans, though they suffered from a little too much 'noise' - greys, for example, consisted of various colours, rather than just grey. But the area that most separates the Brother from dedicated photo scanners is skin tones. The Brother's results simply didn't look realistic when compared to the original photo.

In terms of print and scan quality, we'd place the MFC-890 roughly on a par with the Lexmark X75, although it falls behind when it comes to text quality. Its most serious competitor is HP's PSC 2210 multifunction device. This shares many of the Brother's features, but lacks some of its fax functions and the automatic document feeder. However, it uses the same printing engine as the Photosmart 7150 in our inkjet Labs this month, so if print quality is a priority, it's the more natural choice.

The two devices offer similar running costs, too. Although Brother quotes a life of 950 pages for its black cartridge and 450 for its colour cartridges, these figures apply to its draft mode, which consumes far less ink. We'd add around 50 per cent to the running costs, making them comparable with those of the HP. Still, it's good to see the separate colour ink cartridges in the Brother, which means you won't need to chuck away all the inks just because one colour has run out.

For many offices, the decision to buy the Brother will rest on whether you need its automatic document feeder. If you do, and can live without top-quality printing, the Brother is a fine choice. But if quality is the most important factor, choose the HP PSC 2210.