Product Reviews

Following our recent experience trying to get Lexmark's X9350 wifi all-in-one to work wirelessly, we approached this Brother wireless multifunction device with some trepidation. We needn't have worried as setting up the MFC-845CW, including getting it to see and connect to our wireless network, was a cinch.

The MFC-845CW has all the features you'd expect of a device in this price range. It can connect to your network wirelessly or over Ethernet, or directly to your Mac over USB. It has card slots and a PictBridge USB socket for direct photo printing, an automatic document feeder for scanning, copying and faxing, and a 2.5in LCD for viewing photos, configuring the multitude of available options and displaying phone numbers in the fax machine's phone book.

It also has one unique feature: a Dect handset. The handset connects to the MFC-845CW wirelessly and can be used as a standard telephone handset when the Brother all-in-one is plugged into your phone line. The main device can be set up to auto-detect whether an incoming call is a fax or voice call and route it accordingly. There's also a built-in digital answering machine and a speaker phone on the all-in-one unit. You can even add up to three additional handsets to the Dect network. The handset worked from the second we plugged it in and played happily with our office PBX. Likewise, the fax machine was easy to set up and configure: we were sending and receiving faxes in no time.

Hooking up this all-in-one to print wirelessly over our network involved nothing more than selecting the wireless option from the menu and asking the built-in wizard to take us through the necessary steps. It automatically listed all the networks

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it discovered and asked us to select one. After that, it was just a case of entering the network's encryption key on the keypad and, bingo, we were connected. That's a whole lot easier than the convoluted approach that was required to get the Lexmark X9350 working.

Once the MFC-845CW was set up, printing was simply a matter of adding the device in System Preferences and selecting it when printing. Printing from memory cards was just as easy, as was making copies.

There are two input trays for the printer: one for A4-sized media and one for envelopes and smaller photo paper such as 6 x 4in. The mechanism used to switch between the two is a little unwieldy and nowhere near as neat as the push-button system on Canon's Pixma devices.

The one area where we thought this all-in-one might slip up was scanning over a network. However, it worked very well. Pressing the Scan button on the control panel enables you to scan to any Mac on the network that has the Brother Twain driver installed. You're then invited to choose the Mac to which you want to scan, enter the passcode if you've set one up, and select whether you want to scan to file, image, OCR or email.

Scanning from the Mac is equally easy. Choose the Brother Twain driver from the Acquire menu item in your chosen application and the driver launches, ready to scan. Our only beef is that the options for tweaking scans are limited to adjusting resolution, bit depth, brightness and contrast. There's no de-screen option or sophisticated contrast adjustment such as Levels or Curves.

We were pleased with the results of our tests on the MFC-845CW. While it won't win any awards for being the fastest printer in town, and its photo print quality isn't a match for dedicated photo printers from the likes of Canon, Epson and HP, its results are perfectly acceptable for an all-rounder. Text print quality is good for an inkjet - not as crisp as a laser printer, but a match for nearly any other inkjet at Normal quality.

At £230, the Brother MFC-845CW is cheaper than Lexmark's X9350 and yet offers much more. If you need a fax, printer, scanner and copier for home or office, like the idea of a bundled Dect phone, and only want to use it to print photos occasionally, it would be a good choice indeed.