Labs

Brother is best known for its business printers, and this inexpensive MFP's features are well suited to home-office users. It was fairly easy to set up once we'd extracted the four individual ink cartridges from their packaging. Once these were installed, it took about four minutes to charge and clean the print heads.

Draft print quality was poor, with pale text and broken lettering. We got much better results at normal quality, but print speeds were slow. Even printing a single page took just over half a minute. Text was solid and well formed,

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but bold characters had smudged edges. It did well in our mixed colour print test, and at a reasonable speed. Colours were accurate with no unwanted speckling or stripes.

We were also pleased with the quality of our 10x8in photo prints on A4 photo paper, although print speeds were again very slow. Prints were clear and sharp, with accurate colours even on skin tones and pale areas. Unfortunately, we had trouble with printing borderless 6x4in pictures. Borderless printing isn't even an option at the highest print resolution of 1,200x6,000dpi, but it's available at the lower photo-quality setting. Even so, print previews failed to display our images as borderless, and our borderless 6x4in prints had a 1mm white border on the right-hand side.

The DCP-135C's scanner has one of the lowest resolutions in the group, and some of the images it produced were extremely grainy. This was particularly visible in areas where a lighter colour blended into a darker hue. Document scans looked better, with sharp letters and accurate colours. Copy speeds were average for the group, but copies were dark and grainy with fuzzy lettering.