Labs

The sturdy MFC-465CN has a fax, automatic document feeder and both USB Hi-Speed and 10/100 Ethernet ports. It was easy to set up, although it beeped annoyingly with every keypress. Fortunately, this was easy to switch off in the setup menu using its colour screen.

Draft print speeds were below average, and draft text was very pale. The 'fast normal' mode produced slightly better results, but still took nine minutes and 33 seconds to print a 50-page document. Correspondence-quality printing was slow,

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and we had to wait almost half a minute for the first page. Text documents looked good, although the edges of bold characters were faintly smudged. The black text in our mixed-colour prints was sharp and the colours were accurate, but solid areas of colour were speckled and inconsistent.

Photos were painfully slow to print, and there were specks and imperfections in areas of dark colour. Mid-range colours and skin tones looked faded, and while extremely dark and very light tones were accurate, grey and brown mid-range tones were indistinct. Like Brother's cheaper DCP-135C, this MFP couldn't print 6x4in photos without a thin white border, even with borderless printing enabled.

The scanner software is basic, but it let us perform multiple scans per session by default. It successfully auto-cropped A4 previews but couldn't do this for smaller sizes, so we had to define the scan area manually for photographs. Software scanner control was available only when connected to the device by USB rather than over the network. Scanned text was hard to read at 150dpi but sharp at 300dpi.