SAN FRANCISCO – Brother’s US$180 MFC-790CW color inkjet multifunction printer has a tempting array of goodies, but offers lackluster performance. Despite its aspirations, the MFC-790CW can’t compete with other machines in its price range, such as the HP OfficeJet J4680.

Though the MFC-790CW is compact, it still provides some nice features for the price. Wi-Fi connectivity is standard. A 4.2-inch color LCD touch screen replaces many control-panel buttons and is easy to use, with a few exceptions: The on-screen ink-status button, for instance, looks more like an icon, so I didn’t understand that I could press it to access ink-related features. Media slots, a PictBridge port, and a dedicated photo tray encourage you to print your favorite shots.

Although this model has versatile paper handling, the trays hold a minimal amount. The automatic document feeder (ADF) holds just 15 sheets. The main input tray takes only 100 sheets; the piggybacked photo tray, merely 20. The tray lid doubles as the 50-sheet output tray. With these three components crammed into such a small space, loading or adjusting media requires some tricky maneuvers.

The ink cartridges nestle conveniently behind a small door in the machine’s front. The separate cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges each cost $10 and last 325 pages (per industry-standard ISO measurements), or 3.1 cents per color, per page. That’s pretty good. Black is the exception: At $23.50 for 450 pages, it’s a pricey 5.2 cents per page.

But the real problem is the MFC-790CW’s speed, or lack thereof. It printed plain-text pages at an abysmal rate of 3.9 pages per minute. It did better on graphics, managing 2.4 ppm. The print quality didn’t make up for the long wait. Text samples looked a little light but crisp. Graphics printed on plain paper appeared dull, but on Brother’s own photo paper they improved considerably. Scan samples seemed dark on occasion and sometimes yellowish, but acceptable; copy samples were also decent.

Given its low price and interesting features, the Brother MFC-790CW could have been a contender. But its plodding performance can’t be ignored.

February 10, 2009

Understated Assistant
By Billy Joe I. Allardo
Published in the December 2008-January 2009 print edition of PC World Philippines

Brother HL-2140
P4,990
www.brother.com.ph

The Brother HL-2140 is a compact laser printer that should be ideal for small and home offices, where space is as valuable as the profit from each everyday transaction. This laser printer can only churn out monochrome prints, thus reducing its role to document printing and a graph or two. Compared with the printout of the Samsung ML-1640, the color tone and character size are bolder. A closer inspection revealed that the letters churned out by the Brother HL-2140 appeared to be more jagged compared to the smooth lines from the Samsung ML-1640. Still, this is a minor issue. The results were still very readable, thanks mainly to the thickness of each letter.

Since this is a monochrome printer, do not expect too much when it comes to graphics. Images printed on normal mode were better when compared to the ones produced on the highest setting, which came out saturated. Yet there were no signs of banding, a print head discrepancy wherein vertical or horizontal lines appear across the image. In addition, there were also no traces of bleeding with both text and images. The absence of bleeding and banding on the printed material is a plus factor to the efficiency of the Brother HL-2140 when it comes to toner use.

The design of the printer is simple and straightforward. Clad in differing hues of gray, it has a set of light emitting diodes (LED) that warn if there is an error (like a paper jam or opened latch) or if you already need to replace the drum and toner cartridges. A translucent button with a blue LED underneath is nearby and serves a multitask role of canceling and continuing a print job. However, you might mistake this as the power button. To boot up the printer, you need to press the switch located at the lower right side of the unit.

Bundled with the printer are the customary power cable and a USB 2.0 cable. The CD included has the printer drivers and a user guide, but you need to have an internet connection to utilize both.

Access to the toner cartridge is through a latch located in front. The cartridge bay is a bit cramped, but its okay since you only access it when it is time to replace the toner cartridge. The manual feeder tray feels somewhat flimsy and you might break it once you are trying to pull out the paper tray underneath it.

People who buy a monochrome printer nowadays intend to use it mainly as a cheap alternative for printing plain documents. Despite the issue on jagged letters, the Brother HL-2140 still fits the bill with its thickly printed characters. In addition, its compact design and uncomplicated use allows this printer to be at your side, no matter how big or large your office is.