Brother MFC-290C review

Like buses, you wait ages for a new low-cost inkjet MFP to be released and then two come along at once.

While Lexmark's X3650, opposite, is aimed at home users, Brother's MFC-290C has a range of features more suited to office use. It's one of the cheapest MFPs we've seen to include a fax machine with a 15-page automatic document feeder (ADF). This makes it an appealing option for home workers who need to send lengthy documents.

Print speeds were slower than usual for an inkjet. It was most noticeable in our normal quality text document print test, where a single page took 26 seconds to emerge. We've noticed this with other Brother inkjets. It's particularly problematic in an MFP that is otherwise well suited for use in a home office. Normal quality print speeds of 3ppm are very slow, especially compared to the increasing number of compact mono laser MFPs, which are much faster and only a bit more expensive.

Photo printing, an area where inkjets usually excel, was also painfully slow and results were variable. Most of our photos were bold and bright, with good contrast and well-defined dark tones. However, very pale shades had a marked magenta tint and light skin tones looked jaundiced. Even extracting our prints was a minor irritation that required us to reach inside the printer to pull them out of its deep tray. You can print photos directly from various memory card formats, but this isn't particularly convenient without a screen. There is also a PictBridge USB port, so you can print photos directly from a digital camera. Unlike some other Brother printers, there's no facility to print PDFs from a USB drive, which would be more useful to office users.

The quality of normal document prints was also flawed. Mono text documents were usable, although black text looked slightly grey in comparison with prints from both lasers and other inkjets. Draft quality prints emerged at a respectable 9.8ppm, but are only suitable for proofing, as they're pale with jagged lettering. Colour document prints were poor and suffered from agonisingly slow print speeds of just 1.4ppm. Bright colours looked washed out, but pale shades were accurate.

Copy quality is better than that of most inkjet MFPs, with particularly accurate colours and legible reproduction of even fine 5pt text. However, mono copies of colour graphics were gritty, and copy speeds were rather slow at 30 seconds for a single mono page and 42 seconds for colour. The ADF makes it easy to copy documents of up to 15 pages at once, but it's also slow. We had to wait almost four minutes for a 10-page mono copy.

Brother's scanner interface is basic, but did everything we needed. You can select resolutions and bit depth, and choose from a variety of preset sizes. There's no automatic size detection, so you'll have to select scan areas for unusually sized items yourself. Settings are helpfully retained between scans and the interface remains open after a scan has been made, which makes it easy to scan batches of documents. The CCD scanner has a maximum optical resolution of 1,200x2,400dpi and up to 32-bit colour depth. Unfortunately, although our low-resolution document scans looked good and captured tiny text accurately, high-resolution photo scans suffered from poor shading and jagged dithering.

Despite its solid range of features and low price, the MFC-290C disappoints. However, most fax MFPs are more expensive, so you'd be hard pressed to find an MFP with similar capabilities at this price. Lexmark's X9575 (Labs, Shopper 249) has network capabilities and faster print speeds, but costs almost twice as much. If you don't need colour, you may be better off with a mono laser MFP such as HP's LaserJet M1319f (What's New, Shopper 249), but this isn't a cheap option. Due to its slow print speeds and poor quality, we can't recommend the MFC-290C even though it's the cheapest fax MFP we've seen.