Printer: Brother MFC-9330CDW

As the most expensive model in this round-up by a fair margin, this Brother printer has much to prove. Its specifications certainly look good.

This is an LED printer, which is similar to a laser printer. Its actual print speed is the highest of this lot of printers, at 23 pages a minute (black-and-white and colour).

Samsung's Xpress C460FW comes closest at 18 pages for black-and-white printing, but manages only four pages a minute for colour.

The Brother comes with a colour 3.7-inch touchscreen, larger than any on the multi-function printers reviewed here.

It is useful for navigation and control. Understandably, the touchscreen is not as responsive as those found on mobile devices. This can be frustrating when you make a swipe gesture on the screen and nothing happens.

It has a touch-sensitive backlit keypad which lights up when required, such as when you are sending a fax. Except for the power button, all the buttons are touch-based, which makes for a clean look.

The paper tray holds 250 sheets, easily beating its shoot-out rivals whose trays top out at 150. It also has a 35-page auto document feeder.

The MFC-9330CDW supports automatic duplex printing, which, as anyone who has ever used this feature can tell you, is convenient and saves paper.

Wi-Fi Direct is supported - this means you can print directly from a supported mobile device or laptop without connecting the printer to a Wi-Fi network.

Brother's iPrint & Scan app (iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7) does not look snazzy, but it will let you print documents and photos from a variety of sources, including cloud services, such as Dropbox, Evernote and OneDrive.

For offices, this printer has a Secure Function Lock feature, which can restrict up to 25 users from printing in colour.

The Brother MFC-9330CDW produces decent black-and-white print-outs, but its colour prints were far from the best. The bar charts which it printed showed mild banding.

Its black toner costs $95 for about 2,500 pages - the cheapest of the five printers here. However, heavy users will have to factor in the replacement cost of the drum ($185, good for 15,000 pages).

Fast and packed with features, this printer is worth its high price tag, especially if you print mostly in black-and-white. TECH SPECS

Price: $698

Yield: Up to 2,500 standard pages per cartridge (black) and 1,400 pages per cartridge (colour)

Print resolution: Up to 600 x 2,400 dots per inch

Speed: Up to 23 pages per minute (black), 23 pages per minute (colour)

Tested speed: 23 pages per minute (black), 23 pages per minute (colour)

RATING

Features: 5/5

Design: 3/5

Performance: 4/5

Value for money: 4/5

Overall: 4/5

This article was first published on Oct 29, 2014.
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