Brother MFC-795CW

Hardware: Distinctive Features: A Phone!

It's not everyday that you use your printer to phone a friend, and while it might seem unusual, it saves space and is a useful extra feature on a multifunction device.  As well as the phone and an answering machine, you get a large 4.2'' colour screen, wired and wireless connectivity, a document loader and four separate cartridges: black, cyan, magenta and yellow.

Such a wide range of options makes the MFC-795CW a pretty high-end offering.  To give you a summary of what it can do, it prints, copies and scans but also faxes in colour, makes calls and takes your voice messages.  And it doesn't even take up that much space!



Speeds

If you take a look at the specifications at the top of the page, you'll see that we've put 'Not available' for printing speeds.  Brother's advertising does claim a speed of 35 pages per minute, but that's not something we're prepared to accept because unlike its rivals, it doesn't use a standard measure for testing and listing print speeds.

Our own tests showed we were right to be sceptical: instead of 35 ppm, the actual speeds were closer to 4.5 ppm, a third slower than some other manufacturers like colour.  The speeds are almost identical in colour (4.4 ppm) and black and white (4.5 ppm).  It's only in draft mode that the speed climbs to 22 ppm.


Photo printing speeds are no better: 4 minutes for an A4 colour print and almost 2 minutes for a 4 x 6 is almost four times slower than some of the competition.  The Canon Pixma MP640, for instance, makes 4 x 6 prints in just 27 seconds.


Quality: better photos than documents

Warning: paper jams likely ahead!  We started our tests using the exact paper stock that Brother recommends, a 260 gsm photo paper specially designed for this printer.  It got stuck so many times that we eventually give up and switched to a 240 gsm paper from another manufacturer.

We didn't have any of these problems when printing office documents using standard 80 gsm papers.

This printer has four standard cartridges: black, cyan, magenta and yellow.  As is usually the case with Brother's printers, the quality of office documents can't match that of their competitors.  Colours aren't reproduced accurately, there's not enough contrast and ink drops remain visible, meaning solid blocks of colour don't look even.


Scanner & Copier: more haste, less speed?

The scanner is fast, digitising a 4 x 6'' photo at 300 dpi in 12 seconds, and twice that at 600 dpi (25 seconds).

Black-and-white copies take 28 seconds to produce, but colour takes longer at 42 seconds.  Unfortunately, the quality isn't great.  On our test document, ink drops were clearly visible on both sets of copies.  If you want to be able to look at lots of detail on a graph or chart that you've copied, you'll have to look quite closely.

The average colour discrepancy produced by the scanner was 5.5% in our tests, which is acceptable.  However, the results themselves were a lot worse than the original.  On the photo shown here, the loss of detail and contrast is evident, and the colour reproduction is pretty week.

The details of the colour discrepancies are as follows:

Cost per page: above average

The total cost per page using the MFC-795CW is 11.7 p per page, which is better than the Brother DCP-365CN, but more expensive than the 11.1 p per page achieved by the Lexmark Interact S605 or 10.4 p per page on the HP Photosmart Wireless, both of which have XL cartridges.  At 9.5 p per page, the Epson Stylus Photo PX810FW also works out cheaper.

ISO Lifespan