Reviews

Brother MFC-9320CW review: LED printer

Brother makes a rare foray into LED technology to produce the MFC-9320CW. Does it give it the edge in a competitive colour printer market? We review the Brother MFC-9320CW to find out.

30 Nov 2009

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Price

£402

Brother has an extensive range of laser and inkjet multifunction printers, but the MFC-9320CW is one of the first LED-based machines the company has produced. It's a full-colour device with a conventional design, having a flatbed scanner, complete with Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) on top, a control panel in front and the main body of the print engine directly underneath.

The advantage of an LED printer, which uses a strip of high-intensity LED elements to illuminate its photoconductive drum and reproduce an image on the page, is that it has no moving parts and is therefore simpler to make and potentially more reliable.

The print engine is designed linearly, with paper running from front to back under the four print drums, so the printer is quite deep, but not excessively wide. A 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom is supplemented by a single-sheet multi-purpose feed for special media.

The control panel is well-designed, though quite crowded with buttons for controlling the fax, as well as scanning and copying. There are eight one-touch numbers, 200 speed dials and 20 devoted to groups, so this is a versatile fax machine.

The number pad serves a second function to enter a Wi-Fi pass code when setting up the wireless networking and to offer secure walk-up printing. The machine uses a host-based Windows driver, but PCL and Postscript-based drivers are available for download. It's odd these aren't included on the software CD, which is far from full.