IT Pro Verdict

This is a well-designed, small office or workgroup multifunction machine with flexible fax and the convenience of a wireless network connection. Its LED print engine produces high quality output, particularly for photographic content, and both speed and running costs are reasonable.

By Simon Williams

published 30 November 2009

in Reviews

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.

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