Brother MFC-590

An all-in-one inkjet printer, scanner, colour copier and plain-paper fax

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Price: £445.32

Manufacturer: Brother

Specifications:

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Verdict

Pros:

Convenient and straightforward to use.
Cons: Slow and noisy; doesn't fully support Windows XP.
Overall: In classic multifunction style, this machine is a jack of all trades but master of none. Speed and quality for each function is never better than average.

Alistair Dabbs, Personal Computer World 26 Feb 2003

By combining an inkjet printer, scanner, colour copier and plain-paper fax into one unit, Brother's MFC-590 certainly saves you desk space.

It's also a versatile alternative to peripherals, letting you operate fax and copier functions directly without switching on your PC.

Up to 100 sheets of paper are loaded into a lean-back feeder, with printouts emerging onto an extending output tray at the front.

There is an automatic document feeder on top of the machine which operates for multi-page faxes and copies alike. This lifts up to reveal a conventional A4 glass scanning plate for thicker originals such as books, magazines and other bulky objects.

The printer hardware is built around a 1,200dpi (dots per inch) Piezo print head, using four ink cartridges. Having separate cartridges, as opposed to one black and one tri-colour, is less wasteful over time, but replacing all the inks at once is expensive at over £40.

Print quality is average but by no means poor, while real-world throughput is slow at around 2-3ppm (pages per minute) for ordinary colour office documents at normal quality.

It is capable of near-photo quality but, with our A4 photo test on glossy paper taking more than 19 minutes, we can't imagine anyone wanting to bother.

The scanner uses a 36bit CCD array capable of capturing images at up to 600 x 2,400dpi optical sampling rate. Scan quality is not sophisticated, but is acceptable for general office scanning, colour copying and faxing. Fax performance is equally competent, enhanced by a clear button layout.

Our biggest concern was the incomplete support for Windows XP. Drivers are available from solutions.brother.com, but were absent from our test sample. Most buyers, though, will be perfectly happy with the average quality and performance.

Price: £445.32 (£379 ex VAT)

Specifications: