Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Low printing costs, two year warranty.

Thumbs Down:

Doesn’t come bundled with USB cable, ugly looks, creative software needs internet connection, slow print speed.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Brother DCP 165C is a color inkjet printer, it has 32 MB of memory, supported flash memory cards are SDHC Memory Card, Memory Stick Pro, xD-Picture Card, USB flash drive, SD Memory Card, Memory Stick.

Maximum copying speeds are -  up to 18 pages/min for color and up to 20 pages/min for mono. Maximum document enlargement is 400%, maximum document reduction is 25%, copying features include 4 on 1 and 2 on 1.

Maximum printing resolution is up to 6000 x 1200 dpi for color, up to 6000 x 1200 dpi for mono, Maximum Printing Speed is up to 25 pages/min for color and up to 30 pages/min for mono. There are four ink cartridges – black, yellow, magenta and cyan. Optical resolution is 1200 x 2400 dpi and interpolated resolution is 19200 x 19200 dpi, internal color depth is 36 bit.

Supported media type is Transparencies, Plain paper and Photo paper. Border Photo Sizes are 5 in x 7 in, A6 (4.13 in x 5.83 in), 3.9 in x 5.8 in, A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), 4 in x 6 in. Standard media capacity is 100 sheets. Speed details are – Copying : up to 20 pages/min – B/W, Copying : up to 18 pages/min – Color, Printing : up to 25 pages/min – Color, Printing : up to 30 pages/min – B/W.

Supported operating systems are MS Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Apple Mac OS X 10.2.4 or later, MS Windows 2000 Professional, MS Windows XP Professional, MS Windows XP Home Edition, MS Windows Vista. Bundled software includes Presto! PageManager for Mac, ScanSoft PaperPort SE 11.0.

Consumables included are 1 x Cartridge ( Black ) – up to 450 pages – Brother Innobella LC61-BK, 1 x Cartridge ( Yellow ) – up to 325 pages – Brother Innobella LC61-Y, 1 x Cartridge ( Magenta ) – up to 325 pages – Brother Innobella LC65HYM, 1 x Cartridge ( Cyan ) – up to 325 pages – Brother Innobella LC65HYC. Brother gives a 1 year limited warranty for this printer.

Razzle Dazzle:

Brother DCP 165C is a poor performer and doesn’t impress with looks either. It has a boring look which is fine if you are getting it for your office. It has the typical boring rectangular shape, and is 5.9 inches tall, 14.4 inches deep and 15.4 inches wide. An office printer doesn’t necessarily have to be boring and Brother makes no effort what so ever to make this device attractive looking. If are the kind of person for whom looks matter, we would recommend you to stay away from this printer. The printer looks similar to the dot-matrix devices that we had in the 80s. It is due to the tiny rubber buttons and the single-line LCD that doesn’t have a backlight. The website describes the device as “low-profile” which we think is an understatement.

Inside Dope:

This is the worst printer we have ever had in our test centers, apart from the cheap price tag (it costs $80) we didn’t like anything about this device. We had lots of hardware malfunctions while testing the printer, the print speed was very slow and we don’t know what the manufacturer was thinking when it brought this awful printer to the market. The print quality too is extremely bad. We would recommend you against buying this printer and go for Canon Pixma MX330 which is belongs to the same price range and is a better performer by miles. If you are adept at printers, you will quickly notice that this device is much behind in quality level when compared to printers in these days are offering.

If you are adept at printers, you will quickly notice that Brother DCP 165C is behind as compared to what other printers in the market today are offering. The tiny rubber prints are really bad and feels cheap while pressing. There is a single line LCD but it doesn’t have a backlight which makes it difficult to use in poor light. We also had to tilt the printer around because we couldn’t see the characters on the LCD properly.

There are a number of buttons on the right of the screen for scan, photo capture, ink levels, stop/exit button, power, two buttons for black and color. The photo capture button is used to view photos on the memory card. The printer comes with PictBridge USB and is located between the input output tray and the control panel. The card reader can read xD, Memory Stick, SD and CompactFlash cards.

There is a large drawer at the bottom of the printer which holds the blank sheets and the top of the printer gives out the printed sheets. However, Brother messes up here too, the drawer doesn’t come out enough from the printer and hence it is difficult to take the sheets out. You will need a pair of sticks to take the paper out and it will be worse if you are printing small photos.

The power port is located on the left side and the USB port is inside the printer. You will have to open up the machine, prop the lid up with a plastic arm, just like a hood of the car and then put the USB cord in. This is quite irritating and you lose cable length because of this.

The driver that comes with the printer lets you adjust between the quality settings which are fast normal, fast, fine and normal. You get a “True2life”, a tool to enhance color which lets you customize brightness, contrast, white balance, color density and other such settings. There is also a cartridge monitor which lets you know how much ink is left in the cartridges.

The printer comes with a third application from ScanSoft called “Paperport”. It is used to edit photos and is quite similar to iPhoto seen in Mac. Basic photo editing features include red-eye elimination, blemish erasing and auto enhancement. We played with this application for a while and were pretty impressed with what it had to offer. However, the software contains only basic editing features and doesn’t come anywhere close to Adobe suites.

We thought the Brother DCP 165C was really poor in print quality. We tested it for photos, graphics, presentation and text and they all appeared fuzzy even after we fiddled with the print head. For text, the prints suffered from distorted and jagged edges, especially in cases of low font. Color prints were worse, the colors were blotchy and the transition between them was so abrupt, that we could see white blocks between them. We tried printing with the drivers color settings of “True2life” and “vivid color” but the performance didn’t improve by much.

The copy and scan features on the printer were good. Scanning options include putting images to e-mail, to an optical character recognition text translator or file folder. On the virtual Control Center, you get four programmable buttons that can be customized to any preference. Copying can be done even if the computer is switched off, though this is not an uncommon feature on the printer, still it is nice to have. Magnification of the copies can be set from 25 percent to 400 percent of the original size but for pagination there are only two options – 4-in-1 and 2-in-1.

The DCP-165C has a four-cartridge system with separate tanks for yellow, magenta, cyan and black. You can buy high-yield and standard cartridges on the Website. We tested the high-yield capacity and here are the results. A color cartridge that costs $17 gives an output of 750 pages and black cartridge which costs $32 gives 900 pages. The price is cheaper but it comes at a cost for low quality.

The DCP-165C gives you Brother Creative Center shortcut on the disc which is just a link to the manufacturers Web site. Most printers give a suite of desktop options for playing around with your prints, but Brother gives no such application. The Creative Center shortcut lets you print home or business creations like games, greeting cards, presentation and brochures. You need an internet connection for this and it was one of the many features on the printer that irritated us.

Like mentioned before, the Brother DCP 165C is the slowest ever. We tested this device with five printers in the same price range before coming to this conclusion. The printer churns 0.62 photos per minute which is slower than its predecessor Brother MFC-685cw which gives 1.3 photos per minute. The device performed poorly in other tests too.

Brother gives you a 2 year warranty which really impressed us considering competitors offers just one year. You also get tech support over the phone from 6 am to 5 pm. You can visit the website for software downloads, location of service center, FAQs and reference manuals. There is also an “Ask Us” program which provides help over e-mail.

Nitty Gritty:

In case you haven’t guessed by now, the Brother DCP 165C is a poor printer. We will strongly advice you against buying this device. If you are looking for printers in the same category, we will recommend you the aforementioned Canon Pixma MX330.

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