Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: highly inexpensive, compact.

Thumbs down: awful print quality, highly inconvenient paper tray to use, lacks flatbed scanning functionality, very slow output speed.

Inside the trunk:

• Copier Type Digital
• Fax Type Plain paper
• Printing Technology Ink-jet – Color
• Standard Memory 16 MB
• Max Printing Resolution up to 6000 x 1200 dpi
• Max Printing Speed up to 25 pages/min (mono) / up to 20 pages/min (color)
• Ink Cartridge Configuration 4 cartridges (1 each: cyan, magenta, yellow, black)
• Ink Palette Supported (Colors) Cyan, magenta, yellow, black
• Operating System Support MS Windows ME , MS Windows XP , MS Windows 2000 , MS Windows 98 SE , Apple Mac OS X 10.2.4 or later , MS Windows XP Professional x64 Edition

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS:

I guess the makers of this multifunction printer are still stuck somewhere in the 1990’s. frankly, its high time that they zap out of this phase and get a reality check because using this computer just made me feel like I was traveling in a time machine which goes only into the past… anyways going towards the review.

Razzle-dazzle: Possibly progressive thinking is something that the makers of this printer have not really heard of because it really leaves you unsatisfied when it comes to innovative invention.

It’s a small printer standing at 16.1 inches wide by 19.3 inches deep and 12.8 inches tall, but whoever said that only the size is the best part of the design. Its highly out of vogue black look does very little to add to its looks or to get me even talking about it. Its least appealing to the eyes and to add more salt on the wounds its got drab rubber buttons and boring drawers very much unlike its on the shelf swanky competitors.

Its button layout is also quite conventional, doesn’t have anything much to offer with a few small rubber buttons against a one line LCD which is hardly visible. The display screen is also set up at a very weird dead set on angle, because of which I actually had to look askance to read the tiny characters during the labtests.

Below the LCD screen we have the Fax, Scan, and Copy function buttons along with a bonus telephone handset with auto dialing on the keypad. But again, this doesn’t do anything much to add to its looks. Also it lacks an USB port or any memory card support because of which it is not possible to make use of any external media.

If I talk about improvements in this printer then possibly I could talk about the removable plastic tray which handles most of the incoming and outgoing papers from the printer with adjustable tabs that corral small 4-inch-by-6-inch photo paper all the way up to full legal size slabs.

Inside dope: It comes loaded with a new feature called “true2life” which is a colour enhancement tool with the help of which the colour density, brightness, contrast etc. can be changed. There is also a status monitor that is installed by the drive which keeps a track of the cartridge and ink levels. Also it includes a feature called Papersoft by Scansoft which helps in image processing by providing basic image editing solutions like blemish erasure and red-eye elimination. I quite enjoyed playing around with the software but would like to add that this is basically for amateurs at photo editing like me, isn’t something that can match upto the adobe suites or anything close by.

If your looking forward to scan probably thick books or anything other than single page documents then this one will surely prove to be a disappointment because it lacks a flatbed copier and scanner.

Leaving the unpromising features aside, I thought atleast the performance could be the saving grace. I was seriously expecting this one to be better than its earlier predecessor, the Brother DC-165C ,but again this one proved to be slower. Why am I not surprised?? This one scores so low in most our benchmark tests that I don’t even think its worth talking about it. And the biggest disappointment is still on its way… this one took almost a minute to print a measly paper of text even after a direct USB connection.

Nitty- Gritty: If you feel like your missing your old dot matrix printer then rest assured… this one is surely going to be its newest replacement. Its not that I am biased but it’s just that I really tried hard to like this one but all the efforts seriously went down the drain.

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