Brother MFC-790CW All-in-One Printer

This Brother 790CW all-in-one performed admirably in all my tests. The large, color touchscreen is a particularly handy and welcome addition. It's a little on the slow side, and at large sizes the fonts aren't the sharpest I've seen; but for the price, it's a great buy. Plus, since it's fairly small and compact, it won't take up much room in your office.

Brother has seen the future, and its name is wireless printing. Yes, I've said it before: this should be a standard feature on all printers in the 21st century, and my guess is that, sooner or later, it will be. Brother takes an extra step in its printers, including this MFC-790CW all-in-one, and makes the process simple.

The Brother MFC-790CW is a compact multifunction printer. It uses four ink tanks with Brother's proprietary Innobella ink, which provides vivid colors and long-lasting prints. In my tests, a 4x6 photo took only about two minutes to print and came out dry, vivid, and very sharp. Perhaps the colors were slightly more muted than I saw with the Epson NX400 but any differences were truly slight.

The printer is fairly compact, and that led to some small issues with the 790. To print using photo paper, you need to readjust the paper-feed tray and load paper into the top of the tray; the instructions in the manual are pretty vague when it comes to this process, which involves squeezing a plastic clip and then sliding the whole top of the tray forward. It's a cumbersome process, and needs to be reversed before using the regular paper tray again.

Since it's a wireless printer, I do all my tests wirelessly, and I understand that it's possible that my print times will be extended as a result. A six-page PDF took 1 minute, 20 seconds to print, with the first page out in 42 seconds (so about 19.6 seconds/page). Color graphic pages averaged 45 seconds per page. It's not slow, but it's certainly not particularly fast. Large fonts didn't show any bleed, but they were also not the sharpest I've seen. And for some reason the printer squeaks a lot.

The 790CW has a 4.2" touchscreen that is very handy, especially when printing photos from an SD card. A handful of photo-editing options can be accessed through the touchscreen.