Brother MFC-255CW All-in-One Printer

Brother's MFC-255CW is a very good color inkjet printer that is a great value at under $100. Like some other Brother all-in-ones I've tried, it has slow print speeds across a wireless network, but it scores high points for print quality--especially photos, which come out looking fantastic.

The Brother MFC-255CW is a lot cheaper than some of Brother's bigger all-in-one printers, but its strong (and weak) points are pretty much the same. In the former case, print quality is excellent; Brother's Innobella ink leaves photos incredibly rich, sharply detailed, and with amazing depth. Other print jobs print out the way they should--crisp, sharp, and without soaking into cheap copy paper. But it had some woeful network-printing speeds.

Printing out a 20-page Word document took an amazing nine minutes, with the first page out in about 2:44, when printed across the wireless network. Switch to a USB connection, and times dramatically improve, with a first page out in 24 seconds and the whole job averaging about 20 seconds a page. Brother's Innobella inks work well even with cheap, plain paper, without leaving the final copy soggy or limp.

The MFC-255CW is an all-in-one printer but it really did a great job with photo printing. It printed a colorful 4x6 photo in 1:32, not so fast but then again, faster than the more expensive MFC-6890cdw.

This is a low-price printer, and so while it offers a fax, scanner, and copier, there's no LCD screen to help you edit photos. It does offer print support for memory cards and it can scan directly to e-mail and in a variety of formats (including JPG, TIFF, and PDF). So for the price, it's a good buy; and if you can find a deal on it, which is likely, it's even better.