Brother MFC-9970CDW All-in-One Color Laser Printer

The MFC-9970CDW is big and heavy, and fairly pricey. But for offices and small workgroups, this color laser printer with built-in fax, copier, and scanner, and automatic document feeder may be the ticket to a well-organized office. The automatic duplex printing, scanning, and faxing is an excellent feature, and though first pages take some time to print, the printer is very fast once it's going, putting out almost 30 pages per minute. I wish color prints looked a bit better and there was less paper curl; but balanced against the extras provided (including a touchscreen and USB port), it's hard to complain too much.

Let's get the biggest issue about Brother's MFC-9970CDW all-in-one color laser printer out on the table first and foremost. It's very big and quite heavy. This is not a "sitting unobtrusively on the corner of the desk" printer, but rather, "We're going to need a bigger office" kind of printer. Ultimately, that's a fairly petty gripe since this is a color laser printer made for offices and workgroups, not those of us who work in spare bedrooms. But do keep in mind that this printer weighs almost 63 pounds and measures 19.3" x 20.7" x 20.9", and getting it up the stairs and into my home office was a trying experience.

Ok, warnings aside, if you do need a heavy-duty color printer for a small office or workgroup, this is a very good bet. First of all, it comes with a wide array of user-friendly options that are not always found on color laser printers meant for offices, such as a USB port conveniently up front (you can scan directly to USB), a five-inch color touchscreen (which unfortunately handles some but not that many functions--there is a 20-key fax memory keyboard as well as a number keyboard and nine other buttons as well), automatic duplex printing / scanning / faxing, and wired / wireless networking.

How's it perform? Very well, with one caveat: When the printer is not warmed up, first pages out are slow--as much as 30 seconds, and half of that when the printer is warmed up. That's a bit frustrating, but that frustration melted away once the first page was out and subsequent pages were flying out at a rate of almost two seconds per page. For big jobs, you'll forget about any frustration by the time the job is finished.

In terms of quality, there were few noticeable issues. Black text of course looked excellent, as it should for a laser printer. I found that most color prints looked good, though not spectacular, and there was a bit of paper curl even when using paper made for laser printers. That's not so unusual, just a bit annoying. Laser printer paper does tend to flatten after a while, and of course the tremendous July humidity was not helping the situation much.

Other functions worked very well, with no unpleasant surprises. The scanner (as well as the printer and the fax) has an automatic duplex function, which means with a few jabs of the touchscreen you can run your document once through the automatic document feeder (ADF) and scan both sides at once, into two separate documents. That's a tremendous time-saver and I can see how small offices would really benefit from this feature. In my tests I noticed that the ADF didn't always feed my scan perfectly straight, resulting in some slightly skewed results. This was a minor issue and could easily be corrected with the scanning software.

All these wonderful features don't come cheap, and at more than US$600 this printer is going to appeal mostly to those who have a need for speed and who will pay extra for the high-yield toner cartridges that will make this an even better buy.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.