The All-in-one Box

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday April 14, 1997

Trevor Ireton

Brother's "multi-function centre" rolls the most common office hardware into one box - and it's a business bundle of joy, TREVOR IRETON reports.

TELEPHONE, fax machine, answering machine, laser printer, copier and increasingly a scanner - these are the tools of modem business. But with typical prices anywhere from $500 to $1,000 for each machine, it's outrageously expensive to get fully kitted out.

Brother's solution to this dilemma is the Multi-Function Centre MFC-9500, which crams these disparate capabilities into a single box of tricks and adeptly juggles them: it can simultaneously print and fax, scan and print, print and copy, scan and receive a fax, copy and receive a fax. All this from one power point and with telephone line. It's an efficiency that spells good news for businesses operating on shoestring budgets or with little space at hand.

The MFC-9500's print engine, adopted from Brother's proven range of laser printers, outputs a crisp six pages per minute at 600 dpi resolution for professional quality copy on a variety of paper and card weights.

Advanced print options include a draft mode that uses only 50 per cent ink yet runs at the same high speed, and a reduction mode to shrink two A4 sheets onto a single A4 page. A straight paper feed path and anti-curl system permits paper to be reused.

With 512Kb on-board RAM, the Brother proved itself more than capable for business documents incorporating basic graphic elements such as logos, charts and clip-art images. Attempts to print photo-quality images scanned in or downloaded from Web pages slowed the output, but if you find the .Brother a little laggard for this specific application it can be upgraded to 1.5Mb RAM for $399.

Improvements could be made to the holding capacity of the document catcher as there was a tendency for printed pages to be pushed off the front tray onto the floor during bulk printing or copying.

Some of the most welcome advantages from using the MFC-9500 as your fax machine include the low price, flat filing and longevity of A4 sheets compared with a roll of thermal paper, and a memory chip which can store up to 60 incoming pages if you run out of paper. Most offices must keep their fax machine turned on overnight, so the Brother can be put into a low-power and noiseless sleep mode until an incoming call is detected, at which point the unit leaps into life.

As a photocopier the MFC-9500 scales pages from 50 per cent to 200 per cent, again at 600 dpi, and can do 99 copies with sorting. The main paper tray holds 200 sheets, in front of which sits a 30-page automatic document feeder.

The same copier mechanism doubles as a TWAIN-compliant scanner which can churn through documents at up to 8 ppm in 100 dpi draft mode or 4 ppm in 200 dpi, although unlike flatbed machines that handle bound documents such as magazines the MFC-9500 can process only loose pages. Images are rendered at 256 shades of grey. There was little toner banding in scans and the resultant images approached the tone of black and white photographs. Bundled Xerox TextBridge software allows quick "prescans", restriction of the scan to a user-defined area of the page and optical character recognition (OCR) to avoid retyping scanned documents.

Users will save on running costs through buying consumables for only one device instead of many. Replacing the toner cartridge after 2,000 pages costs $49 and the drum (rated at 20,000 pages) is priced at $279.

The MFC-9500 can be pressed into duty as a telephone with 124 auto-dial memories and a clever alphabetical index on the LCD display. Redial, hands-free dialling and speaker phone functions are also included.

Being a thoroughly modern gadget, the MFC-9500's answer machine uses non-volatile RAM instead of tape to store 15 minutes of messages.

With all this functionality you need a way to easily control the machine. Brother's proprietary Multi-Function Link Pro software (for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95) provides a comfortable interface that firmly links the MFC-9500 with your PC by transferring settings you choose on the fax machine to your computer and vice versa. Faxes can be sent from any Windows application and a schedular can dispatch faxes at any user-defined time to take advantage of off-peak phone charges.

The same software includes a Message Centre for storing answer machine messages and faxes onto your PC's hard drive. This adds the ability to retrieve faxes and voicemail while away from the office and have faxes forwarded to another fax machine.

Now, if only Brother can be persuaded to ship the software and printer drivers on a single CD instead of nine floppy discs!

At first glance the MFC-9500 seems best suited for small and even home-based businesses, but it's also perfectly suited to big business executives and project teams needing a local (read "private and secure") fax machine and printer.

In short, this pleasing mix of functionality with a recommended ticket price of $1,799 is almost guaranteed to tempt the small business and executive user yet keep your accountant smiling.