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The dimensions of this four ink unit are 45x37x14cm, it is small enough to fit on a shelf as the amount of clearance needed above is not great. The cover over the scanner lifts landscape on the vertical axis from the front so unless you are placing pages from a book or a bulky magazine to be scanned the lid needs only to be lifted a few degrees.

The four ink cartridges fit into one end of the unit – hinged – and for once they seem to contain a reasonable amount of ink. This unit can be connected to a network or by USB. I would suggest if you use USB to have the unit to the left of the PC as the USB lead fits inside the right side of the unit and any normal length lead is unlikely to be long enough otherwise.

See also: Printers

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Scan, Copy and Print is what this unit does, when not connected to the PC this is only copying and I managed four black pages a minute, colour pages took around 40 seconds. However my stand alone photocopier rarely gets used now as the Brother unit is easier to use for one off pages and takes around the same time for black pages and my photocopier cannot do colour anyway.

Installation of software is simple and not that long winded, the scanning element is a recent version of the excellent Paper Port software that has a perfectly adequate OCR module. Total hard disc space taken for a full installation is 500MB. However there a lot of extra modules and utilities that could easily fill an article in their own right. For the novice there is a perfectly adequate Control Centre that can do everything from a single display.

There are built in card readers for Smart Media, Compact Flash, Memory Stick (both versions) Secure Digital and XD. The paper loads face down in the bottom of the unit and while I think the claimed 100 sheets is optimistic it may be possible. Paper is delivered face up just above the input area.

So that leaves printing and while this is good in the better modes and acceptable in draft mode I once again cannot get anywhere near claimed print speeds. Printer manufacturers refuse to release the files that give their impressive print times. The claims for the Brother unit are up to 20PPM in black and 15PPM in colour I doubt if I achieved one third of that.

However worse was to come I doubt you would buy this unit to print A4 pages on photo paper. But with the card readers I have to test the ability. Well a reasonable time would be less than five minutes, a good time anything less than four minutes. I have had units that take ten minutes but here a new record slow of seventeen minutes. Yes I was warned that printing in best mode on glossy photo paper has extended drying times, yes the output quality was good, yes I always say that speed is not important but I do feel this is unacceptable.

The unit is available for £108 (Dabs), this is neither cheap nor expensive as far as the current offerings of all in one units available. The overall size is very small, there are 15 buttons and a two line LCD display and for a stand alone photocopier it is fine. To scan the occasional page or three fine. The copying options allow fine control of reduction and enlargement by as little as 1% increments however the slow printing speeds really only make it useful in the home, it has the ability to connect to a network but I fear productivity would suffer due to the slow printing speed.

http://www.brother.co.uk/cms.cfm/s_page/55570/s_level/17010/s_product/DCP310CNU1/s_path/16870:17010