Verdict

Pros

• 35-sheet ADF
• High capacity consumables option
• Separate toner and drum

Cons

• No wireless connection
• Poor greyscale copies
• Output stack can be fiddly

Introduction

Brother has a strong range of mono, laser all-in-one printers and the Brother DCP-8110 sits near the top. It’s headline feature is speed, claimed to be up to 36ppm, and it’s designed for the small office or a workgroup in a larger organisation. At just under £300 it’s not an impulse buy, but will need a purchase order signed off.

Brother DCP-8110DN Design

Like many of Brother’s all-in-ones, the black case flares from a small base to take account of the flatbed scanner, which in this case is fitted with a 35-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF). The ADF has a flip-over cover, which becomes the paper feed tray and a two-stage flip-over paper support, to stop pages ending up on the desktop.

The simply laid out control panel, set at a slope in front of the scanner, centres around a five line, backlit, mono LCD display, which shows contrast, quality, enlargement or reduction and the chosen paper tray by default. Ranged around are a navigation diamond, a numeric pad, so you can enter a code for secure print, Start and Stop buttons and others to select copy options.

Brother DCP-8110DN Features

Below the control panel of the Brother DCP-8110DN is a USB socket, for both uploading print documents and downloading scanned ones, and to the right of this is a gap for the paper output tray. Pages hardly overlap the front of the machine at all and they can be slightly fiddly to remove.

The main, 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom of the printer is supplemented by a fold-down 50-sheet multipurpose tray directly above. A 500-sheet paper tray is available as an option to sit underneath the machine. At the back are sockets for USB and 10/100 Ethernet, but there’s no wireless connectivity as standard.

The drum and cartridge unit is a two-piece assembly, so you can renew the toner several times before the drum needs attention. It slides in from the front, once you’ve folded down the main front panel.

Brother provides a copy of Nuance PaperPort SE and its own MFL-Pro Suite and ControlCenter 4, as well as drivers which emulate both PCL and Postscript.

Brother DCP-8110DN Performance

Brother claims a top print speed of 36ppm for the DCP-8110DN, though we wouldn’t go quite that far. In our five-page text test, we saw 15.8ppm and in toner-save mode this rose to 16.7ppm, which was also the speed for the five-page text and graphics page.

The longer, 20-page document gave 27.9ppm, which is a very healthy turn of speed for a small desktop all-in-one such as the Brother DCP-8110DN, though it’s still not much more than two thirds of the claimed speed. The printer can handle duplex print as standard and the same 20-page document returned 16.7 sides per minute.

A single page copy from the flatbed took just 10 seconds and five pages through the ADF a speedy 20 seconds. A 15 x 10cm photo from a PC took 16 seconds and a full A4 photo uploaded from a USB drive completed in 19 seconds. These are all excellent speeds, making this machine capable of handling reasonably heavy workloads.

Text print is dense and very clean and although the machine defaults to 600dpi, against its maximum of 1200dpi, pages printed at the lower resolution will be fine for day-to-day work. Greyscale graphics are clean, too, with few signs of banding and good reversed text when necessary. Even photo prints, normally difficult for a mono laser, gave reasonable results though, as usual, darker tones tended to be black.

Copying greyscale originals, that is anything with printed images, can be unreliable. Many shades tend to be either black or white and black text on a grey or darker coloured background can end up printing black on black. This is usually a function of a CIS scan head and is not unusual in a multifunction printer. Here, though, there’s less tolerance than normal and our test copies were in places unreadable.

Using the higher capacity toner cartridge, capable of up to 8,000 pages, and with a drum rated at 30,000 pages, the page cost on this machine comes out at 2.3p per print, including 0.7p for paper. This is very low and is one of the benefits of paying a little extra for the Brother DCP-8110DN in the first place.

Brother DCP-8110DN Verdict

The Brother DCP-8110DN is a fast, purposeful mono laser multifunction. It’s useful duplex facility doesn’t extend to the scanner, and it doesn’t support wireless connection, but print quality is excellent and running costs are comfortingly low. Greyscale copies can be difficult to read.

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