Verdict

Pros

• Fast colour print
• Good software bundle
• Options for up to 800-page paper handling

Cons

• No duplex scan or copy
• No USB drive socket
• No draft print mode

Brother’s DCP-9055CDN comes from a range of colour laser printers and multifunctions where you can mix and match the feature set to fit your printer to the needs of your office. It probably needs to be an office as, although the company says this machine is for 1 to 5 people, it would be pretty excessive to buy it for just one person.

This is a big black and off-white machine, which sits high off the desk. The 35-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) is neat and has a folding feed tray, which completes the lines of the machine’s top, when closed.

The control panel sits at a steep angle in front of the ADF and has a right-hand heavy look. Although the backlit, bitmapped LCD display, which can show up to five lines of text, is set into the centre of the panel, the copy and print buttons to the left are slightly over-balanced by a navigation diamond, a numeric pad and Start and Stop keys, to the right.

Despite what was said on the web page for this product, there is no USB host port, so direct printing from or scanning to a USB drive isn’t possible. Brother has now corrected the page.

Below the control panel is the top of the colour laser engine, where printed pages end up, and below that, the pull-down front panel reveals a, slightly flimsy, 50-sheet special-purpose tray. Under this is the main 250-sheet paper tray and an optional 500-sheet one can be fitted under the printer.

The printer has no wireless connection, but both USB and 10/100 Ethernet ports are available at the back. The front panel of the machine pulls down to reveal a pull-out tray containing the four toner cartridges. The tray lifts out to provide access to the transfer belt and drum. Even non-technical users should be able to service the machine easily.

Software provided with the printer includes a copy of Nuance PaperPort 11SE and Brother’s own MFL-Pro suite. Arivers for both PCL and Postscript, in emulation, are also included.

Brother rates the DCP-9055CDN at a very healthy 24ppm in both black and colour print. Under test, we didn’t quite see this speed, but our five-page text print did give 15ppm and the 20-page document, raised this to 18.2ppm, so three quarters of the rating. There’s no draft mode on this machine, so all print comes through at the same quality.

Duplex is standard and printing the 20-page document as a 20-side, 10-page test gave 12.3 sides per minute, a very respectable result. Our single-sided, five-page text and colour graphics document returned only 11.5ppm, though, which is disappointing when colour has the same speed spec as mono print.

A single page colour copy from the flatbed took 14s and a five-page mono one from the ADF completed in 25s, both very reasonable speeds. Finally, a 15 x 10cm photo on an A4 sheet and at best quality, also came through in 25s.

Print quality is more than good enough for even an exacting office, with clean, black text from the 600dpi engine. Colours are intense and show no signs of banding, though shades of blue and green are on the dark side. This also shows in the photo print, where detail is lost through colours tending to black, though again there are good levels of detail. A colour copy does better than some we’ve seen from similarly priced printers.

There are two different capacities of toner cartridge available for this machine, with the higher yield consumables offering 4,000 pages of black and 3,500 pages of colour, each. Although there are also drum, transfer belt and waste toner bottles to replenish, these have high yield figures of 25,000 and 50,000 pages each.

The overall page costs come out at 2.8p for ISO black and 11.8p for ISO colour, neither of which is particularly high for this class of machine. Indeed, the black cost is competitive with much more expensive colour lasers.

Verdict
If you have a lot of mixed black text and colour business graphics documents to print, and need speed and sound print quality, combined with reasonable running costs, the Brother DCP-9055CDN fits the bill well. Although it might be nice to have a duplex scanner and a front panel USB port, these are available in other models in the same range, if they’re essential.

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