Brother MFC-5490CN Review
One of Brother’s much touted multi-function printer MFC-5490CN is put to test today. It’s a 4-in-1 printer that can print, scan, copy and fax. A 50-page automatic document feeder and wired network option glams the printer. It costs around £110 but the absence of a colour LCD display is utterly disappointing, especially considering that the manufacturer offers sans PC printing through PictBridge and memory slots.
Print quality is barely decent. Monochrome prints are black but not as dark as other printers would offer. Business graphics looked good. Skin tones on photo prints looked perfect, however, the backgrounds looked darker than normal.
Brother claims that the printing speeds are 35 pages per minute for monochrome prints and 28 pages per minute for colour. Our tests showed that monochrome dips way below to 22 pages per minute and colour to 14 pages per minute. Still, these are acceptable speeds.
Now, the most important part, the printing costs. Cost of print for monchrome prints were 5.5p and 14.9p for colour including 0.7p set as the price of paper. These figures are expensive and could be a misdriving factor in the success of the printer.
The Brother MFC-5490CN is not an inexpensive printer, that includes the cost of prints too. Print quality is average. Placing a host of features on a printer does not make a printer popular or successful. This one is a no-buyer.
About the author:
Abhinav has been blogging about printing and related technologies on CreativeCloud for several years. He is also a project manager for a large technology company.
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