Last Friday Brother introduced its new multifunctional inkjet printer — the MFC-6490CW.

This printer is the first in a new line of “Professional Series” printers. It is also first Brother’s color inkjet to print, copy, scan, and fax on 11 x 17-inch tabloid sized paper.

The MFC-6490CW can print at speeds of up to 35 ppm in black, 28 ppm in color at up to 600 x 1200-dpi resolution. When copying, you can achieve speed of up to 23 copies per minute in black, 20 in color. The scanning unit supports resolutions up to 19200 dpi

The printer uses 4 separate color ink cartridges for imaging.

The Brother MFC-6490CW is well-equipped: it has a 50 sheet Automatic Document Feeder, dual paper trays that can hold up to 400 sheets, and Super G3 33.6Kbps fax modem.

You can connect this printer via USB 2.0, but it also supports Ethernet and 802.11g-compatible Wi-Fi connectivity.

The MFC-6490CW has a built-in 3.3-inch widescreen display and allows for direct photo printing from digital camera media cards, USB flash drives or PictBridge-enabled cameras.

The printer is TWAIN-compliant and compatible with Mac OS X 10.2.4 or later. The bundled software includes Presto PageManager OCR.

The printer is available at an estimated street price of $299.

Brother has pushed itself up into second place in the laser printer market by producing a wide range of well-made, high-value machines. The HL-6050D is a medium-size workgroup mono laser printer with built-in duplex facilities. It’s reasonably expandable and Brother claims a top speed of 24ppm, so it should be quite quick.

The printer is square-cut, but looks modern, even in its slightly passé cream case. A substantial, 500-sheet paper tray can be supplemented with an optional second one and there’s a 100-sheet, multi-purpose tray, which folds down from the front. Paper feeds to the HL-6050D’s top surface, next to the printer’s controls.

The control panel is simple, but covers all the essentials. There’s a four-way dial for navigating menus and dedicated buttons for starting and cancelling print jobs. The final button is marked Reprint and it’s good to see all the controls are marked with Braille codes, for the sight-impaired.

The Reprint button does what the name suggests; it reprints the last job sent to the printer. This is ideal if you want to print a single copy and proof read it, before completing the rest of the job. It could be a security problem though, if you don’t clear the function after printing a confidential document. There’s no USB socket on the front panel for walk-up printing, which would complement the Reprint function.

The two-line LCD display has a twin-colour led backlight, which switches from green to orange to indicate alerts and errors; a neat solution. The menu system itself is easy to navigate and offers good control of the printer’s functions.

Installing the consumables is straightforward: fold down the front panel and you can slide in the two-part drum and toner cartridge. The drum has a service life of 30,000 pages and each toner cartridge should produce 7,500 ISO pages, so maintenance isn’t going to be a day-to-day affair.

The bundled software includes drivers for PCL and Postscript page description languages, both in emulation, and drivers for Windows, Mac and Linux are available. Ethernet networking is included as standard, together with appropriate monitoring software. Brother also offers an optional wireless adapter, so you can free the machine from a cabled network connection, if you need.

Regretfully, we cannot review each and every printer, but what we can do is to turn our readers to reviews we find interesting and helpful.

One such review is at CBSnew.com: tech analyst Larry Magid examines consumer-targeted Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer:

Until the mid-’90s, if you wanted to print something in color, you had to use an inkjet printer. Laser was for black and white only. Then in 1994, CMS came out with
a color laser printer but it was priced at $10,000.

What a difference a bit more than a decade makes. Today you can get personal
color laser printers for less than $400. And based on my recent experience with a couple of inexpensive Brother printers, the quality can be remarkably good.

It is a good news to hear that color laser printers like Brother HL-4070CDW are becoming available for home use. For now, laser printing is not very suitable for printing photos for a scrapbook, one of the pros for owning a home printer. However, color laser may have other advantages for home user. Reading the article you can see that for yourself.

Manufacturers of printing devices are well-known to make profit selling not the printers, but rather consumables for them. However, it does not make it any less surprising the two new printers by Brother International, HL-2100 series monochrome laser printers.

Brother HL-2170W, a successor of a popular HL-2070N model supports two network interfaces: wired Ethernet and wireless Wi-Fi. Given the street price of $149.99, Brother can responsibly call it the industry first wireless laser printer to hit (reversely) the mark of $150. The other printer, Brother HL-2140 (priced even lower – $119.99,) is further development of HL-2040 model.

Both printers combine high printing speeds and compact dimensions: 14.5 x 14.5 x 6.7 inches. They are capable of printing up to 23 pages per minute at maximum resolution of 2400 x 600 dpi. And 250 sheets of paper is how much a input drawer can hold.

The Brother HL-2140 is equipped with USB port and has 8 MB of RAM onboard, while HL-2170W model comes with 32 MB RAM and supports Ethernet, 802.11b/g (Wi-Fi) and USB interfaces.

Both model use same printer cartridges. A standard yield toner cartridge is enough to print 1,500 pages, and high yield cartridge contains toner for 2,600 pages. The drum duty cycle is estimated as 12,000 pages.

List of supported OSes includes Windows Vista/XP/XP x64/2000/Server 2003/Server x64; Mac OS X 10.2.4 (or newer).