Brother DCP-165C Multifunction Printer

We've tested plenty of printers at CNET, but very few have frustrated us as much as the Brother DCP-165C multifunction has. The counter-intuitive set-up, bland design, deplorable print quality and crawling output speeds earn this printer a double thumbs down.

CNET Editors' Rating

2.5 stars

Average User Rating

1 stars 10 reviews

Price: AU$139.00

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The Brother DCP-165C is the reason why people dread hitting the print button on their computers. During the testing process, we were derailed with hardware malfunctions and hiccups that left us shaking our heads in disdain. Although the AU$139 price tag is tempting, you'll immediately regret the purchase once you see the results of your printed documents; that is, if you have enough time to wait around for the job to finish. We recommend you stay far away from the DCP-165C and check out the Canon Pixma MX330 instead: you'll be much happier with the Canon's auto-document feeder, 1.8-inch colour LCD, and a handful of impressive driver features that'll leave the Brother DCP-165C in the dust.

Design

If you've done any printer shopping at all prior to reading this review, you'll immediately notice that the Brother DCP-165C is light years behind the competition in terms of aesthetic design. We knew this printer would receive low design scores right off the bat in what you could call hate at first sight. Its long footprint saves a bit of space at 39.1cm wide by 36.5cm deep by 14.9cm tall, but the boring rectangular shape has absolutely no appeal to the modern consumer, especially when you consider the aesthetic achievements of printers such as the HP Photosmart C309a Premium Fax All-in-One. The website describes the DCP-165C as "low profile", which might be the understatement of the year.

The button layout on the front lip of the control panel literally reminded us of our first dot-matrix printer back in the late '80s, with its small rubber buttons smashed around a pathetic one-line LCD that lacks a backlit screen for night-time viewing. In addition, the screen is fixed at an angle that's actually difficult to read unless you're hovering over the device. We actually found ourselves having to squint to read the tiny characters during tests.

To the right of the screen, you'll find a series of buttons for Photo Capture, scan, ink levels, power, stop/exit button, and two buttons for colour and black "Start". The "photo capture" button opens a folder to display images on a memory card from the reader built in between the control panel and the input/output tray. The reader has slots for PictBridge USB (to connect a digital camera), CompactFlash, SD, Memory Stick and xD cards.

The large drawer that pulls from the bottom of the device holds sheets of paper and the top doubles as a landing where finished prints come to rest. The glaring issue here is that the drawer sits flush in the printer when it's fully installed and doesn't extend far enough out of the device. That makes it hard to grab outbound prints unless you have a set of children's hands around to help with the job, and the control panel on top protrudes so far over the tray that it's actually difficult to see when a job is finished printing. This problem is most irritating while printing smaller 4x6-inch photos.

While the power port is easy to access on the left side of the rear panel, the USB port sits inside the printer. For some reason, Brother forces you to open up the machine, prop up the lid with a plastic arm (similar to the arm on the hood of a car engine), snake the USB cable (not included in the box) through a small plastic guide, and plug it directly into the internal components. Not only is this a hassle and unique to Brother, but you also wind up losing more than a foot of cable slack as a result of the extensive internal looping. It feels counter-intuitive to lift up the lid and expose the print head to serve no other purpose other than to plug in the USB cord.

Features

The drivers on the installation disc give you the option to adjust the printer's quality settings from normal to fine, fast and fast normal. In addition, you get a box to check natural versus vivid photo printers and a unique "True2life" colour enhancement tool with customisable changes to colour density, white balance, contrast, brightness and other settings. Finally, the driver also installs a status monitor that pops up during job processing to monitor ink cartridge levels and quality control.

Brother also gives you the option to install a third-party imaging application called "Paperport" by ScanSoft. This program lets you edit photos in a file browsing set up similar to Apple's iPhoto, with basic photo editing solutions for auto-enhancement, blemish erasing and red-eye elimination. We played around with the software for awhile and enjoyed its simplicity compared with iPhoto, although don't expect the editing quality to be on par with Adobe suites; this is geared more for light users and amateur photographers with limited time and editing resources.

The printer's scan and copy features both perform adequately. Scanning options include routing images to a file folder, email or to an optical character recognition text translator. You also get four customisable buttons on the virtual Control Center that you can program to any preference. Copying also works as a stand-alone device — you can set the magnification from 25 per cent up to 400 per cent of the original size, but the only two options for pagination are 2-in-1 and 4-in-1. The competition usually offers many more including up to four images on one page, thumbnails and two-sided prints.

Like many other printers, the DCP-165C includes a suite of desktop options to help you get creative with your prints, but the Brother Creative Center shortcut that the disc installs onto your desktop is simply a link to the Brother website, where you can print out business or home creations that include brochures, presentation, greeting cards and games. Obviously, the drawback is that you can't access any of these features unless you're connected to the internet. We're not sure why Brother didn't develop its own desktop software, but it's just another example of a poorly executed feature.

The DCP-165C uses a four-cartridge system with individual tanks for black, cyan, magenta and yellow that load into the front bay. Brother offers standard and high yield cartridges on its website, but we'll use the high-capacity price points and page yields for a cost per page analysis: colour cartridges cost around AU$15 for 750 pages and a black cartridge costs around AU$40 that'll last approximately 900 pages, according to Brother, which factors out to 2 cents per page of colour and 4.4 cents per page for black prints. Those prices are a bit cheaper than the average cost to print, but that doesn't mean much if the print quality is subpar.

Performance

The DCP-165C stands out among the competition in our speed test, but not in a good way. It printed the slowest in almost all of the document output tests out of five other printers in the same price bracket. It registered the slowest scores in the photo test, printing at a sluggish rate of 0.62 page per minute, which surprised us because its older brother, the Brother MFC-685cw (released in late 2007), scored 1.3 photos per minute. The rest of the tests were equally pathetic, with the printer continuing to flounder in last place.

Performance test (in pages per minute)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Presentation speed	Photo speed (1 sheet)	Colour graphics speed	Text speed

Epson Stylus NX515

5.53

0.83

4.63

13.81

HP Officejet J6480

2.36

0.83

2.17

5.54

Canon Pixma MX330

2.17

0.93

1.88

5.54

Kodak ESP 5

2.21

1.37

2.13

4.39

Brother DCP-165C

2.61

0.62

2.48

2.77

Like many of the Brother printers that came before it, the DCP-165C just can't get a handle on output quality. All our test subjects, including pages of text, graphics, photos and presentations appear fuzzy and hard to read, even after several print head adjustments and troubleshooting. All of the characters, especially those in smaller font sizes, suffer from jagged edges and distorted edges, as if the nozzle isn't properly aligning with the paper. Coloured graphics prints look even worse, with heavy line weights and blotchy colour blends that transition so abruptly that you can see white blocks between them. We also tried to print graphics and photos on the driver's "vivid colour" and "True2life" colour settings, but neither significantly improved the shortcomings. Finally, we also noticed a pale white haze blanketing all the prints to such a degree that even primary colours look washed out and unacceptable for even the lowest quality snapshot photo.

Service and support

Brother supports its printers with a one-year limited warranty. The company's website provides more support by way of manuals, FAQs, service centre locations and software downloads.