Brother DCP-135C: Quirky, cheap multi-function printer

We're pretty wild and crazy here at Crave. When we're not partying with rock stars, we're getting down and dirty with multi-function inkjet printers like the Brother DCP-135C. That's how we roll.

We're not sure which we prefer, but the DCP-135C is pretty cool. It'll do photo prints, scanning and colour copying. It's not slow, either -- in inkjet terms. It'll spew colour documents at 20 pages per minute or monochrome docs at 25ppm. And the best part is the price: the RRP is £60, but if you shop around you can pick one up for about £40.

Now the bad news: it took us literally 10 minutes to find the USB data port, because it's located on the inside of the printer, not the outside as one might expect. Brother says this reduces the chances of damaging the USB connector if you trip over the cable. To test this reasoning, we deliberately tripped over the cable and dragged the printer to the floor, causing it to shatter into a thousand little pieces.* Turns out Brother was right, the USB connector remained intact.

We also had a minor gripe with the software installation process, which had to be restarted a few times before completing successfully. That's understandable from time to time, but the resultant error message from manually installing the driver is hilarious: "error -- printing", Windows said, implying the act of printing -- with a printer -- was some kind of illegal operation.

Once we got it up and running, the DCP-135C turned in some fairly impressive prints. Photos look just like they came from a photo lab -- to the untrained eye -- and black text looked absolutely fine, even for professional use. In short, the DCP-135C is a very good printer, provided you can put up with its minor quirks. -Rory Reid

*Jokes.