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The Xerox WorkCentre and the Brother MultiFunction Centre (MFC) are aimed at the SoHo market where there is most need for compact combination devices that put printer, copier, scanner and fax functionality in the same box.
Both machines offer broadly similar features, but the Xerox is cheaper at £299.99 ex VAT compared to £579 ex VAT for the Brother.
You do get more features on the MFC, but it's debatable whether they will justify the price difference. Probably the most useful advantage the MFC has over the Xerox is its fully integrated fax function, which operates independently of a host PC and offers up to 8Mb of onboard storage for unprinted incoming faxes.
The ability to send and receive faxes without switching on a PC is a plus, but not a decisive advantage on its own.
The other thing the Brother can do which the Xerox cannot is print stills or capture video frames from digital cameras or camcorders. There are slots for Compact Flash and SmartMedia cards, so no host PC is necessary.
This is fine as far as it goes, but you may get better results after a little polishing with some picture-editing software on a PC.
The two printers follow a similar design, with a hinged lid containing a document feeder, which closes over the glass platen for flatbed scanning, copying and faxing. The Brother's feeder holds up to 50 pages while the Xerox's can only take 20.
In both cases the scanner element offers the usual basic 24bit colour, 600dpi (dots per inch) (unenhanced) resolution, but there was no doubt in our tests that the Xerox had the edge in terms of clarity of text reproduction. It also captured colour, contrast and detail in scanned photos better than the Brother. Unsurprisingly, this was also evident in the quality of photocopying, especially colour copies, which the Xerox managed creditably.
The platen/document feeder assembly hinges up to reveal the innards of the printer, so changing cartridges is easy. The Brother uses Piezo crystal technology to propel the ink droplets out of the nozzles, while the Xerox relies on the normal thermal approach.
Both offer 1200dpi resolution and individual cyan, magenta, yellow and black cartridges.
If you stick to the manufacturers' prices and figures for number of pages printed at five per cent coverage, the Brother averages a cost of 1.6p a page black ink only and 1.9p a page in CMY. The Xerox costs 2.5p a page in CMY and 3.9p or 3p a page in black, depending on whether you buy the standard or the high-capacity black cartridge.
The Brother was also faster for text-intensive printing, averaging a respectable 4.5 pages per minute (ppm) in our tests, while the Xerox clocked up 3.6ppm. This was reversed when we switched to high-quality colour photo printing, when the Xerox output a page in five minutes compared to the Brother's seven minutes.
Quality is arguably the most important factor, and here the Xerox was the clear leader, with much crisper plain text, even on cheap laser paper, and visibly superior fine detail and colour reproduction for business graphics and particularly for photos.
One other factor that might make a difference is that Xerox offers a network adaptor option, whereas Brother does not. There were things that we liked better about the Xerox, such as its software control and utilities suite, which we found slightly more intuitive than the Brother's, but the Brother scored for having a bigger main feed tray (as well as its top feeder), offering 250 sheets to the Xerox's 150.
On balance we'd go for the Xerox, which is both affordable and capable of excellent output quality for its price. If PC-independent faxing is a must, the money you save by opting for the Xerox should cover a standalone fax machine.
Price
Brother MFC-860: £680 (£579 ex VAT)
Xerox Workcentre M950: £352.48 (£299.99 ex VAT)
Contacts
Xerox: 0800 787 787, www.xerox.com
Brother: 0845 60 60 626,
www.brother.co.uk
See also:
All Multi-function Devices
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