Brother DCP-9045CDN Color Laser Printer

Specification & Options

The duplex scan, print and copy features of the DCP-9045CDN Printer do pretty much what they say on the box. You can print on both sides of the paper in a single job, scan both sides of a document from the ADF, though obviously not from the scanner glass, and copy a duplex original.

You can also take a single-sided document and produce a duplex copy. It’s a comprehensive set and although not that quick, it does all these jobs well.

Brother rates the device at 20ppm for both mono and colour print, but our five-page black text document only provoked 12.5ppm under test. The 20-page job increased the speed to 15.58ppm, but this is still only around 75 percent of the rated speed. The colour text and graphics document returned a speed of 9.68ppm, less than half the headline rate.

Duplex printing saw a speed of 6.90 sides per minute, disappointingly slow as it may discourage duplex use, in favour of faster print speed. This slow duplex speed is reflected in the 10-page/20-side document copy, which took a sluggish 3:18 to complete. After the initial novelty of the scanner feeding out pages through its top slot, to handle scanning of their second sides, it turns out to be a coffee-break function.