The DCP-310CN is the most basic colour MFD in Brother's range, but it uses the same novel base unit as a number of other Brothers. The top lifts up and rests on a stay of the type that you would find holding up a car bonnet, and that allows you to see that the layout of the ink cartridges is quite unusual.

Where most printers and MFDs have the cartridges on top of the print head so they move from side to side during the printing process, in the DCP-310CN the four ink tanks sit in holders on the right hand side and then feed ink through small tubes to the print head. The most obvious result is that the DCP-310CN is very low in height, and this is particularly true as the lid is basic since there is no sheet feeder to accommodate, but you have to lift the lid if you want to feed in a sheet for copying or scanning.

The back of the DCP-310CN is quite featureless as the network or USB cable feeds in through a conduit to a pair of connection ports inside the device, so once it's plugged together the DCP-310CN is very neat and tidy, although the power cord does rather stick out on the left-hand side.

These are mostly positive points and if you look at the performance results of our printing tests you may conclude that the Brother is a demon photo printer as the times are very fast. Would that this were so, but the Brother managed these results by defaulting to a low print quality.

When we forced the quality setting to photo standard the print speeds became much slower, matching the Brother MFC-620CN, and although the quality was acceptable it is clear that the DCP-310CN is no photo printer. Text printing, on the other hand, was good, and coloured pages such as Power Point slides also pass muster, but the speed isn't too impressive.