Take the Brother DCP-310CN, add a few features and you've got the MFC-620CN. The differences are the fax, answer phone and sheet feeder on the top, and an extra £60 or so on the price tag. Note that the fax is rated at 14.4kbps where both Canon and HP use a 33.6kbps speed, although whether that matters will depend on what's at the other end of the phone line.

Printing speed and quality are exactly the same for the two Brothers as they use the same internals, right down to the ink tanks, but that's not unexpected as the Brothers are, well, brothers.

Speaking of those ink tanks, a replacement set of four will cost you about £30 and you can expect a life of 500 black text pages and 400 coloured pages. Text prints at a rate of 20 seconds per page with coloured sheets coming off at a rate of one a minute, so the Brothers are likeliest to be most at home in an office where there aren't great demands on the printer and copier, but where the emphasis is on convenience.

The MFC-620CN will do anything that you ask of it but we can't help but think that Brother has overstepped the mark by adding the card reader. There is no doubt that the MFC-620CN can print photos, and they look decent enough although they weren't borderless, but they took an age to print off. Nineteen minutes for an A4 photo is beyond a joke, and we also found it tricky to change the paper setting to 6 x 4-inch photo paper.

Furthermore the paper tray in this range is really nasty. It's terribly flimsy and it is surprisingly tricky to feed in anything other than A4 paper, which sums up the MFC-620CN nicely. Stick to printing, copying and faxing A4 sheets of black text with the occasional bit of colour and you'll be very happy, but if you compare the Brother with, say, the HP Photosmart 2610, you'll realise that it is possible to have your cake and eat it too.