Brother has established a name for itself as a provider of high-quality yet good value solutions in the printer market, both on a consumer and business level. A new range of all-in-one printers aims to continue this trend. The model on test here is the MFC 440CN, a mid-range contender from the group, aimed at consumers and home-office users.

The MFC 440CN combines a 25 pages per minute mono (20ppm colour) printer with 32MB of built-in memory, a 20-sheet photo paper tray and 2-inch colour LCD. It's also network ready with a 10-sheet automatic document feeder, fax facility and 80 speed dials.

In addition to the fax machine and printer there's a built-in copier, scanner and photo capture facility to grab and print photos direct from multimedia cards. All of this is elegantly arranged with a sleek silver and black exterior, offering as compact a solution as we've seen in the all-in-one printer market.

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The installation process is quick and painless: after a few minutes to set the printer up and clean the cartridges you're good to go. There are four main functions to choose from, accessible from corresponding keys on the main panel. The informative LCD display guides you through each process, making every task straightforward.

Starting with the printer, we thought the quoted 25ppm for text was a little optimistic; you'll only get near this at the very lowest draft and economy settings which are unlikely to be of a high enough quality for many uses. At the standard setting quality improves dramatically, but print times are cut to around 6ppm for a full page of monochrome text. Results are reasonably sharp on regular weight paper: you can increase the print quality easily enough but you're better off using dedicated inkjet paper since the ink does bleed slightly on cheaper types.

You'll be lucky to get the quoted 20ppm from full colour photos, as even at the lowest quality settings we only saw speeds equivalent to about 15ppm. Photo printing is purely about results, though, and you can dial up the print quality here to the maximum 1,200 x 600dpi provided you're using glossy photo paper. A full A4 print at the highest settings took around 15 minutes to complete, which is certainly not quick by any means. It's worth nothing that there is a dedicated feed tray for 6 x 4-inch photo paper and you'll obviously see faster output times here.

Colour reproduction and lighting were pretty accurate but the results did show a very slight blue hue over the image and, on close inspection, faint print lines were visible. From a distance the prints still look photo quality though, so for the most part we were pleased with the results.

Navigating around the other functions of the printer, like the scanner, copier or photo capture, is a breeze. Simply select the function you require and follow the prompts on the LCD screen. Full colour copies take around 45 seconds and pages of text about 25, results being pretty much identical to the original print. You have a choice of quality levels and options to enlarge, change the paper type and size or adjust brightness and contrast levels.

The scanner gives you the option of scanning to e-mail, image, OCR, file or card, with times varying from around 10 to 45 seconds spending on your selection. The OCR option is particularly neat: while suffering from the inherent problems associated with handwriting recognition, it does its best and outputs results directly to Notepad for you to save.

Finally, the photo capture tool takes any SD, MMC, XD or Compact Flash card inserted into the built-in card reader and previews any photos detected on the 2-inch LCD. From here you can use the controls on the printer to browse through pictures and choose which to print, or alternatively print an index page of all the images.

The Brother MFC 440CN isn't the highest quality printer in the world, nor is it the fastest, but at under £200 retail (you can pick it up for considerably less online) it's good value for money. Most people don't mind waiting a little longer for their prints - if you want fast text output a laser printer is still the only way to go - and print quality from the MFC 440CN is still good enough for all but the most scrupulous of users.

An excellent control layout and informative LCD means the MFC 440CN is a breeze to use, whether you're looking to simply output pages of text or do justice to your favourite photos. Home office users will benefit from the fast and easy scanning and photocopying options, and the built-in fax tool offers broadband users an additional facility without having to invest in a dedicated machine.

The Brother MFC 440CN is a capable, good value all-in-one that makes up for slow print speeds and slightly less than perfect photo results with an excellent interface and a host of useful features.