There are plenty of inkjet all-in-one printers available and quite a few are suitable for small and home office use. If you add in the requirement to handle A3 paper, though, there are suddenly very few on the market.

Brother has seen this gap and has attempted to fill it with the MFC-6490CW, a machine that can print, scan, copy and fax - including Internet faxing - A3 documents. There are plenty of uses for this large page size, such as printing posters and mocking up A4 booklets, which can be printed as spreads on A3.

The printer is no bigger than typical A4 photocopiers from a few years ago and Brother has sensibly included two paper trays, one holding 250 sheets and the other 150. Both trays can handle A3 and A4 paper, though the top, 150-sheet one can take paper down to 15 x 10cm, so is suitable for holding standard photo blanks, too. You do have to know what size of paper is in each tray, though, and specify it explicitly when printing, as the machine has no automatic paper size detection.

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Because of the unit's larger than normal dimensions, there's plenty of room on the control panel to separate out the different function areas. This is helped by a widescreen colour LCD, which is wide enough to show a photo thumbnail and options for printing or effects, without having to overlay them. The menu hierarchy could be better handled, though, as there are some odd key choices.

The MFC-6490CW comes as standard with USB, Ethernet and 802.11g WiFi connections, so is very versatile and can be easily set up to work with an office workgroup. It can print through any of these connections, but also from a PictBridge camera, a USB stick and the most common types of memory card.

Brother claims print speeds of 30ppm and 28ppm for A4 draft prints in black and colour, respectively. We saw speeds of just over 4ppm and just under 3ppm for normal-mode A4 prints in five-page jobs. These speeds are closer to what you can expect in typical use. A five-page A3 print job took just under two minutes.

Print quality is good across the board, with very high quality photo prints, even up to A3. Plain paper jobs saw little ink spread in either black or colour. Page costs come out at 3.3p and 8.2p for black and colour, which is fair for the former and a bit high for the latter. The Brother machine has permanent heads and the ink cartridges plug in behind a hatch in the front of the printer.

Perched on top of the printer is the scanner unit, a flatbed scanning mechanism with a 50-sheet automatic document feeder. Add in the fax capability and photocopier functions and this is an impressive multifunction device for anyone needing to work with A3 size documents.

As a first attempt at an A3 all-in-one office inkjet, the MFC-6490CW makes a lot of the right moves. It has twin paper trays, a good scanner and some useful extras, such as the widescreen LCD display. A couple of annoying shortcomings, particularly the lack of auto paper size detection, let it down, but it's still a useful printer in a growing market.