Brother has a range of inexpensive inkjet all-in-one printers and the DCP-585CW is designed to sit near the top of that range. It's a four-in-one machine, offering printing, scanning, copying and photo print, and this last feature is accommodated by having a separate feed tray for 15 x 10cm photo paper, built into the lid of the A4 paper cassette.

This is OK, but it's fiddly to have to remove the cassette from the machine to slide the photo paper tray forward and back to change paper sources.

The control panel includes Brother's trademark, double-width LCD display, which makes selecting photo images from a memory card much easier than having the options superimposed on the photo image.

The flatbed scanner is in its conventional position above the print engine, but the four ink cartridges are more convenient than most, as they plug into the right of the paper cassette, behind a fold-down flap. This isn't true of the USB and network cables, though, both of which have to be reeved around channels inside the printer, once the scanner has been hinged up on its slightly precarious ‘bonnet stay'.

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Both cabled and wireless networking are standard on this machine, which is unusual in a device costing under £90, though we're still not sure of the advantage of networking on what is essentially a personal all-in-one device.

Brother must sense time differently from the rest of us, as its speed ratings for the DCP-585CW are 33ppm for black print and 27ppm for colour. These are ludicrous figures, even assuming draft print mode and allowing no time for driver processing. We saw speeds of under 3ppm for black pages and under 2.5ppm for colour and we firmly believe these are the kind of speeds you'll see in practice. Perhaps the decimal point was in the wrong place.

Print quality depends on the kind of document you're producing. Black text on plain paper is grey rather than densely black, due to the paper fibres not being saturated. Unexpectedly, colour ink has better saturation but colour graphics still look insipid compared with the machine's main competitors. Colour photocopies are even paler. Photo prints are well up with most of the competition, though, offering bright but natural colours and good levels of detail.

Print costs, as always, depend on the price you can find for the ink cartridges. With the best prices we could locate, the cost per page comes out at 2.6p and 6.1p for black and colour print, respectively. Both these figures are reasonable when compared with other inkjets at a similar price.

This is another machine that tries to blind you with its feature set. It has a good one, including cabled and wireless networking, photo print and a convenient double-width colour LCD. The key factors in any printer, though, are the quality and speed of its print. On both these measures, the DCP-585CW lags behind its main competition.