Mobile Printing
Brother MP-21C
Price: AU$626
Distributor: Brother International
Ph: 02 9887 4344; Fax: 02 9888 9707
www.brother.com.au
The 21C is the same model we tested in 1999, only this time we did not receive the optional cut sheet feeder and for a bit of a lark had to manually feed the pages for the 10-page peak throughput tests.
The printer is a small charcoal -brick" that, to reduce the amount of desk space it takes up, stands on its side. The robust printer is only 300mm long, 50mm deep and 106mm high, beautifully engineered, and weighs in at only 1kg. The manual feed works reasonably well, the user must gently feed the paper into the provided slot, after a moment's hesitation the printer takes the page, pulls it through, then reverses it slightly to ensure the print starts as close to the top edge as possible. Output is also pretty simpleâ€"straight out onto the desktop.
The 21C does not have a power supply, nor does it have a parallel adaptor cable for its only proprietary port. Instead, the printer ships with a PC Card that plugs into your notebook and through the connector cable provides both communications and power to the printer. Apparently the printer's power needs are minuscule and the PC Card port easily copes with the printer power load. There is apparently a parallel adaptor cable available but if you go this route you will also need to purchase the tiny 200g AC power supply as well.
Controls are minimalâ€"the power button also functions as a resume and form feed control in a printer error situation and the only other control initiates head cleaning. The Windows printer driver is also pretty minimalistic with nowhere near the customising features of most of the desktop units. The four status LEDs indicate a variety of conditions including power on, printer error and cartridge running low or out of ink completely.
Installing ink cartridges is simple: the front cover opens and the cartridges, two only, slot into the top of the printer. The print head cannot be replaced by the user and, the format of the ink cartridges is quite unusual. There is a large black and cyan cartridge and a smaller magenta and yellow cartridge. This can be a bit of a bummer if you do a lot of black printing as you are always tossing out a potentially quite full cyan cartridge as well. The printer does have a neat feature in that it does have a two colour mode to help you through a potential crisis if one cartridge runs dry.
Because we had no sheet feeder, a cartridge life test was not carried out this time (feeding the sheets one by one being a bit of a chore). However, our test results from last year indicated a life of around 180 page of 5 percent black and 97 pages of 15 percent colour.
Unfortunately, the cartridges are not inexpensive with the cost per black page a steep 31 cents while colour pages are around 58 cents.
Documentation was very good with a comprehensive Users Guide and a surprisingly comprehensive Quick Setup Guide that runs to 17 pages. On the plus side the printer will not annoy anyone nearby while printing because it is very quiet in operation.
All our performance testing was performed with the supplied PC Card interface and, as previously mentioned, using manual feed. Even so, we were surprisingly close to the performance results we obtained last year but with a peak throughput of just 0.7ppm, it's quite a while before output appears. Thankfully the printer is not much slower producing the output in the photo tests. At 0.45ppm the Brother is actually slightly faster than some of the desktop units tested.
Overall print quality was not up to that of the desktops but then again the quality is not too bad when you consider the units portability. Character formation, while no worse than last year, did not compare all that favourably with the newer, and improved, printers under test. The characters were a little ragged in comparison and were not as black as most other printers managed to produce. Areas of solid black fill are quite a pale grey and tend to be a little uneven but gradient fills were surprisingly smooth with little banding. The Brother popped out the photo print an excruciating 18 minutes after we hit the print button but to be fair the quality was really very good. Colour fidelity and the level of detail was very good, better than some of the desktops and a credit to such a small portable unit.
4%
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Thats really good printer,These would be useful in the work place who are using printers.Like in the office. This may be a big help to make their work easier. Thanks for sharing this information. Have a good to all of you.
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