The Brother MFC-9440CN ($700 street) gets almost everything right. Clearly designed as a color laser all-in-one (AIO) for the small office, busy home office, or small workgroup in a larger office, it offers fast print speed, an attractive price, and all the right functions for the target market: printing; standalone copier and fax; and scanning and faxing to and from PCs over a network (this includes scanning to a PC's e-mail program and adding the scanned file as an attachment. It even includes a 35-page automatic document feeder for scanning, copying, and faxing multipage documents. Unfortunately, the MFC-9440CN stubs its toe just a bit on output quality. Still, although the output is less than ideal, it's more than adequate for most business use.

As with most color laser AIOs, the MFC-9440CN is big enough that finding a spot for it may be a challenge in a small office. You probably won't want it on your desk, where at 19 by 17 by 19.2 inches (HWD) it would dominate your desktop and tower over you. And unless you spend your spare time working out with weights, you'll also probably want some help lifting its 72.6-pound frame into place.

Aside from the heavy lifting, physical setup is reasonably easy, consisting of removing packing materials and restraints, loading paper, and plugging in the power cord and cable. Network setup is typical, using an automated setup program. I tested the printer using Windows XP, but the disc also includes drivers for Windows 2000, 64-bit XP, and Vista.

One potentially frustrating issue that I've seen with other Brother AIOs is that when setup finishes, the printer isn't entirely set up—at least not if you're using the Windows firewall. Most of the features work at that point, but you can't scan to a PC from the front panel. As I've pointed out in other reviews, scanning from the front panel is usually the preferred choice for an AIO that's not on your desk, because it lets you take the document to the AIO, scan it, and bring it back with you in one trip.

Ideally, you shouldn't have to go through any additional manual steps after running the installation routine, but at least the MFC-9440CN's quick-start guide lists those steps—a critical oversight Brother was guilty of for some earlier network printers. (Brother says it also added this information to the quick-start guides for earlier models when it added instructions for installing them to run with Vista.)

Once you have everything set up, the MFC-9440CN does its job reasonably well. It sped through our business applications suite in just 11 minutes 25 seconds, giving it boasting rights as the fastest color laser AIO I've seen in its price range. The next fastest is the Lexmark X502n at 13:52.

As I've already suggested, the MFC-9440CN's output is suitable for most business needs. More than half of the fonts in our text suite qualified as easily readable and well formed at 6 points, and some passed both thresholds at smaller sizes, too. Only one heavily stylized font with thick strokes needed 20 points to pass both tests. These results make the text slightly subpar for a laser but suitable for anything short of desktop publishing or extensive use of small type for, say, legal contracts.

Graphics on our tests were easily good enough for most offices. Depending on how much of a perfectionist you are, you may consider them suitable for handing out to important clients or customers as well. I saw an obvious color shift toward yellow, but that doesn't count as a major problem for business use, since the goal is usually for the colors to be pleasing rather than to match a specific color. Even better, Brother says that since shipping the printer to me to test, it has upgraded the firmware and driver to eliminate the color shift.

Photos also showed a color shift, but photo quality is otherwise reasonably good for a laser. Even with the color shift, the output is satisfactory for jobs like printing Web pages with photos. Assuming the firmware and driver solve the color-shift problem, the output should be suitable for, say, client newsletters. Depending once again on how much of a perfectionist you are, you may even consider it sufficient for marketing materials like trifold brochures or one-page handouts with photos.

The Brother MFC-9440CN clearly isn't the right color laser AIO for everyone. If you need top-quality output, particularly for text, look elsewhere, starting with the Lexmark X502n. But if you don't need text at small sizes, the MFC-9440CN delivers top speed, reasonable quality, and lots of features—a combination that can serve nicely in a small office.

Check out the Brother MFC-9440CN's test scores.

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