Add the Brother MFC-9970CDW ($700 street) to the small, but growing, list of desktop laser MFPs that include a color touch screen on the front panel. As with the others, including the HP LaserJet Pro CM1415fnw color MFP ($449 list, 4.0 stars) for example, the touch screen itself is a highly attractive feature that makes giving commands much easier. In this case it's even more welcome than it would be with most MFPs, because of the wealth of commands available. More important, the combination of lots of features plus ease of use helps make the printer a good choice for the small to medium size office or workgroup it's aimed for.

As you would expect, the MFC-9970CDW will let you print and fax from your PC over a network. In addition, front panel commands let you fax, copy, print from or scan to a USB key, and scan to other destinations as well, including directly to email or to the email program on your PC, adding the scanned document as an attachment.

The MFP's scanner offers a 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF) and duplexing in the scanner itself—meaning that it reads both sides of the page at once so it doesn't slow down to turn the page over. Combined with the duplexing printer, this lets you copy both simplex (one sided) and duplex (two sided) originals to your choice of simplex or duplex copies.

With all of these choices for what you can do, having touch screen controls makes it far easier than it would otherwise be to pick your way through the options. The front panel combines the touch screen with a few buttons as well—primarily for a numeric keypad and a Cancel button—but they're few enough so they're not confusing, and they don't take anything away from the essential ease of use of the touch screen.

Paper Handling and Setup
In addition to the touch screen and long list of features, the MFC-9970CDW does pretty well on most basics as well. For paper handling, for example, in addition to the print duplexer I already mentioned, it offers an appropriate input capacity for a small to medium size office, at 300 pages divided into a 250-sheet drawer and a 50-sheet multipurpose tray. For those who need more, Brother sells a 500-sheet tray ($249 list) giving a total 800-sheet capacity.

The hardest part of setup is moving the printer into place. It weighs 46.3 pounds and measures 20.9 by 19.3 by 20.7 inches (HWD), which means you probably won't want it sitting on anyone's desk. Once you find a spot for it, however, setup is standard fare, with both Ethernet and WiFi as network connection choices. I used the Ethernet connection and ran my tests on a Windows Vista system.

Speed and Quality
Speed is a strong point, as with most Brother printers. Brother rates the engine at 30 pages per minute (ppm) for both monochrome and color, which should be close to the speeds you'll see for text files with no graphics or photos. On the new version of our business applications suite, (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), it came in at an effective 6.6 ppm, making it the fastest color laser MFP we've seen, by just a hair.

As a point of reference, the current Editors' Choice in the category, the similarly priced Canon Color ImageClass MF8350Cdn ($699, 4 stars), is effectively tied with the Brother printer, at 6.3 ppm on the test files that the old and new versions of the suite share.

Output quality is the one area where the printer doesn't shine. Text quality is dead on par for a color laser MFP, which makes it good enough for anything short of highly quality desktop publishing applications.

Graphics output is just a touch below par, at the low end of the tight grouping where almost all color lasers MFPs fall. It's certainly high enough quality for any internal business need, but I'd hesitate to hand the output to an important client or customer if I wanted to convey a sense of professionalism. Photo quality is far below par. It's good enough to print recognizable photos from Web pages, but the quality is worse than I would normally expect to see in a printed newspaper.

As should be obvious, if graphics and photo output quality is important for your office, this is the wrong printer to get. But if you don't much care about photos, and don't need impressive looking graphics, the combination of speed, capability, and ease of use from the front panel is enough to make the MFC-9970CDW stand out. And that may well be enough to make it your printer of choice.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Check out the test scores for the Brother MFC-9970CDW.

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Brother MFC-9970CDW with several other MFPs side by side.

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