CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
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Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 05/06/2005
When you slide the Brother MW-140BT out of your suit pocket, people might mistake it for an antique cigarette tin. This quirky, sleek metallic contraption measures only 6.25 by 4 by 0.7 inches (LWD) and weighs about 10 ounces with its battery and paper cartridge installed.
The slim Brother mPrint is about the size of a chocolate bar.
You can connect the mPrint via its mini USB port and provided cable to a standard Windows PC; the unit ships with Windows drivers. When we fed the MW-140BT a full Microsoft Word page of text from a PC, the printer reduced and silently printed the page in 16 seconds. The tiny 3-point text was perfectly clear, as were screenshots and other grayscale images on the 3x4-inch sheets. But this printer really comes into its own when you power up its Bluetooth adapter to talk to a PDA and print screen captures, schedules, contacts, and to-do lists. We used two Brother utilities to print via Bluetooth from a Pocket PC device: PrintPocketCE adds a print dialog to your PDA's PocketWord and PocketExcel, so you can specify the number of copies to print, as well as how to orient and collate the pages. Brother also includes comparable utilities for Palm OS devices.
Unlike some battery-operated wireless printers, such as those at car-rental agencies, the MW-140BT doesn't work with rolls of paper, which means there's only one consumable, but an expensive one: Brother charges $4.49 for a 50-sheet pack, or 9 cents a page. A 30-pack of full-sheet labels costs $7.49, a quarter each; and the same number of two-ply "carbon" papers costs $9.49, or about 32 cents each. Brother's tiny sheets don't feel gritty, smell bad, or look grayish and supposedly won't fade like thermal papers from the past. The second-sheet "carbon" copy pages are specified to last a decade.
The three-ounce battery charger is designed to power the mPrint and last 100 pages on one charge. You'll have to send the printer back to Brother to swap out the lithium-ion battery once it fades, which should be about three years from your purchase, and the company pays shipping and sends a substitute during the downtime.
This device includes a standard one-year warranty with toll-free phone tech support available weekdays from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. ET, as well as 24/7 fax-back support via a toll-free number. You can access FAQs, manuals, driver downloads, and e-mail help at Brother's Web site. Brother also runs a program to assist developers building vertical applications that incorporate the printer.
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