Built around a laser-print engine, the Brother MFC-6800 ($500 street) offers strictly monochrome output, but that's nearly its only limitation. (Note that the HP OfficeJet G85, reviewed September 1, 2000, is the closest competitor to this Brother unit.)

The MFC-6800 is a printer, color scanner, copier, plain-paper fax machine, and PC fax modem (without a data modem feature), and it makes few compromises. For scanning, copying, and faxing, the unit comes with both a flatbed and a 30-page sheet feeder. The printer includes one-touch buttons for easy use and comes with software that lets you fax from any program. And its laser-print engine offers a snappy 10-page-per-minute speed.

Setup consists of removing the packing materials, sliding the toner cartridge into place, installing the software, and plugging in a USB or parallel cable (neither of which comes in the box). We used a USB connection, which makes the rest of the process almost entirely automatic.

In addition to the printer driver and the PC fax driver, the setup routine installs a Twain driver, so you can scan from any program that's Twain-aware. A control program lets you scan, fax, or copy from an on-screen menu. In addition, the routine installs a document management program, ScanSoft's PaperPort, which forwards scanned documents to other programs. PaperPort also includes an OCR module that uses ScanSoft's OCR software TextBridge.

We tested each of the major functions of the MFC-6800, starting with printing at the default resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi). Performance lived up to its claim, hitting a measured 10 ppm on our 30-page Microsoft Word file. Photos also printed quickly, at about 40 seconds for an 8- by 10-inch image.

Output quality was appropriate for the resolution. Lines in text and graphics were crisp and well formed, with text readable in font sizes as small as 4 points. In graphics, solid areas were solidly filled in, and thin light lines held well against a dark background. Dithering in graphics and photos was relatively subtle, and shading changed gradually, as it should.

One paper-handling issue that affected copying and receiving faxes was that printed output curled significantly and got in the way of later sheets. Brother reportedly has not seen this problem and suggests that it may be limited to our particular unit.

Separate sets of buttons on the front panel let you fax just as you would with a dedicated fax machine or copy as you would with a dedicated copier. Similarly, a Scan button lets you start a scan and choose a destination on your system—word processor, graphics editor, or e-mail.

You can also start a scan by putting paper in the sheet feeder to launch an on-screen menu with options to copy, fax, or scan to a file, e-mail, OCR, or graphics program. After choosing the destination, you can modify such settings as resolution and then scan. You can also easily change the default destinations.

We used the on-screen menu for testing OCR and found that this method worked reasonably well for Times New Roman text but not for other fonts, at a speed of 3 ppm for the whole process on our seven-page test file. One inconvenience is that you can't use this on-screen menu, which has an easy approach to changing scan settings, to scan from the flat- bed. But you can use PaperPort to scan and then direct the scanned result to a program.

You can also scan directly from a Twain-aware program. We scanned photos, for example, by calling on the Twain driver from Adobe Photoshop.

Finally, the fax driver worked as promised and let us fax from any program.

One issue worth mentioning is that you can jiggle the combination sheet feeder and flatbed cover back and forth a bit. This certainly makes the unit feel less than heavy-duty. Even so, the Brother MFC-6800 is an attractive package. The printer will certainly serve as a cost-effective, space-saving answer to multiple needs in a small office.