If you have limited work space yet require maximum productivity, then an all-in-one printer is the ideal choice. However, some are more all-in-one than others.

For home use, a printer and scanner is probably all you need. For work purposes, you may want to add a fax.

Brother’s MFC-845CW goes further by providing all these functions, from photo printing to faxing and adding wireless networking, together with its own Dect telephone handset.

As a replacement for the MFC-820CW, it boasts double the onboard memory and boosted print speeds. It also provides more convenient access to ink cartridges via a front-loading system.

Photo-printing capabilities are also enhanced, using Brother's new consumables and a paper tray that can house A4 and 6x4 sheets simultaneously. However, unlike some dual printer trays, such those in HP printers, the printer requires manual intervention when swapping sizes as it can’t change between the two automatically.

We found the photo print quality to be good, although not up to the standard of the very best photo printers out there. And, while it has a full complement of flash memory slots, Compact Flash, SD, Memory Stick and Xd are all supported, there’s limited functionality available when you’re using them. You're limited with rotating thumbnails and printing photos and contact sheets; none of the fancy image-editing tools found on many other photo printers are present.

However, office-based functionality is rather better with a full selection of options for scanning direct to email or memory cards in different formats, including Pdf.

The included Dect phone uses the MFC-845CW as a base station, which also provides answering machine facilities and the option of adding up to three more Dect handsets.

Software support is good, providing easy network setup and management. You also get an automatic scan and translate utility that can translate scanned documents into any of 11 languages.

Drivers are provided for Windows and Mac, and Brother continues its excellent support of Linux by providing full driver support for various distributions of the operating system.

Ink costs are reasonable at about £17.61 for a 500-page black cartridge and £9.98 for each of the three 400-page colour cartridges, and with print speeds up to 22ppm (pages per minute) in colour and 27ppm in monochrome it has plenty of performance to keep up with a small workgroup of networked users.