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Issue 631 • 11 – 24 May 2022A laptop with an
OLED screen?
What are they?
OLED screens are common on high-
end TVs and mobile phones, because
they can create perfect contrast (where
black is truly black and white is very
bright). They also reproduce colours
accurately. Now you can get them on
laptops as well.How do they work?
Rather than having a single backlight that
each pixel filters or blocks to recreate
the colour it needs, OLED screens use
individual lights for each pixel. Backlit
screens tend to leak a little light, so their
pixels never appear perfectly black;
OLED screens solve this problem.What’s the
catch?
Price. OLED screens
are expensive. For
example, Dell’s
XPS 15 laptop with
an OLED screen costs £2,099 (www.
snipca.com/41758, pictured).So can I do without it?
Yes. If you’re only browsing the web
and checking your email, a decent IPS
screen should be good enough.VERDICT A good-value multi-function
printer, but print and scan quality is
merely average, and colour prints are
slow★★★★★
ALTERNATIVE Brother DCP-
J1140DW £150 It’s slightly more
expensive and doesn’t have a fax
option, but this printer produced better
prints in our testsSPECIFICATIONS
1200x6000dpi maximum print resolution •• 150-
sheet paper tray •• 20-sheet automatic document
feed •• Wi-Fi 4 •• USB 2 port •• 172x400x343 (HxWxD) ••
8.3kg •• One-year warranty http://www.snipca.com/41732
On Sale Weds 25 May
Linksys Atlas Pro 6
Affordable Wi-Fi 6
mesh router to
combat dead zonesPRINTER | £131 from Amazon http://www.snipca.com/41732
Brother MFC-J1010DW
Check the fax
We sometimes struggle to make sense of
Brother’s numeric names. The low
numbers in this printer’s model make it
sound like it offers basic functionality,
whereas it can actually do everything:
print, scan, copy and – for those in love
with late 20th-Century tech – fax.
It also has a 20-sheet automatic
document feeder for processing
multi-page documents. There’s automatic
two-sided (duplex) printing, but the
document feeder only scans one side
of each sheet (unless you turn it over
yourself). Throw in Wi-Fi and a colour
screen and this adds up to an excellent
specification for the price.
The MFC-J1010DW is reasonably
quick when printing black text,
delivering 15.3 pages per minute (ppm) in
our test, while churning out an A4
photocopy in 13 seconds, or 10 mono
copies in a minute and a half. It’s much
slower with colour, though, managing
only 3.7ppm. It needed almost 30 seconds
for a single colour photocopy, and 10
pages took more than four minutes.
The scanner is much faster, capturing
an A4 page at 300dpi in just 14 seconds
and needing only 24 seconds to scan a
6x4in photo at 600dpi.
Like many other Brother scanners
we’ve tested, however, the results were
only adequate – fine for draft documents,
but lacking the sharpness and dynamic
range of its closest rivals – struggling
in particular to distinguish between
darker shades.
Does everything
you’d want for a home
office, but speed and
print quality are so-so
While there’s little to criticise about its
print quality, there’s little to love either.
Black text and mono photocopies were
fine. Photos were good enough for
occasional use, but this printer’s target
market probably cares more about colour
prints and photocopies on plain paper.
Unfortunately, these lacked saturation
and came out duller than those from
inkjet rivals.
Brother makes an XL range of cartridges
for this model, each offering a generous
500-page capacity. However, mono
costs work out at a costly 2.9p per page,
while each colour page costs 7.9p.
With a compact design, useful features
and decent performance, this isn’t a
bad multi-function printer for a home
office, especially if you need a fax. It’s
also reasonably cheap, so it’s a shame
that it fails to offer great performance
or output quality.Acer Aspire
XC-1660
A decent Windows 11
PC for less than
£500