Very compact and incredibly cheap for an A3 all-in-one, but speed and print quality are only average

Interesting design and plenty of features, but it takes an age to produce mediocre results

A dreadful scanner and an overall lack of features make the low price a moot point

This is one of the most complete office multifunction printers we've ever seen. but the MFC-885CW can’t overcome its price or quality issues.

An uncompromising monochrome laser that gets the job done with speed and precision.

Quick, cheap to run and an abundance of features – a worthy award winner

Youll have to excuse the pun, but the MFC-9200c is far and away the big brother to the MFC-4600. There is no comparison in terms of size, and it efficiently uses that space to provide more features than its competition.

It’s not quite an office grade product, but the MFC-7840W is a great choice for a busy home office.

Lightning quick, top-quality prints and the running costs are as low as the price tag

With a performance reflecting its relatively lower price, the Brother didn't score as well in most printing tests. The photo print in particular took over four times longer than many of the other printers, and its quality was inferior in comparison. Text quality was also poor, particularly on the smaller 6pt font where visible banding occurred.

As most of the devices we tested consisted of inkjet units, we were interested to see how the laser printer in the MFC-4600 stacked up. Relatively lacking in features, the MFC-4600 is geared toward productivity, performing well in our speed tests.

Whereas a couple of years ago Canon might have described this as a mini camcorder, it now describes it as a compact multimedia DV camera. Certainly by comparison with the others in this month's labs it's not mini, however it does manage to pack a lot of features into a relatively small package. It is an upright camera rather than the longer, squatter shape of the MVX250i and weighs 43 grams less than its bigger but cheaper brother.

Superb print quality at consistently high speeds, and it’s packed with useful features too.

Kodak's LS433 is similar than its little brother the LS633, and they fight it out on slightly different battlefields. The 4-megapixel LS443 is the slightly bulkier of the two, has a smaller display and weighs a little more.

It lacks the style of its higher-end big brother, the Coolpix 500, but at half the price, it wont stretch the budget too far.

The Radeon 7500 is the little brother to the Radeon 8500 and is essentially an enhanced version of the original Radeon card, an example of which was tested in this round-up as a yardstick and included in the performance graphs (pages 50-51). It features the Charisma Engine; ATIs equivalent of the T&L engine found in GeForce-based cards.

Despite having a 1.02-megapixel CCD, the 820 still suffered similar poor optical zoom performance of its little brother, with image pixelation at high zoom. The image stabilisation was only average and that put you off seeking any sort of magnification while filming moving objects. The improved CCD does provide better stills, and the 820 can use MPEG-4 to compress video clips.

The WinFast Titanium 200 T shares is similar to its big brother, the Ti 500 TD, in terms of good performance at an affordable price. This time around however, its the performance-on-a-budget GeForce3 Ti 200 chipset offered at the very affordable price of $555, making it a strong contender for PC Authoritys Value Award.

A Lexmark multi-function device, the P6250, won our last photo printer roundup, so the expectations were high for its big brother, the X7170. Unlike our Labs Winner, this machine is definitely targeted at the business market. For an extra $100 premium, the machine adds office-oriented functions such as faxing, a copy feeder and a better scanner. It's also noticeably larger than its brethren.

Although boasting the lowest average access time in the roundup at 12.2ms, looking at this drive's graphs, we notice a few more hiccups along the way than its big brother the 400GB Deskstar 7K400.