http://www.gadgetspeak.com/gadget/article.rhtm/130124/410992/Brother_DCP-130C.html

Brother DCP-130C 

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This is a compact All In One unit, however while it is small and the controls are easy to use, all is not as it should be.
Brother DCP-130C all-in-one printer

The Brother DCP-130C is 39x35x16cm and light grey and black in colour. There are a total of 15 buttons all at the right side of the front edge of the top along with a rather poor LED display that you always seem to be at the wrong angle to view what it is saying. The front has two card slots as well as a PictBridge one. It is nice to see a proper paper tray - rather than an open shelf-printed results are delivered face up on a shelf just above the paper tray.

The flatbed scanner has a landscape lid that needs 28cm to raise to the vertical although there is no reason why to slip a sheet under the cover needs a raise of more than a few centimetres. Books or magazines of course need a larger raise.

The scanner is rather good and I was quite happy with the quality of all pages that I downloaded to the PC. A quick way of testing the scanner is to use it as a stand alone copier. Around 30 seconds for a colour copy that varies very little from the original. Slightly quicker for a black copy but again quite acceptable.

This is a four ink and four cartridge unit with decent sized cartridges that are east to fit and the advantage of single cartridges is that you never waste ink as if the yellow cartridge is empty you only need to change the yellow.

So far a quite acceptable entry level unit the only minus being the poor single line LED display. However it often goes into a cleaning cycle and I do not mean just when it is turned on and this takes around two to three minutes. If you just want to copy a single page this is more than annoying.

Now onto printing, I am pleased to say printing times are much improved from those of last years batch of products however times are still not great.

For printing the ubiquitous 200 word document in draft mode it is 12PPM and the more normal 1500 word document spread over four pages it is 10PPM and the output for both is grey so really only useful for proofing. Printing in normal mode produces near black output but is somewhat slower.

Now onto photo output and regular readers will remember the horrendous time taken to print an A4 borderless print with last years model. This year a huge improvement it only takes 9minutes, still poor but on the same planet as other companies. To print four 9x13cm images on an A4 sheet should take around the same time. Even though I selected borderless and clicked yes at the 'this may take some time' message what I got was four 9x13cm images all with borders and this took around 8minutes. So it will only print an A4 sheet with a single image borderless and it will only do this in the middle quality of photo, when you select best it automatically unticks borderless.

I suppose the low overall cost of the unit may suit someone who does only a little printing, is not worried about waiting for copies but needs good scanning quality. However I'm not sure there are a lot of that category of person out there.

Doing my internet searches found the Brother DCP-130C at a best price of £49.99 from the first link below.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/130C-DCP130C-25-20PPM/dp/B000M4EE06

http://www.brother.co.uk/g3.cfm/s_page/50670/s_level/16990/s_product/DCP130CU1

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What our readers said!

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Comment by Pam Schleich, 9 May 2009 14:57

For some inexplicable reason - my Brother DCP-145C is refusing to print pages.  The machine says it  "Print unable - 36"   I have no User's Handbook, so cannot refer to the Troubleshooting page.   I have tried switching off/on the machine, but all it does is clean itself!  Does anyone have any idea how I can resume printing?  Thanks
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Comment by Lloyd Brydon, 28 Dec 2008 15:31

I too have had problems with the DCP-130C cleaning itself every time I switch it on. I have replaced cartridges and in spite of only printing off a few colour pages they have emptied themselves through the constant cleaning cycle.
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Comment by Daniel, 14 Oct 2008 9:40

How can i print in black/white if i got emtpy color cartiges????
I do have a full black color cartige, and empty color cartiges... and i want to print in black!!!!

Why cant i do it???
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Comment by Lins, 15 Sep 2008 20:20

This is the most annoying printer I have ever had!  The wretched thing seems to have OCD and cleans itself A LOT, and therefore uses up loads of ink.  Apart from online stores there don't seem to be many shops who sell the cartridges and certainly not the cheaper compatible ones.It is also very poor at printing photos, the paper often gets jammed.The reason I bought it was because the staff at Staples were recommending it... they obviously were trying to get rid of them!ThanksLins  
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Comment by Charles Ingolfor Bjornson, 31 Aug 2008 17:48

My photos come out very green! What am I doing wrong?
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Comment by Tom, 6 Aug 2008 8:29

hi, my sister-in-law has this printer/scanner
She might only print every second or third day - after more than two days not in use it AUTOMATICALLY does a "Cleaning" - this is using up a ridiculous amount of ink.
I havent had a chance to look at the settings yet, I'm wondering though if anyone else is having this experience -
I'll report back when I've had a look at the software/driver whatever you call the "interface" :)
thanks, Tom
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Comment by petew, 16 May 2008 19:22

For those of you that have lost the install disk, all drivers are available by following this link. When you get there select 'drivers', your operating system and your language.

Hayley : Which part of the instructions are you having problems with? Assuming you're using Windows Vista you'd end up on this page. The instructions seem fairly straight forward. Save the download file in a temporary directory (the suggestion is c:\brodnt. The file is an executable so once you've downloaded it you need to run it. Use Windows Explorer to go to the temporary directory and double click on 130INST-B. This will extract the real files into c:\brodnt\DCP-130C, which includes a "Setup130C" directory followed by lots of language directories (not sure I see the point in the download page asking language!) - in the 'Eng' English directory there's the real 'Setup' programme you want. Run that.

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Comment by felltop1, 16 May 2008 11:54

how can i get paper that is jammed into the rollers of dcp-130c they are to small to grasp
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Comment by Hayley, 12 May 2008 8:12

Hi I have also lost my install cd but dont quite understand the download instructions. Can I downloaded and saved it to my desktop but not sure If that was correct?
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Comment by bryancheow, 7 Apr 2008 11:55

i loss my installation CD
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Comment by BryanCheow, 7 Apr 2008 11:51

I lost my installation cd
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Comment by mike davies, 2 Oct 2007 20:51

One interesting anomaly has arisen when printing a word document...I wanted to print a bit of text at the base of an already printed sheet...it was a an arial photo of a building that I'd printed out from a web site. I was sending it by post to someone and wanted to add some information at the base of the page, so I did the text in Word 2000 and in the word document I made sure it was at the bottom of the page. I loaded the printed photo A4 size into the tray and pressed print but nothing happened...it said data was being received but it wouldn't print it. I tried fooling the printer by increasing the time out settings but to no avail...if I moved the text up to the top of the A4 page (where I definitely didn't want it) it printed fine!!
All suggestions gratefully received...I find the print quality/scan quality good but it is a really slow thing...
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Comment by petew, 2 Sep 2007 9:34

Loosing a disk used to be a real pain. These days though the disks are usually out of date when you buy the machine and the latest from any decent company can be downloaded from the manufacturers web-site.

For the DCP-130C you can download drivers, firmware from Brothers support site. Just click on this link.
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Comment by Leanne Li, 1 Sep 2007 13:49

I lost my installation disc and I have purchased a new PC. How to get a disc to install to my new PC? THANK YOU!
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Comment by ian bunclark, 4 Mar 2007 17:24

yor comments were very true

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