Low-cost color lasers tend to have high-cost toner, but the MFC-9125CN's consumables are reasonably priced. The model ships with starter-size cyan, magenta, yellow, and black supplies that last for 1000 pages apiece. (The separate drum lasts 15,000 pages.) The replacement black costs $75 and lasts for 2200 pages (3.4 cents per page). Each color costs $70 and lasts for 1400 pages (5 cents per color, per page)--a little more expensive than average. A page using all four colors costs 18.4 cents.

The cartridge bays are not keyed to ensure that you put the correct color in the correct bay, and the printer will use whichever color you install as the color it thinks it is. For this reason, a misplaced cartridge can produce odd-looking images. We have observed and tried this on other Brother printers. The good news is that we've been able to return the cartridges to their rightful places and print correctly without further incident.

All color laser/LED multifunction printers priced below $500 have some shortcoming; that's how they manage to be so affordable. The Brother MFC-9125CN's grainy image quality and lack of automatic duplexing are typical (though disappointing) drawbacks, but it shows well against its competition in speed and toner costs.