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Get a Brother wireless all-in-one printer for $49.99

It's a flatbed, but it's also a smokin' deal on a printer, scanner, copier, and fax machine. Best of all, ink is cheap, especially if you go third-party.

Rick Broida Senior Editor
Rick Broida is the author of numerous books and thousands of reviews, features and blog posts. He writes CNET's popular Cheapskate blog and co-hosts Protocol 1: A Travelers Podcast (about the TV show Travelers). He lives in Michigan, where he previously owned two escape rooms (chronicled in the ebook "I Was a Middle-Aged Zombie").
Rick Broida
2 min read
The Brother MFC-J270w all-in-one printer doesn't come with a USB cable--but it doesn't need one, either. Wi-Fi, baby!
The Brother MFC-J270w all-in-one printer doesn't come with a USB cable--but it doesn't need one, either. Wi-Fi, baby! Brother

I'll cut right to the chase: the Brother MFC-J270w all-in-one printer has a list price of $99.99, but Best Buy currently has it for $49.99. Shipping adds another $15, but you can save that cost by picking it up in-store. (What you probably can't escape, however, is sales tax.)

Even with those surcharges, that's a downright awesome deal on a device that prints, scans, copies, and faxes, and does so without wires. Yep, like all printers should, the MFC-J270w rocks Wi-Fi.

It also comes with a 1.9-inch color LCD (small, but acceptable for navigating menus and previewing photos), a four-cartridge ink system, and a two-year warranty.

Brother says the MFC-J270w can crank out 33 black or 27 color pages per minute when printing, or around 20 when making copies.

I haven't used this particular model, but I do own an older, similar sibling, the MFC-490CW. I like it a lot, especially the super-cheap third-party ink cartridges (which in my experience print just fine).

The only real shortcoming is that it's a flatbed, meaning you have to feed one sheet at a time. That's pretty inconvenient for faxing and copying multi-page documents.

But if you do that only occasionally, it's hard to beat 50 bucks for a wireless multifunction printer. I'm not sure how long Best Buy will offer it at this price, so if you're interested, I'd say act fast.

Bonus deal: Amazon has a pretty sweet Sony Blu-ray home-theater-in-a-box system for $238 shipped. The Blu-ray player is Wi-Fi ready (adapter sold separately) and can stream Netflix, Pandora, etc. And the speaker system provides 850 total watts of 5.1 audio goodness. (Be sure to read some of the user reviews, though.)