We have obtained deep CCD R and I mosaic imaging of 578 arcmin^2^ within 1°.5 of the Pleiades' center - reaching a completeness magnitude I = 19.5 - with the aim of finding free-floating brown dwarfs. Teide 1, the best bona fide brown dwarf discovered so far in the cluster (Rebolo, Zapatero Osorio & Martin, 1995Natur.377..129R), arose as a result of a combined photometric and astrometric study of ~1/4 of our covered area. The extension of our two-colour survey provides eight new additional brown dwarf candidates whose photometry is rather similar to that of Teide 1. Several of them are even fainter. Follow up low-resolution spectroscopy (Martin, Rebolo & Zapatero Osorio, 1996ApJ...469..706M) shows that one of them is indeed a Pleiades brown dwarf. Most of the remaining candidates are background late-M dwarfs which are contaminating our survey, possibly due to a small (previously unknown) cloud towards the cluster which affects some of our CCD fields. We did not expect any foreground M8-M9 field dwarf in our surveyed volume and surprisingly we have found one, suggesting that its number could be larger than inferred from recent luminosity function studies in the solar neighbourhood.