Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As an entry level printer in the INKvestment line from Brother this is a good machine. The INKvestment system provides you with more ink so you can print more pages between ink refills. If you just plan to use the printer for printing and copying then this is a nice setup for the price. The scanning function is acceptable, but only if you’ll be scanning infrequently and are able to spend extra time with each scan. IN THE BOX In the box you’ll find the printer, the 4 ink cartridges (3 color and 1 black), the power cable, and some instructions. A USB cable is not included, although you might need one during the setup. DESIGN The printer has a pretty standard design that you’ve probably seen before. The top is the flatbed scanner with a lid that flips up. This model is designed for just a single sheet at a time in the scanner so there’s no fancy automatic sheet feeder on top. When the lid is open you also have access to a USB-B port with a path for the cable to feed out the back of the unit. The top also has a small control panel with buttons to select the paper size, setup wifi, turn the printer on and off, make a black and white copy, and make a color copy. There are LED lights associated with some of the buttons as well as separate lights to indicate a malfunction and to indicate low ink. There is no screen on this model. The front of the printer has a removable lower paper tray which also has the output tray built into it. The tray slides out of the printer and flips open. Once it is flipped open you can adjust the paper guides for the size of paper you are using. The paper feeds into the printer with the printing surface facedown in the tray. It then does a U-turn at the back of the printer and feeds out the front onto the top of the tray. The right side of the front of the printer has a flip-down door that reveals the ink cartridge slots. The ink cartridges are quite large compared to how much ink is actually in them (see my picture). With the exception of the black ink cartridge they are mostly just filler plastic. I’m guessing that Brother must sell some more expensive version of the cartridges that have a larger area for the actual ink. When I have looked up replacement ink though it is interesting to see that even the replacement cartridges look the same and the replacement black cartridge actually looks like the included color ones with ink just at the top. Brother claims the included ink can last up to a year through normal use, but that is likely based on very little color usage and about 5% overall page coverage printing text documents. SETUP Physically setting up the printer is quite easy. Put some paper in the tray. Slide all 4 ink cartridges into their spots in front (the cartridges each have a unique design so you can’t put them in the wrong spots), and plug it in. The setup of the printer to your computer is a different story. The main issue with printers like this are that they don’t have a screen on them, and thus you can’t configure them to your wireless network using only the printer. In order to get this one on the network you will first need to download the software from Brother’s website. The software will then find your printer and attempt to configure it. In my case the software found the printer, but always failed during the configuration step and thus I couldn’t get the printer to join my wireless network. The only way I was able to get the printer on the network was to first connect the printer directly to my computer with a USB-A to USB-B cable. Once I did this the software easily configured the printer to join my network and I could then disconnect the USB cable. This is the method I recommend for the easiest setup experience. Luckily I had a USB-A to USB-B cable on-hand. If you don’t have one then it would be best to find somebody to loan you one as you will only use it for a few minutes and then never need to use it again unless you change your wireless network setup. Once the Brother software is installed and the printer is joined to the network you are ready to start printing and scanning. IN USE For printing purposes the printer works just like any other printer. You can choose options such as the page scaling, color or black and white, number of copies, and print quality from your computer’s standard print dialog box. Brother has a mobile app for printing from your phone or tablet, but I found that the printer was immediately detected by my iPhone without installing any additional apps and I was able to print to it just fine. It’s worth noting that the printer is a little loud when printing. Not excessively loud but definitely louder than some of the other Inkjets I’ve used. You won’t want to print things if people are sleeping nearby. For copying you can simply place what you want to copy on the scanner surface and press the black and white or color copy button on the top of the printer. The default copy options are probably adequate for most uses, but if you want to tweak the settings you can do so via the Brother application on your computer. The application lets you change settings such as the number of copies, the print scaling, the density of the ink, the overall quality, etc. Scanning works in a similar way to copying as far as the Brother application is concerned. Using the application you can choose the scanning resolution from 7 different levels ranging from 100x100 dpi up to the maximum of 1200x1200 dpi. The default of 300x300 is probably good enough for most things. The higher resolution scanning levels will of course take more time to complete the scan. You can also configure scanning presets such as “Photos” and have the scanner use specific settings and also save the scan as a JPG to a specific directory, while other presets can use different parameters such as scan in black and white and save as a PDF to another directory for documents. You can even direct the scans you make to a cloud provider such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive. The major issue I have with the scanner portion of the printer is that the included software doesn’t automatically crop the scan to just your document or have a way to automatically crop multiple items from a single scan. For instance, if you put a single photo on the scanner the resulting scan is going to be a large image that is mostly white with your photo in one corner as the scanner will save the entire scanning area regardless of if your document is large or small. Likewise, if you place 4 separate photos on the scanner you will end up with an image of the entire scanning area with your 4 photos, not 4 separate image files. Other scanners I’ve had include the automatic cropping and separating feature, but this one seemingly doesn’t. This means that for every scan you make you’ll have to manually crop your image file afterwards, which can be very time consuming if you are scanning a lot of photos or other smaller documents. Surprisingly the scanner also doesn’t have an option to do any type of pre-scan. On other scanners you can run a quick pre-scan and display a small image of what you have on the scanner so you can at least manually select the scanning area before running the main scan. The printer also says that you can initiate a scan by pressing both of the copy buttons at the same time, but this doesn’t seem to work for me. I’m thinking this only works if your computer is connected via USB and not over the network. The Brother application allows you to configure many things and also provides a lot of information including the current ink levels. It even has an estimated pages remaining counter for each color of ink, and you can set the pages remaining count to be based on your actual usage or be based on the normal ISO standard for pages remaining based on the ink level. There is also a web-based interface which you can password protect. The web-interface provides even more configuration options. PERFORMANCE The printing speed of this printer is quite good for an inkjet. Printing a regular document consisting of mostly text yielded print speeds of around 10 pages per minute (see my video). It’s not super laser printer speed but it also is noticeably faster than some other Inkjets that I’ve used in the past. Printing photos or other items with a lot of coverage will of course slow things down considerably. Printing a full 8.5x11” photo on the standard settings will take about 3 minutes. This produces a perfectly acceptable photo. Setting the printer to the absolute highest settings results in a full page photo print time of about 9 minutes. Using photo paper I was able to make some very nice prints with this printer despite it not being sold as a true photo printer (as true photo printers normally include additional colors of ink rather than the standard CMYK setup). It does seem that the ink will last a long time, even with the cartridges that don’t use up all the available space for ink. I think if you’re just using this printer for normal printer things like text and the occasional graphic you will find that you’ll spend a lot less on ink than with some other printers. Using it for photographs will of course use up the ink faster and my printer is showing a significant drop in the ink levels after printing around 10 full page photos, but that is to be expected. SUMMARY Overall I think this is a good printer if you are in the market for something that prints fast and uses the higher capacity ink cartridges. The copying function works well, but the actual scanning to your computer is far less than ideal. If you plan to do a lot of scanning such as storing large documents or digitizing family photos then this definitely is not the printer for you. The scanner is more like a bonus feature that’s nice to have if you find an occasion where you need to scan one or two things. PROS: - Fast print speed - High capacity ink system - Good print quality for both text and images, even photographs - One touch access to black and white or color copies right from the printer CONS: - Wireless setup may require using a USB cable that isn’t included - Scanner functions are less than ideal due to the lack of automatic cropping and separation in the software - A little noisy