Brother MFC-J6920dw review: a fast, capable MFP stuck with mediocre print quality

Brother MFC-J6920DW $300.00 With a massive A3-size scanner platen, excellent performance, decent output, and 500-sheet paper capacity, this inkjet MFP will make short work of office chores and do it on the cheap. But there are flaws.

The Brother MFC-J6920DW’s most unique feature is its sideways paper path—paper is inserted long-side first, rather than short-side first. This allows outstanding performance out of a relatively inexpensive ($300) color inkjet MFP (copy/fax/print/scan). However, this is the second sideways printer from Brother we've seen (the MFC-J4510DW being the other) that suffers banding issues, especially in draft mode. Also, Brother has yet to shake the stereotypical inkjet's faded look in color graphics printed to plain paper. This printer’s strongest points are speed and super-cheap inks, plus, it has great scanning capabilities. It’s worth considering for a medium-volume small office with modest graphics needs.

While my editor thinks the Brother MFC-J6920DW looks like an squared-off mushroom, I like the way it's larger on top than on the bottom. (Star Wars meets Gumby?) Of course, the reason for its bulk—a large, ledger/A3-sized scanner platen, which allows no-stitch scanning of larger documents, has a lot to do with my liking. There's also a 35-sheet automatic document feeder, and the MFC-J6920DWsports dual scanning elements so it can copy a two-sided document in a single pass. If you regularly scan both sides of the paper, that's the next best thing to a sheet-fed scanner.

Nearly everything is done via the 3.7-inch color touchscreen display with its intuitive menu structure. The ink cartridges are found under a flip-open panel to the right of the output tray. A similar door on the left houses the Memory Stick, Secure Digital, and PictBridge ports for direct printing and storing of scans. The MFC-J6920DW may be connected via Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or USB. Setup is easy, and the scanning software and drivers are top-notch.

Paper capacity is one of the MFC-J6920DW's strengths, with two 250-sheet paper cassettes on board. That's a good chunk of the unit's 1500-page recommended monthly volume (the official monthly duty cycle is 26,000 pages). Two-sided (duplex) printing is automatic, and in my hands-on, it didn't bog down printing as much as it does on other units.

One flaw I noted was that the MFC-J6920DW had difficulty picking up the last sheet of paper in the cassette. This even occurred when I was using photo paper. It's not the worst thing in the world having to put two sheets in the cassette instead of one, but it isn't confidence-inspiring. Also, after a last sheet mis-feed, the job wasn't automatically restarted, and the first subsequent page was a partial print.

Speed is excellent nearly throughout. Text and monochrome graphics print at 13.7 pages per minute on the Mac, and 12.8 pages per minute on the PC. Snapshots (4-inch by 6-inch) print at just over 4 ppm on plain paper and 1 minute, 1 second to print on glossy paper. A full-page photo printed on the Mac took a whopping 4 minutes, 14 seconds on the Mac, though in my hands-on with the PC, it was more around two minutes. Copies also arrived quickly at around 5 pages per minute.

Scans were decently quick at about 6 seconds for previewing, 30 seconds for 600 dpi, and about a minute at 1200 dpi.

The quality of the MFC-J6920DW's output is the usual Brother yin and yang. Text isn't the sharpest or blackest we've seen, but it's adequate even for correspondence. Photos printed on glossy stock are also good, though the colors are a bit over-saturated. Plain-paper graphics is where the quality dips. While okay for charts or spot color, there's a definite faded look to photos.

An unfortunate print-quality effect is banding between passes of the printhead. When printing in draft mode, there was a noticeable difference in the brightness between the right and left sides of the page. There was no evidence of banding at the default or best settings, but in our color copy, which has a lot of solid color, we noticed fine white lines running vertically down the page at consistent intervals.

Scan quality was decent, but color images showed harsh, dark shadows, and line art tended to be a little fuzzy or jaggy.

The Brother MFC-J6920DW's ink comes in XL and XXL sizes, which are referred to by Brother as high-yield and super high-yield. While this begs the question of what happened to regular-yield, the ink is cheap regardless. You have to search around for the 2400-page LC109BK XXL black cartridge: We found it for online $38, off from $40 retail, which makes for a very attractive 1.5 cents per page.

Per the numbers at Brother's site, the LC103 XL cartridges all last for 600 pages with the black costing $25, or 4.165 cents per page. The colors cost $15 apiece, or 2.5 cents per page so you wind up with an approximately 11.5 cent four-color page. The more capacious, 1200-page LC105 colors cost $23 each, which drops per-page color costs to about 5.75 cents. With the LC109BK, that would make for super-cheap, four-color page of about 7.25 cents.

The MFC-J6920DW is a bit rough around the edges, but it could serve many mainstream offices competently. It's especially suitable if you regularly scan large and two-sided documents.

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Review: Brother MFC-J870DW boasts NFC and many more features, but performance is just average

It’s hard to stand out as a $150 printer. Many, many models crowd this affordable price range. Brother pulls off quite a feat, therefore, with the $150 MFC-J870DW. It beats out every other competitor by being the first to offer near-field communication (NFC) as a standard feature. It also crams this product with nearly everything else you could possibly want in a consumer printer. Even better, the printer has reasonably priced inks and a two-year warranty.

Checking features off a list is just half the race, though. Performance counts, too. And there, the MFC-J870DW is just an also-ran.

NFC is a common feature in smartphones and tablets. You’ve likely seen commercials where people touch devices together to exchange a photo, or you’ve heard of handling payments by touching your phone to something. Frankly there’s not much more to NFC at this point, but Brother’s got the right idea in using it to ease printing from mobile devices. You don’t even need to touch your device to the printer—you can be several feet away (see video). You do, however, need to download Brother’s free iPrint & Scan app (available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone), and the printer and the device must be on the same wireless network. Other mobile-printing options include Apple AirPrint for iOS devices, Google Cloud Print, and Cortado’s workplace solution for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry devices.

In addition to NFC, this printer also boasts CD/DVD printing from a front-loading tray, ethernet and Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n, not 802.11ac) connectivity, and a 20-sheet photo tray as well as a 100-sheet letter/legal input tray. The control panel has a 2.7-inch diagonal touchscreen, plus a touch-sensitive control panel whose buttons light only when they’re needed.

BrotherBrother stuffs nearly every possible feature into the MFC-J870DW. Scanning two-sided documents is one of the few limitations.

The major limitation to the design is in the handling of two-sided documents. You can print in duplex, and you can turn a one-sided document into a two-sided copy. You cannot, however, scan duplex documents; the automatic feeder just can’t do it. If you have a two-sided document to copy or scan, you must scan each side manually on the letter/A4-size platen. This is an incredibly tedious task. Given all the other features in the MFC-J870DW I might seem petty to complain, but I think this limitation is going to effect everyday use more than the presence of CD/DVD printing or NFC.

Everyday performance matters, too, and in this respect, the MFC-J870DW is acceptable. On the PC platform, it printed pages with mostly plain text and a few monochrome graphics at a speed of 7.9 pages per minute (ppm). Our color-photo sample, a snapshot-sized photo on letter-size paper, took just 20 seconds (3 ppm) to print at default settings onto plain paper.

When we switched to photo paper and the Best-quality setting, however, it took more than five times as long—111 seconds—to print the same image. Copy speed for a plain-text document was slow (3.2 ppm). On the Mac platform, text printed faster—9.6 ppm—while a four-page PDF file printed at a sedate 1.6 ppm, and a full-page, high-resolution photo printed at typical 0.5 ppm. Scan speeds were faster than average.

Output quality was also acceptable. Plain text was more dark-charcoal than true black, and it was just slightly fuzzy around the edges—in other words, stereotypical inkjet quality. Color images printed on plain paper looked yellow and dotty. Switching to photo paper eliminated all flaws except for a persistent yellowish cast. Scans of line art and black text were very nice, but harsh shadows marred color scans.

Brother's prices for replacement ink cartridges for the MFC-J870DW are a little better than average—and that’s not guaranteed in this price range. The 300-page, standard-size cartridges include a $15 black (5 cents per page) and $10 cyan, magenta, and yellow (3.3 cents per color per page). The 600-page, high-yield cartridges are a $25 black (4.2 cents per page) and $15 cyan, magenta, and yellow (2.5 cents per color per page). A page with all four colors would cost a slightly cheaper than average 15 cents with the standard-size cartridges, and an economical 11.7 cents with the high-yield cartridges.

The Brother MFC-J870DW deserves credit for being progressive, adding NFC ahead of its competition—and arguably, ahead of customer readiness. The printer’s actual performance remains unremarkable, however, so you have to decide whether you want more features or better quality. The HP Officejet 6700 Premium offers better performance, if not quite every bell and whistle.

The daughter of a mechanical engineer, Melissa grew up playing with machine parts and still loves getting into the nuts and bolts of how things work. She is never happier than when she is on a factory tour.
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