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: Canon Pixma MG4220 a capable home-office MFP with pricey ink

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them, studied music at Julliard, and power mods his car for kicks.
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The $130 Canon Pixma MG4220 color inkjet multifunction will easily handle the needs of a home office, but its ink costs are higher than average, and they're ludicrously expensive if you make the mistake of purchasing the low-capacity PG-240 and CL-241 cartridges. On the other hand, the unit provides nice output, makes quick work of business documents and copies, and automatically duplexes—a nice feature set for the price.

The Pixma MG4220 is easy to set up via Wi-Fi or USB. The control panel, unfortunately, is still not so simple to use. On this model, Canon continues its practice of positioning three buttons under the LCD (a 2.5-incher on the Pixma MG4220) to perform certain actions, rather than letting you use the perfectly adequate four-way cursor control and OK button. Hopping back and forth among all the buttons is both pointless and aggravating. Comparatively, the software is a model of efficiency, and the new quick menu for common tasks is easy on the eye. The MFP provides full support for scanning, copying, and Web printing.

The Pixma MG4220's 100-sheet input tray and 50-sheet output tray make it strictly a low-volume printer. The fact that it will automatically refeed the paper to print on the other side (automatic duplexing, in other words) is a boon. You'll find no automatic document feeder for the letter/A4-size scanner on the top of the Pixma MG4220, but the lid telescopes a full inch to accept thicker materials. The MFP's card slot supports direct photo printing from SD Card and Memory Stick media.

Judging from our tests, the Pixma MG4220 is easily fast enough for a home office when printing and copying business documents. Monochrome pages exited at about 6.8 pages per minute on the PC and 6.6 ppm on the Mac, while copies arrived at a sprightly 6.4 ppm. Photos, on the other hand, printed rather slowly. Snapshot-size (4-by-6-inch) photos printed at a little under 3 ppm to plain paper, but at a rate of only about 0.6 ppm on glossy paper. Full-page color photos rendered to glossy paper at a rate of 0.3 ppm, about average for an entry-level inkjet MFP.

The output from the Pixma MG4220 is good, but typical current-generation Canon. At default settings, text is sharp and black, monochrome graphics have a slight purple tint, and plain-paper color graphics could be a tad darker and use more contrast. At the printer's best setting, text is good enough for business documents, though extremely slow to arrive compared with default settings. Color photos look very nice, with our only minor complaint being the slight orange tint. Said tint, however, does give the pictures a friendly, warm vibe.

Now for the bad news. Ink costs for the MG4220 are high in general, but what you absolutely do not want to do is purchase the 180-page PG-240 black cartridge or CL-241 unified color cartridge (the same kinds of cartridges that also ship with the unit): At 10.6 cents per page for black and 13.9 cents per page for color, their costs are exorbitant. The story gets better—slightly—from there. The 300-page XL black costs $21, or 7.0 cents per page, and the 600-page XXL black costs $38, or 6.3 cents per page.

The XL unified color cartridge is more affordable: At $30 for 400 pages, you pay 7.5 cents per page for all three colors. That assumes usage similar to the industry standard employed to measure page yield. If you use a lot more of any one color, you’ll need to replace the entire cartridge even if plenty of ink remains for the other colors. A four-color page printed with the XL color cartridge and the XXL black cartridge costs a slightly lower-than-average 13.8 cents.

Melissa Riofrio

The Canon Pixma MG4220 has decent output and sufficient speed for most home offices, and is one of the cheaper MFPs with automatic duplexing. However, you do have alternatives. The HP Photosmart 5520 has cheaper inks, and the Brother MFC-J625DW has an automatic document feeder as well.

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Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A Review: Ultralight, Pretty, and Capable

The new Asux Zenbook UX31A looks like the old UX31E, with a brushed, bronze-tinted, solid aluminum shell that looks slightly dangerous and angular. The weight remains the same, at 3 pounds and an ounce. But our test model arrived with a gorgeous, 1080p IPS (in-plane switching) display and an Ivy Bridge processor, boosting both performance and display quality. Price (as of 08/09/2012) is about $1449.

Points of Improvement

In addition to updating its UX31 Zenbook line with Ivy Bridge CPUs, Asus is trying to bring consistency to its touchpad pointing experience. PCWorld’s review of the earlier Zenbook UX31E was mostly favorable, but the review said that the touchpad wasn’t optimal. One issue that the company itself noted was that it sourced touchpads from two different vendors, and it was a crapshoot as to which one you’d get when you bought a Zenbook.

The UX31A rectifies that, using the same brand and model of touchpad in all systems. Drivers have been tuned a bit as well, and the overall touchpad experience is better. Palm detection has improved, though the cursor still has a slight tendency to overshoot when you use your finger to move it. Multitouch gestures and tap-to-click no longer have excessive lag, either.

You can still get the Zenbook with a 1600 by 900 pixel display, but it’s worth spending a few dollars more for the 1920 by 1080 pixel display, based on IPS technology. The one downside: all those pixels crammed into a 13.3-inch display may make you want to adjust the display's scaling for fonts to improve readability. The 1080p display includes an antiglare filter, a welcome standout in a sea of glossy, too-reflective panels.

Sound quality through the built-in speakers, codeveloped by Bang & Olufsen, is mostly accurate, though some acoustic classical material sounded a touch bright. As with most systems with tiny speakers, the Zenbook lacks any real bass content—you’ll want external speakers or headphones if you’re looking for more boom in your audio.

Performance

Our Zenbook review unit included the speedy Core i7-3517u CPU, supporting four software threads with two cores, and 4MB of L3 cache. As with most Ultrabooks, the system includes 4GB of RAM, some of which needs to be allocated to the integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics processor.

Overall performance is on a par with the similar Acer Aspire S5, posting an 82 on PCWorld’s combined assessment.

The Acer still ekes out a higher Worldbench 7 score, posting a startlingly high 195, compared with the Zenbook’s 150.

The Asus takes 20.1 seconds to start up from a cold boot, slightly slower than the average of 16.3 seconds for recently reviewed Ultrabooks, despite the built-in, 256GB solid-state drive. However, overall storage performance is excellent, outpacing all competitors.

As you might expect, gaming performance is limited, since the Zenbook relies on Intel’s HD 4000 integrated GPU. It’s an improvement over past Intel graphics efforts, but no replacement for a discrete graphics chip. With demanding games, you’ll need to dial down the graphics settings for playable frame rates.

In the end, Asus essentially maintains performance parity with the similarly priced Acer Aspire S5, but includes a better display.

Battery life is an excellent 6 hours, 24 minutes, falling just short of Toshiba’s larger U845W and outpacing the rest of the pack of recent Ultrabooks.

Ports and Connectivity

The Zenbook ships with two USB 3.0 ports, one on each side. This is only just acceptable, but the lack of additional USB ports is mitigated by built-in Bluetooth and an integrated SD card reader that supports the latest SDXC high-capacity cards. Other ports include a mini-VGA port and a micro HDMI connector for external display and projector connectivity, plus a combination microphone/headphone jack.

On the networking side, the Zenbook ships with the aforementioned Bluetooth (4.0) and dual-band 802.11n that even supports the older 802.11a standard, making the system suitable for corporate use. While it doesn’t include a built-in ethernet connector, Asus thoughtfully includes a USB-to-ethernet adapter.

The User Experience

The improved touchpad is certainly welcome, if not perfect. It’s a bit overly sensitive out of the box, but changing the settings has a marked impact, unlike the original Zenbook. Palm detection works well, so your hovering palm doesn’t send the cursor flying across the Windows desktop to be lost in a sea of icons.

Asus doesn’t include excessive bundleware, but it does load in Microsoft’s Windows Live software suite plus some useful utilities. The LCD panel's color balance can be tweaked using the Asus Splendid utility, but I’d suggest avoiding the “vivid” setting unless you like your color saturation particularly garish.

The keyboard disappoints a bit. While it’s fully backlit, the keys themselves are mostly flat, textureless, Chiclet-style keys. I found my fingers occasionally slipping off one key onto another while touch typing, and the tiny bumps on the F and J keys barely enough to help in finding the home row. All this is mitigated slightly by the physical size of the keys, which are suitably large.

The 1080p IPS panel offers excellent color fidelity, though it's just a touch on the muted side. With a little calibration, the Asus could be a useful system for on-the-go photo editing. Video playback is excellent, with no stuttering or pauses. Viewing angles are superb, as you’d expect with an IPS monitor.

Storage is a little problematic. As with past Zenbooks, Asus partitions the speedy solid-state drive into two nearly equal-size partitions, one for the OS, and another for data. This means you’re constantly juggling which drive to use. I would have much preferred having a single partition—256GB isn’t a vast amount of space by today’s standards, so splitting up the SSD in this fashion isn’t very useful.

Final Thoughts: Incremental Improvements Add Up

The Asus Zenbook UX31A represents an incremental evolution over the original UX31E, but the improvements are welcome. The Ivy Bridge CPU and high resolution panel finally realizes the potential of the sleek chassis. The touchpad is much improved, though the keyboard is the same flat, Chiclet style. The real star of the show, however, is the 1080p LCD display. Editing photos or viewing movies on the system is a real treat, and made better by the reasonably good built-in speakers.

The UX31A is not without quirks, like the oddly partitioned storage system. But overall, the new Zenbook represents a near-pinnacle of the Ultrabook design. It performs well, is super-slim and light, and looks fabulous.

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