Brother MFC-J6945DW Review

The Brother MFC-J6945DW is a light- to medium-duty wide-format all-in-one inkjet printer developed for small-office use. Like its predecessor, the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J6935DW, it can not only print but also copy, check, and fax tabloid-size pages, and it comes with a generous paper input capacity. The cherry on top is that it prints rather well and at a very sensible cost per web page. Every one of these rewards add up to an easy Editors' Choice for the MFC-J6945DW.

Brother MFC-J6945DW - brother.com

Brother MFC-J6945DW Review

Print with confidence with Brother Genuine Ink.

Brother Genuine Ink is engineered to work optimally with your Brother printer, ensuring smooth, reliable printing with vivid colors and sharp images. So you can print with confidence each time!

Bro Customer Support.

2-year restricted guarantee for peace of mind. For customer care, visit us at www.brother-usa.com/support.

Breathe freely with up to 1 year of ink in the box.

Experience absolutely uninterrupted, outstanding cost savings, and great convenience with up to one year of ink ‡, based on printing roughly 300 pages monthly, using only the cartridges offered in the box.

Revolutionary INKvestment Ink System.

Brother reengineered its ink cartridges to hold more ink and added an internal ink storage tank, delivering more pages of uninterrupted printing.

Publish with self-confidence using Page Gauge.

Help take the uncertainty out of when to change ink by using the special Brother Page Gauge ‡, a visual, numerical way to recognize how much ink you've used and how much ink you have remaining.

Flexible paper handling increases efficiency.

Print, copy, check, and fax approximately 11" x17". Two paper trays with a total capacity of 500 sheets help reduce refills and support up to 11" x 17" paper, plus a ledger-size scan glass. A multi-purpose tray that holds up to 100 sheets delivers included capability and lets you print on envelopes, cardstock, and various other media for varied printing requirements.

Engineered to supply effectiveness.

Conserves time with single-pass duplex (2-sided) copying and scanning through as much as 50 sheets

Printing as mobile as you are.

Publish wirelessly from your desktop, laptop, smartphone, and tablet ‡. For included comfort, use NFC "touch to link" to publish and scan without attaching to a network ‡.

User-friendly Cloud link.

Print-from and scan-to preferred cloud apps.

Link your means.

Functional connection alternatives with built-in wireless, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi Direct ® or link in your area to a single computer by means of a USB user interface.

Other Post: Brother MFC-J4710DW Review

A Wide-Format Stalwart

Measuring 14.9 by 22.6 by 18.8 inches (HWD) and weighing 53.1 pounds, the MFC-J6945DW is very close in size and weight to its predecessor, and is similar in dimensions to its closest rivals. 

The HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 Wide Format All-in-One, for example, is less than an inch larger in dimensions all around and weighs about 10 extra pounds less than the MFC-J6945DW, while Epson's WorkForce WF-7720 Wide Format All-in-One is slightly larger and weighs about 3 extra pounds less. 

Bear in mind, however, that the Epson design supports not only tabloid-size (11-by-17-inch) media but also super-tabloid (13-by-19-inch) paper.

The MFC-J6945DW's paper capacity, like its predecessor's, is a generous 600 sheets, split between two 250-sheet front cabinets and a 100-sheet multi-purpose tray on the back. All 3 auto-duplexing paper sources support up to tabloid-size sheets, as does the 50-sheet, single-pass, automated document feeder (ADF). 

It has an optimal month-to-month task cycle of up to 30,000 pages, with an advised monthly print volume of 2,000 web pages. Its paper capacity and duty cycle figures beat all of its competitors discussed below.

Generous Connections

The MFC-J6945DW's common interfaces are Ethernet, near-field communication (NFC), USB 2.0, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct. NFC and Wi-Fi Direct are peer-to-peer network protocols for connecting mobile phones to a printer without either device being connected to an intermediary network or router. 

Mobile connection, consisting of these 2 peer-to-peer procedures, is comprehensive. Third-party solutions include Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, and Mopria, or you can connect your smartphones directly to the printer with Brother's iPrint & Scan.

Brother Web Connect cloud solutions enable you to connect directly to both the individual and organizational versions of Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, OneDrive, and OneNote. 

Other Brother cloud applications include Office Print (for printing from mobile devices and 365 versions of Microsoft Office), Scan to Office (for scanning to mobile and online versions of Microsoft Office), Scan to Mobile, Cloud Secure Print, and Easy Scan to Email. 

And if all that is insufficient, you can always go old-school and scan to and print from a USB thumb drive through the port on the left side of the framework.

Brother MFC-J4710DW Review

As the premium printer in Brother's Business Smart collection, the Brother MFC-J4710DW uses everything you'll find in the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J4610DW and more. That equates to begin with, the very same 400-sheet capacity for letter-size paper and a manual feed for up to tabloid dimensions (11 by 17 inches), among other features, and then adds a bigger touch display, duplex scanning, and the capacity to load up to 250 sheets of tabloid-size paper in one of its trays. The combination makes it a simple Editors' Choice pick for mini and tiny workplaces.

Brother MFC-J4710DW - brother.com

Brother MFC-J4710DW Review

What every model in the business Smart multifunction printer (MFP) series has in common is that it can print on tabloid-size paper fed via a manual-feed port. For most models, the hand-operated feed is the only option for larger-than-letter-size printing, limiting how much you can publish at tabloid dimensions (or legal size, for that matter) without it becoming an irritating task.

The capacity to place tabloid-size paper in one of the MFC-J4710DW's two cabinets removes that concern. It likewise turns the printer into a true tabloid-size MFP, in much the same course as the Brother MFC-J6510DW and the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J6710DW. Nonetheless, compared with those printers, it also has the advantage of being a whole lot smaller. 

Set the drawer to tabloid-size paper, and it sticks out from the printer, adding 14.9 inches to the printer's depth. Nevertheless, collapse the drawer for letter-size paper, and the printer is just 10.0 by 18.9 by 11.4 inches (HWD).

Basics

If you ignore the large-capacity tray, the MFC-J4710DW is essentially the same as the Brother MFC-J4610DW in most other respects. It can print and fax from and to a computer system, including over a network; it can work as a standalone photocopier and fax machine; it can print directly from a PictBridge-enabled electronic camera; and it can print from and scan to an SD card or USB memory stick. It will additionally let you preview documents on a flash memory card or USB drive before printing, utilizing a 3.7-inch color touch screen rather than the 1.8-inch display on its less expensive near-double.

The two printers likewise share the same mobile printing features, including cloud printing, printing from a smartphone or tablet over Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct, so you can connect to a mobile device even if the printer isn't on a network with an access point. 

To say that the paper capacity for printing is a strong point is an understatement. In addition to the 400-sheet capacity, it includes a 150-sheet cabinet for letter-size paper and a 250-sheet cabinet for paper up to tabloid size, an integrated duplexer (for printing on both sides of a page), and the manual feed slot in the back that I've already discussed.

Other Post: Epson ET-5850 Review

The paper drawers feed into the printer with the long side of letter-size paper facing the front, so it feeds out the long side first. Given that layout, it's very little of a leap to likewise let you feed tabloid-size paper via the hands-on feed slot with the 11-inch side as the leading side, or to extend the one paper cabinet, making it big enough to hold tabloid-size paper, with the 11-inch side as the leading edge entering into the printer.

For scanning, the MFC-J4710DW offers both a letter-size flatbed and a 20-page automatic file feeder (ADF). Similar to the majority of office-oriented MFPs, the ADF allows you to scan up to legal-size web pages. More crucially, however, unlike the scanners on most affordable MFPs, the MFC-J4710DW scanner can scan in duplex, which means scanning both sides of a page concurrently.

If you handle duplex files frequently, duplex scanning is a crucial feature. Many cost-effective MFPs that can scan paired pages make use of duplexing ADFs, not duplexing scanners. The difference is that a duplexing ADF needs to scan one side, flip the web page over, and scan the other side, which takes much longer than scanning both sides at once. That's faster than doing it by hand, but it's no match for actually scanning in duplex.

As you would expect, the ability to both scan and print in duplex lets you duplicate both single- and double-sided originals to your selection of single- or double-sided copies. You can also check for simplex (one-sided) or duplex printing for faxing and copying.

Epson ET-5850 Review

The Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5850 is an all-in-one printer made to produce 3,000 to 4,000 pages monthly in today's busy tiny and midsize workplaces and workgroups. A letter- and legal-size version of the wide-format Editors' Choice EcoTank Pro ET-16650, the ET-5850's high input capacity, relatively high quantity ratings, exceptional print quality, reduced running costs, and a strong lineup of efficiency and comfort features make it a shoo-in as our existing preferred midrange color AIO printer. 

Epson ET-5850 - epson.com

Epson ET-5850 Review

EcoTank Pro: Power- and Productivity-Packed

Presently, Epson has 4 EcoTank Pro offerings, including the ET-16650 discussed above and a somewhat less-endowed (in terms of shade print and copy speeds) wide-format design, the ET-16600. The letter- and legal-size versions are the ET-5850 tested below and the ET-5880, which adds HP Printer Command Language (PCL) and Adobe PostScript page description language (PDL) assistance.

PCL and PostScript are, certainly, the page description languages utilized in numerous typesetting, printing, posting, and graphics layout environments, and PostScript is additionally the native language of Adobe's advanced graphics layout software application, Illustrator, along with the code Adobe Acrobat makes use of to "attract" or define PDF web pages.

If you plan to use your in-house printer for prepress evidence or brief runs of pamphlets and other marketing products, spending the extra $50 for PCL and PostScript emulation is a good idea. Besides, while writing this, I discovered the ET-5880 for sale at Epson's online store and somewhere else for $50 less than the ET-5850.

Other Post: HP OfficeJet 8022 Review

All the same, given its slim construction of 16.7 by 19.7 by 18.1 inches (HWD) and neat 39.2 pounds, the EcoTank Pro ET-5850 packs a lot of wallop into a relatively tiny footprint compared to competing inkjet and midrange color laser AIOs. It's close in dimension, for example, to Brother's MFC-J5945DW, a competing midrange color inkjet AIO, and about 21 pounds lighter than Lexmark's MC2535adwe, a medium-volume color laser AIO that's an additional PCMag leading pick.

If smaller and lighter is what you require, however, you might consider stepping down to a leaner all-in-one, such as HP's OfficeJet Pro 9015, yet another PCMag Editors' Choice. At the same time, it allows you to go back to the ET-5850 and its established features etablished —starting with its 50-page, single-pass, automatic duplexing (ADF) for sending out two-sided, multi-page files to the scanner. "Single-pass" suggests that the ADF releases two sensing units, one for each side of the web page, making it efficient at capturing both sides simultaneously.

The majority of competing versions, including those mentioned here so far, featured auto-duplexing ADFs. Some, such as the OfficeJet Pro 9015 with its 35-sheet feeder, hold fewer originals. In contrast, others, such as the Lexmark I simply stated, included reverse-duplexing ADFs (with simply one sensing unit, so the tool processes one side, then reverses and turns the paper to refine the other).

Reverse-duplexing isn't as fast or efficient as single-pass, yet over time they both finish the job. Regardless, setup, making copies, scanning to network and cloud storage, configuring security options, producing and publishing usage reports, and more are all handled from the ET-5850's spacious 4.3-inch shade touch-screen control panel.

As you can see above, the display screen occupies the entire panel. You likewise obtain, as you do with any business-oriented AIO these days, an onboard server that provides access to all operational and configuration tasks from practically any desktop, laptop, or mobile web browser.

Like the other EcoTank Pro AIOs, the ET-5850's paper capacity is 550 sheets from 3 different sources —2 250-sheet cassettes and a 50-sheet multipurpose tray that lifts up and out from the rear of the equipment, as shown in the picture below.

The HP 9015 holds only 250 sheets from a single input source, as does the Lexmark MC2535adwe, though the latter also has a one-sheet override tray and can be expanded to a total capacity of 1,451 sheets. The Brother MFC-J5945DW holds 600 sheets from three sources, and the Epson WF-C5790 supports 330 sheets (expandable to 830) from two input trays.

Like the other three EcoTank Pros, the ET-5850's maximum month-to-month duty cycle is 66,000 pages, with an advised month-to-month print volume of 3,300 pages — among the highest among the other midrange color AIOs discussed here. The Lexmark, at 85,000 maximum and 8,500 advised, is the greatest, and the OfficeJet Pro 9015, with a 25,000-print duty cycle and 2,500-page advised quantity, is the most affordable.