Introduction and design
To innovate, printer manufacturers have experimented with different technologies to make their boxy designs stand out. Epson's EcoTank technology on the WorkForce ET-4550 (US-only $499, about £320, AU$678) makes high volume printing easy with large ink tanks that don't need to be replaced as frequently, and HP promises fast print speeds with PageWide, a technology that speeds up printing with nozzles that cover the width of the page.
Brother is taking a more moderate approach with its Business Smart Pro series, and the Brother MFC-J6925DW ($309, £205, AU$428) aims to deliver a solid balance between print quality, cost and speed.
As a printer capable of handling wide format A3 paper sizes, the MFC-J6925DW competes most closely against Epson's WorkForce WF-7610 ($150, £99, AU$207), a printer that can handle 11 x 17-inch prints. What sets the MFC-J6925DW apart from the competition is Brother's INKvestment cartridges, a system that deliver quality, affordable prints with low up-front replacement cartridge costs.
With INKvestment cartridges, Brother delivers lower per-page print costs without requiring users to purchase expensive high capacity or high yield cartridges, making it more cost effective than HP's OfficeJet Pro X 576DW ($354, £232, AU$497).
Design
Brother may be one of the first companies to resolve a pain point with printer designs, achieving a frustration-free package design that doesn't require the an excessive amount of tape and plastic to protect the printer during transport.
All you'll need to do is lift the 36.4-pound (16.5kg) printer from out of its box and set it on a flat surface to get started.
Measuring 21.8 x 17.0 x 12.2 inches (55.3 x 43.2 x 31cm), the MFC-J6925DW feels substantial, but it shares similar weight and dimensions to other wide format printers, like the Epson WF-7610. The MFC-J6925DW is 4.8 pounds (2.2kg) lighter than the Epson, and it's more compact. The Epson is 0.5 inches (1.3cm) wider, 2.1 inches (5.3cm) deeper and 1.2 inches (3cm) taller in height than the Brother.
Unlike the all-black Epson, the MFC-J6925DW comes in a matte off-white finish with black accents.
At the front, there is an articulating 3.7-inch (9.4cm) touch panel, with a touchscreen and a touch-sensitive number pad. The touchscreen supports swipe gestures, making it easy to move between different menu screens.
The all-touch interface along with the angular line design and a trapezoidal cube body give the MFC-J6925DW its modern aesthetic, which looks less imposing than the boxy Epson. However, I preferred having access to physical buttons on the number pad on the Epson.
To the left of the touchscreen, a USB port and SD card slot are concealed behind a cover. Once you pull down the lid, you can access content on your removable media to print without having to connect a laptop or smartphone. The cover helps to protect the printer's clean lines, but can be cumbersome if you're frequently printing from or scanning to removable media.
The MFC-J6925DW ships with four ink cartridges for black, cyan, yellow and magenta. The cartridges load into a compartment on the right side of the printer that's accessible when the cover is removed.
At the front, users will have access to two paper trays. Each tray can accommodate up to 250 sheets of A3 size paper, allowing users to print 11 x 17-inch jobs. The dual-tray design gives the MFC-J6925DW more flexibility than its rivals. This means that users can now have two smaller, dedicated trays for two different paper sizes.
Additionally, there is a top-loading 50-sheet manual paper feeder on the rear of the printer, bringing the overall sheet capacity to 550 sheets if you max out all the paper trays.
At the top, you'll find the flat-bed scanner and automatic document feeder (ADF). The 35-sheet, single-pass duplex ADF is concealed behind a flip-out cover, designed to preserve the printer's angular aesthetics. Once the cover opens, it serves as a support to hold larger paper originals for scanning, copying and faxing.
At the rear, you'll find a permanently affixed power cable and a USB port with a clever cable management design to keep things tidy.
Performance, specifications and costs
After I connected the power source and installed the cartridges and paper, the MFC-J6925DW printed a test sheet. Once the print quality is confirmed, the setup process will continue.
You'll be able to set different paper sizes for each of the paper trays, which is done via the touchscreen. The touchscreen is easy to use, and there is an audible click whenever an input is made. The setup process takes only a few minutes, and it's much quicker than on competing HP and Epson printers, which require up to 20 minutes for extensive first-time printhead calibrations.
The Brother MFC-J6925DW comes with built-in Wi-Fi support, so you'll be able to connect the printer to your local network. Network connectivity extends the functionality of the printer, allowing you to print from Android and iOS mobile devices, scan directly to your cloud storage service and download Brother templates to print documents, like calendar templates, forms and lined paper for note-taking.
The touchscreen adds versatility to the MFC-J6925DW. The UI is easy to navigate, and you can save custom print settings and configurations as shortcuts.
Printer specifications
Print speed: 22 black ppm; 20 ppm color
Print resolution: 6000 x 1200 dpi optimized dpi
Paper sizes: Up to A3 or ledger
Paper capacity: Tray 1: 250 sheets; Tray 2: 250 sheets; Manual: 50 sheets
Dimensions: 21.8 x 17.0 x 12.2 inches (W x D x H)
Weight: 36.4 pounds
Print performance
The Brother MFC-J6925DW is a fast printer that delivers great print quality. Brother claims there is zero delay in getting the first page out, and I found that to be true. It took a second or two to start printing the first page, and letter-size prints take a few seconds to print.
Print speed is rated at up to 22 pages per minute in black-and-white mode and 20 pages per minute in color mode, and my results matched Brother's claims with around 19 pages in a minute. These speeds are faster than the Epson WorkForce WF-7610's speeds of 18 pages per minute for black-and-white, and the MFC-J6925DW prints twice as fast as the Epson in color.
If you're willing to sacrifice a little bit of print quality for faster speeds, you can use Fast Mode. Photos will lose the rich saturation in regular mode, but you'll be able to print black-and-white documents at up to 35 pages per minute and color documents at 27 pages per minute.
Photos look surprisingly sharp and detailed for an office printer, especially when using photo paper. Photographers can bypass connecting a PC or Mac when printing photos. You can scan to a USB flash drive or print from an SD card or flash drive. Additionally, smartphone photographers and tablet owners can print directly from their mobile devices with AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Mopria, Brother iPrint&Scan, and Wi-Fi Direct. Smartphone users can also connect to the printer with NFC.
Maximum resolution on the MFC-J6925DW is 6000 x 1200 dpi. For offices working with graphic files, the biggest downside the MFC-J6925DW is that borderless printing is only available on smaller formats, and you can't print borderless A3-sized photos. The Epson WorkForce WF-7610 is capable of delivering borderless prints in sizes up to 13 x 19 inches.
Print costs
Like Epson's EcoTank technology, the Brother's INKvestment system is designed to not only lower print costs, but also reduce your up-front investment every time you need to order new cartridges.
Brother's black ink cartridge is priced at $25 (£16, AU$34), while the color cartridges are less than $15 (£10, AU$20) each. You can make up to 2,400 black-and-white prints using the black cartridge, and each color cartridge is good for 1,200 prints. To replace a set of cartridges, your ink investment will be less than $70 (£46, AU$96).
With these yields, print costs average one cent for black-and-white prints and five cents for color prints. These costs are on par with the HP Officejet Pro X576dw, a bulkier workstation-class inkjet printer, but to achieve this efficiency on HP's unit, you'll have to spend $119 (£79, AU$164) on each high capacity cartridge, placing your ink investment at $476 (£316, AU$659) for a four-cartridge system. However, with offices that print a lot, the HP's investment may be worth it given that it's capable of extremely fast print speeds, up to 70 images per minute in fast mode.
This means that the replacement cartridge cost for the MFC-J6925DW is one-seventh that of the OfficeJet Pro X576dw.
Epson color ink bottles are priced at $12 (£8, AU$16) each, and the black ink bottle costs $19 (£12, AU$26), placing your EcoTank ink investment at $58 (£38, AU$80). At this pricing, color prints are roughly one cent each, making the Epson the most affordable model.
However, we found print speeds of the WorkForce ET-4550 to be too slow compared to competing printers, which could make the printer ill-suited for high volume print jobs despite the high capacity EcoTank ink design. With black-and-white jobs, the WorkForce prints nine fewer pages each minute than the MFC-J6925DW.
Scanning and copying
Scanning and copying speeds on the MFC-J6925DW are on par with the A3 WorkForce WF-7610. The single-pass duplex ADF scanner is capable of copying color documents at nine pages per minute and black-and-white documents at 12 pages per minute. However, you'll likely be limited by the 35-sheet capacity of the ADF for larger scan jobs.
With internet connectivity, scans can be uploaded directly to services like Google Drive, Evernote and Evernote Business, Dropbox, and OneNote.
Brother's Cloud Apps add additional value to businesses that need to digitize paper documents. For example, you can use the Scan to Office document to convert a hard copy document into an editable Microsoft Word document. You can use the Outline and Remove feature to scan a document and remove red ink in the digital copy.
Copies can be enlarged or reduced in 1% increments between 25% and 400%.
Verdict
If you need print sizes up to 11 x 17-inch, few printers can offer the versatility of the Brother MFC-J6925DW business inkjet. On paper, the MFC-J6925DW's feature may seem on par with competing multifunctions, but the standout feature is that Brother has managed to create a printer that offers a balance of speed, quality and cost.
Ironically, as a printer, the scanner function will help businesses bridge the digital divide with smart tools that will help digitize hard copies. While the printer is capable of creating affordable, great quality prints, the scanner will help business users digitize documents and move towards a paperless office.
We liked
Brother delivered a well-rounded printer in the MFC-J6925DW. For businesses looking to digitize their hard copies, Brother's Cloud Apps provide useful tools to simplify scanning. These tools, for example, can remove red ink from scanned documents or parse text into an editable Word document without the need to connect a PC or buy expensive software.
Dual paper trays and a manual paper tray make the MFC-J6925DW versatile at handling print jobs with different paper sizes, with support for up to 11 x 17-inch prints.
In addition to delivering reasonable per-page print costs, good print speeds and great quality prints, replacement ink cartridges are also very affordable.
We disliked
If you don't need the 11 x 17-inch print and scan capabilities, a standard letter-size MFP will likely come in a more compact package and at a more affordable price. Despite support for A3 or ledger paper size, the MFC-J6925DW, unfortunately, isn't able to print borderless photos, which means your overall print area will be reduced.
Final verdict
Even though the MFC-J6925DW doesn't deliver the best quality prints or the fastest print speeds, the multifunction printer offers a nice balance between cost, quality and speed. As an office printer, it is more than capable of handling color and black-and-white prints, and support for wide format paper will benefit those who need to print larger graphic projects, newsletters and photos.
Where the MFC-J6925DW shines is its cloud-connected software. Even though rival printers from Canon, Epson and HP support printing from cloud apps and scanning to the cloud, the MFC-J6925DW goes a step further in helping businesses digitize hard copies with innovative OCR features. These include removing red ink from originals in the scanning process, scanning hard copies as editable Microsoft Office documents and the ability to scan portions of pages to digitize relevant bits of notes.
For frugal businesses that do not want to make high up-front investments in replacement cartridges, Brother's INKvestment technology makes cartridge replacements affordable. Additionally, there is also long-term savings with low per-page print cost.
The Brother MFC-J6925DW is a versatile, cost-effective multifunction printer with tools designed for businesses that are looking to migrate to a digital workflow.
The post Review: Brother MFC-J6925DW appeared first on Nexttac Technology.