Brother MFC-J5730DW

BEHIND THE CURVEBALL.

ANYONE WHO’S EVER had a printer go on the fritz will relate to what a drain this can be on office productivity. While the cryptic one-line error codes are thankfully a thing of the past, there are still a battery of issues that can arise, which can be especially problematic for a small business that may not have a dedicated IT person on staff.

This was something we experienced first-hand with the MFCJ5730DW. Our initial test runs had it taking a whopping 12 minutes to print a 10-page black-and-white document (or 0.85 pages per minute) and reproducing weird shades for coloured elements. It wasn’t smart enough to know it wasn’t performing to spec, but after quick trip to the maintenance settings and printing out some test pages, it was able to walk us through the troubleshooting process and fix the issue (which turned out to be misaligned printer heads).

With that sorted, print time whittled down to a much faster 12 pages per minute for black and 5.5 pages per minute for colour — the best results of all the printers on test. Scanning and copying times were more run of the mill, with the latter in particular taking a cruisey 3.1 pages per minute. Printing costs are the on the more expensive end of the spectrum at 22c per page.

While it’s only a few months old, the MFC-J5730SDW already looks and feels quite dated, with its non-touch display, retro-looking user interface, and no support for cloud services. Design-wise, it has a boxy yet functional-looking design. Our main complaint is the build quality; the various trays are incredibly rattly, and there’s frequently that uneasy feeling that we may have accidentally broken something every time we replace the paper.