Brother MFC-J5945DW
Brother’s MFC-J5945DW is both a fast and capable A3 printer – and the running costs are low
SCORE PRICE £266 (£319 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk
If your home office has room for an A3-capable device, Brother’s MFC-J5945DW offers plenty of features. In its base are two, 250-sheet paper trays and at the back there’s a 100-sheet input – all accept A3 paper, although not A3+. On top there’s an A4-only scanner, a 50-sheet ADF capable of scanning both sides of a document in a single pass, and a big, user-friendly touchscreen. You can connect it to a wired or wireless network, but the one-off, ten-minute ink-priming process comes before the Wi-Fi setup screen, so you can’t crack on with installing PC software while you wait.
This is a seriously quick inkjet, churning out black text at 20ppm and
complex colour graphics at 10.2ppm. Although it can’t duplex print on A3, it printed both sides of colour A4 pages at 5ppm. Scan speeds were similarly breakneck, with only our 1,200dpi 10 x 15cm photo scan needing over ten seconds – it was still fast at 25 seconds. Using the ADF, a ten-page copy completed in under a minute whether in black or colour, while our 20-side, duplex colour copy reached 8.2ppm.
There’s more good news when it comes to running costs. Using Brother’s 5,000-page XL cartridges, each page of mixed text and graphics works out at about 3.5p, with black ink accounting for less than a penny of the total.
Unfortunately, the MFC-J5945DW isn’t perfect. Black text was bold and crisp, and graphics free of any obvious inkjet artefacts, but colour prints were a little washed out compared to the best office competitors. Scans were a touch aquatic looking and plenty of detail was lost from the darkest shades of an original – we couldn’t distinguish the six murkiest shades in our colour target. We found the printer’s paper handling less than ideal, particularly the output tray, which needs to be either extended for A3 or half-closed for A4 to keep things tidy – which is a bit of an inconvenience.
The MFC-J5945DW faces cheaper competitors such as Epson’s WorkForce WF-7710DWF ( pcpro.
link/298work), which generally has it beaten for quality and flexibility. However, if you need a fast A3capable MFP with low running costs, this is still a sensible choice.