Brother DCP-J1200W
A stripped-back home office all-in-one that’s cheap to run thanks to its highcapacity cartridges
PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from ryman.co.uk
As a general rule, the cheaper the printer, the more expensive it is to run. However, this entrylevel business all-in-one is compatible with Brother’s high-capacity cartridges, which achieve the lowest per-page print costs of any cartridge-based inkjet. Brother refuses to join the refillable ink tank revolution, insisting that larger cartridges are more convenient than bottled ink, and its awkwardly named INKvestment Tank system offers a cartridge-based alternative.
This is Brother’s smallest INKvestment model, and I must immediately point out that it isn’t compatible with the super-high-yield INKvestment cartridges that give up to 5,000 pages per cartridge. There’s no LCD, automatic document feeder or auto duplex mode, but it does promise high-quality colour printing and scanning, and comes with enough ink in the box for 720 black-and-white pages or 480 colour pages.
It’s a fraction bigger than many A4 all-in-one devices because the cartridge compartment is larger and deeper than normal. It’s still quite compact, though, and its uncluttered off-white casing blend into the background more successfully than Brother’s other office inkjets.
The unusually large cartridges are housed behind a front flap where the printer bulges slightly on the right-hand side. Printed pages are ejected through the front slot, and below this is the main (and only) paper tray, which is capable of holding 150 sheets of A4 paper. Note the lack of a multifunction tray.
The Brother DCP-J1200W can print, scan and copy, but not fax.
Being at the bottom of the range, it doesn’t have many other features; with no USB host port, you can forget about scanning straight to a flash drive. There’s no Ethernet port either, but Wi-Fi is built in, with Wireless Connect, AirPrint, Mopria and Brother Mobile Connect all catered for.
During setup (which takes around ten minutes), the printer trots out a test page so you can check the inkjet no zzle alignment. Our sample was alig ned perfectly from the box. In da ily operation, it isn’t as easy to use as an all- in-one with a touc hscreen interface, but the control panel is nice and simple and the companion Brother Mobile Connect app excellent. For example, it makes the task of adding the printer to your Wi-Fi network painless. Simply press the Wi-Fi button on the printer and then search for its IP address using your mobile and let the app handle the rest.
The most notable missing feature is auto duplex mode. You can manually duplex, but it’s a pain. For a multipage document you have to print the odd pages first, then reload the pages, ensuring you have them the right way around, and in the correct order, so you can print the even pages on the reverse. I’m willing to bet you won’t get it right the first time. An auto duplex version of this model exists worldwide (the Brother DCP-J1200DW), but isn’t yet on sale in the UK.
The specification sheet for the DCP-J1200W has highs and lows. It can print on a range of blank media including envelopes, glossy photo paper and A4 paper up to 220g/m2 in weight. However, there’s room for only 150 sheets of paper in the main tray and 50 in the out tray before pages start spilling over. Its print speed is slow, as is usually the case with cheaper inkjets. Brother claims 16 pages per minute in mono mode and 6ppm in colour, and while it matched the mono speed in our tests, colour pages were a fraction slower.
Still, it performed without a hitch during testing, with no smudges, misprints or paper jams, and print quality is excellent for the price. Plain text documents emerged crisp and dark without any smearing, even at very small point sizes. It’s a match for
a laser printer for quality, even if it falls some way behind for speed.
Brother’s dye-based CMY inks
aren’t the brightest, but they yield colourful documents with wellbalanced and consistent shading.
They also work rather well on glossy photo paper to produce pleasant photographs. It can’t compete with the vivid images of a more expensive photo printer, but it’s impressive for a business-oriented model. Both the scan and print resolutions, meanwhile, offer enough dots per inch to ensure accurate photocopies.
In summary, then, this is a multifunction printer that gives pleasing results, so long as you’re not in a hurry.
The final point in its favour is running costs. When the starter cartridges run out, you can buy high-yield replacements that will give you 750 colour pages and cost around £15.50 per colour cartridge. This works out at around 2.2p per mono page and 6.8p per colour page, which is great for a cartridge-based inkjet. The lack of a multipurpose tray, Ethernet port, USB host port and touchscreen are inconvenient, but it’s the inability to auto duplex that will be a deal-breaker for some. It also prints slowly, but if you’re in no rush and you don’t mind turning over each page by hand to print the other side, you’ll be rewarded with decent print quality at a decent price.
SPECIFICATIONS
6,000 x 1,200dpi inkjet MFP four cartridges (CMYK) 1,200 x 2,400dpi scanner
150-sheet input tray 802.11n Wi-Fi USB-B data port 435 x 359 x 161mm (WDH) 6.5kg
recommended 50 to 1,000 pages monthly volume 1yr limited warranty
“It performed without a hitch during testing, with no smudges, misprints or paper jams, and print quality is excellent for the price”