Brother MFC-J1010DW
The MFC-J1010DW is a compact, do-it-all home office MFP, but it’s devoid of any flair
Brother’s impenetrable model numbers seem appropriate for its unexciting but capable home office MFPs. The grey MFC-J1010DW might sound dull as dishwasher parts, but it can print, scan, copy and fax, to which end it’s topped with a 20-sheet ADF. There’s automatic two-sided printing, along with manual support for two-sided copying; the ADF itself isn’t duplex. Add in Wi-Fi and a colour screen, and that’s not a bad spec for a little over £100.
This MFP is reasonably quick when printing black only, delivering 15.3ppm in our test, and spitting out an A4 copy in 13 seconds, or ten mono copies in a minute and a half. It’s much slower in colour, though, managing only 3.7ppm in our graphical test. It needed almost 30 seconds for a single colour photocopy, and ten pages took more than four minutes.
Happily, Brother has fitted the MFC-J1010DW with a rapid scanner, capable of capturing an A4 page at 300dpi in just 14 seconds. It also needed only 24 seconds to scan a 6 x 4in photo at 600dpi. Like many other Brother scanners we’ve tested, however, the results were only so-so: easily up to archival purposes, but lacking the sharpness and dynamic range of the best rivals. In particular, the MFC-J1010DW struggled to distinguish between darker shades.
While there’s little to criticise about this MFP’s print quality, there’s little to love either. Black text and mono photocopies were fine. Photos were good enough for occasional use, but this printer’s target market probably cares more about colour prints and copies on plain paper. Unfortunately, these lacked saturation, seeming dull compared to the best inkjet rivals.
Brother makes an XL range of cartridges for the MFC-J10101DW, each with a useful 500-page capacity. Despite this, mono costs work out at an unimpressive 2.9p per page, while each colour page costs 7.9p.
With a compact design, useful features and decent performance, this isn’t a bad MFP for a home office, especially if you need a fax. The MFC-J1010DW is affordable, too, so it’s a shame that it doesn’t offer the performance or results to surprise or delight.