Brother DCP-J925DW review

Brother’s range of compact inkjet MFPs may have sprouted new features over the years, but their squat shape has remained instantly recognisable. That said, we did a bit of a double-take after unpacking the DCP-J925DW; while the shape and layout are familiar, it’s made from higher quality plastics than we’ve come to expect. The body is textured black plastic, while the top and control panel are glossy and livened up with a swirly pattern. The overall effect is a subtle but welcome, and helps to bring the printer up to date.

The DCP-J925DW is positioned at the higher end of the range, and comes with wired and wireless networking but no fax. The printer has automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, and the scanner has a 20-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for multi-page jobs. Like the HP Envy reviewed opposite, control is via a colour touchscreen. Although the display isn’t quite as crisp as the HP printer’s, it’s far more responsive, making the Brother MFP as a whole more straightforward to use.

Brother’s MFL-Pro software suite includes print drivers that are particularly easy to use. All the key print settings are gathered into the initial print properties dialogue, with more advanced settings tidied away where they’re easy to find if needed. The TWAIN interface for scanning is similarly simple and effective, with the exception that the auto-crop feature isn’t available during a preview scan: you have to trust that it will correctly detect your document in a full scan, or do a preview scan and set the marquee manually.

Although the DCP-J925DW has a single slide out paper cassette, this has separate compartments for A4 paper and 6×4″ photo paper. You needn’t unload one to use the other, but you do need to manually engage or disengage the photo tray. During our 10×8″ photo tests the printer refused to pick the last sheet of A4 photo paper; we had to add more sheets and repeat the test. During our draft print test it also double-fed paper on occasion, allowing a couple of blank pages to sneak into the output.

This snag aside, it’s a rapid text printer. Its draft quality produced blocky text, but normal prints were bolder, crisper and not too much slower. At just under 5ppm, colour printing was acceptably quick, too, though the page order of the results was reversed. Photo prints weren’t especially rapid, but we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the results, prompting us to compare them against samples from previous Brother inkjets we’ve reviewed. On plain and photo paper, it’s clear that the DCP-J925DW’s print quality is a small step forward for Brother printers.

Its scanner isn’t the best we’ve seen. The images it captured were fairly sharp, with reasonably accurate colours, but it tended to muddy the darkest shades, losing detail from the darkest regions of our originals. That didn’t stop the DCP-J925DW producing high quality photocopies, however. Overall, it’s an easy-to-use general-purpose multifunction that produces decent all-round results.