Brother MFC-J4510DW review

At a glance, the MFC-J4510DW is clearly a departure for Brother. While hardly gorgeous, it’s a much smarter and more attractive design than is typical of Brother’s MFPs. It’s also the first printer we’ve reviewed that feeds A4 paper in a landscape orientation, the purpose of which is to facilitate A3 printing without consuming more desk space than is necessary.

Brother stresses that the MFC-J4510DW is an occasional A3 printer, and this is definitely the case. The primary paper tray is A4 only, and A3 sheets must be inserted into the printer one at a time via a slot at the rear. It doesn’t have a proper A3 input tray, so the user must ensure A3 sheets are picked and fed properly. We found the narrow slot made the process difficult, with several misfeeds during our early attempts. With experience, we learned it was best to load the paper and make sure the screen showed “manual feed slot ready” before sending an A3 job.

There’s a similar problem with the output tray which, while fine for A4, isn’t long enough to support an A3 page. The printer is smart enough not to fully eject the printed sheet, however, preventing it falling onto the floor.

It’s a shame that A3-printing isn’t delivered faultlessly, as this printer doesn’t excel in many other respects. In some areas it seems better made and finished than some other Brother MFPs we’ve reviewed, but the paper input tray was rattled, and the retaining arm for the tilting scanner bed felt as if it needed to be forced back down again, and we had to check that it wasn’t snagged on anything.

This is a fast text printer, peaking at almost 19 pages per minute in draft mode. The results were clear and very legible, but at normal quality the text was still clearly produced by an inkjet, having slightly fuzzy outlines. We were surprised by this printer’s poor colour output, which seemed pale and suffered from a couple of subtle vertical imperfections running down the length of each page. Fortunately, the scanner was also rapid, and its results perfectly good enough for office tasks.

This printer supports regular and high-capacity ink cartridges, and using the latter should result in reasonable running costs of about 5.3p per page of mixed text and graphics. Text-only prints are likely to be a little less than the 1.8p ISO/IEC 24712 figure suggests. Unfortunately, at £170 the MFC-J4510DW is quite expensive in the first place; it’s own Brother MFC-J5910DW may be bigger and uglier but at £100 it’s a better, cheaper MFP if you need A3 printing.