Brother MFC-J6520DW review

Brother’s MFC-J6520DW is an office inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP), capable of printing, scanning, copying and faxing A3 documents, and it’s priced well. It even has support for wired and wireless networks, direct wireless printing, duplex (double-sided) printing and a colour touchscreen.

The MFC-J6520DW’s glossy white plastic looks good in Brother’s photos, but in the real-life it’s a disappointingly dowdy device. There are some nice design touches, though, such as the strong, telescoping hinges for the scanner lid and the way that the 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) folds shut when not in use. Others are less successful. We’re not sure why Brother still hides its USB, network and phone ports under the scanner bed.

The paper input tray, which feels and sounds incredibly cheap, is simply unpleasant to use. It rattles and crashes as you extend or collapse it to cope with different paper sizes. There are some oddities to learn, too. Paper sizes, including A4, must be loaded in landscape orientation, while others such as A3, are portrait. More annoyingly, you must set the loaded paper size via the printer’s control panel.

Things improve when you start printing. This is a quick text printer, delivering our 25-page letter test at nearly 14 pages per minute (ppm), and peaking at 17.9ppm on Fast quality. It also printed five pages of text on A3 in just 46 seconds. The results, however, were unexceptional. Text was suitably dark, but not as crisp as we’d expect from a good office inkjet. Graphics were clear and commendably free of banding, grain or other inkjet weaknesses, but their colours lacked impact on plain paper – on photo paper, the results were much better.

Scanned images were unusually sharp for an office-oriented device, and their colours reasonably accurate, but the scanner was poor at preserving detail among the darkest shades of an original. Photocopies were fine aside from being slightly too dark, and they were extremely quick, with single copies taking less than 20 seconds in black or colour, and even a 10-page colour copy needing less than a minute and a half.

The scan interface is beautifully simple, although it could do with an auto-exposure feature

Despite its unremarkable performance and a couple of irritating foibles, this A3 MFP is cheap to buy and operate. Using XL cartridges, running costs work out to be around 4p for an A4 page, of which black costs are only 0.9p. This helps make it a fair choice if you expect to print in reasonable volumes, but if you can live without duplexing then the HP Officejet 7610 delivers better print quality.