Brother MFC-J6520DW review

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.