This Brother model printer is aimed squarely at the small and home office sector. It sits in the mid-level of the SOHO Brother range and offers an astonishing array of features that will keep most users happy for as long as the printer still functions.
Obviously there’s the usual scanning and copying functionality, but the MFC-J4620DW goes a step further and adds printing up to A3 size, faxing and the ability to connect to OneDrive and Dropbox. There’s also support for NFC, AirPrint, Google Cloud Print and iPrint&Sca, and you’ll find 802.11b/g/n wi-fi and a 100Mbps Ethernet port.
It’s certainly a well built machine and feels finished to a much higher quality than the more run-of-the-mill printers in this group test. There’s a 20-sheet autofeed discretely incorporated into the top of the printer, auto-duplexing and a large 93mm colour touchscreen, which allows you to access the printer options, along with the cloud services.
Print speeds weren’t the best in the group, though. The full colour photo test took just over two minutes to finish printing at full resolution, whereas the text test saw around eight pages per minute. However, the quality of the colour image was very good indeed. The colour were bright, and there was a slightly more defined level of sharpness to both the colour and standard text prints.
In terms of the cartridges, the larger XL versions (based on a four pack) manage to offer an impressive yield of 1,200 pages each and cost £29.56 from Cartridgesave.co.uk. This comes to an equally good 0.5 pence per page, which is ideal for the SOHO user.
The standard cartridges aren’t too bad either, with the black cartridge costing £16.71 from Cartridgesave.co.uk and having a page yield of 550 at three pence per page. The colour costs £11.97 and too gives 550 pages before it’s run dry while having a running cost of 2.2 pence per page.
The Brother MFC-J4620DW is by far the cheapest printer to operate out of the group, but it’s also the most expensive to buy. At around £95, the initial cost may put a lot of people off, especially since this is an inkjet and not a laser.
Again, though, this is due to the more home business and small office design of the printer; it’s a cost effective setup for an office, and it’ll do a good job when placed in one. For the home user, though, it may seem a little over the top for the occasional printed receipt or delivery label. If you’re planning on printing out a number of fullcolour, high-quality holiday snaps then, yes, it’s an ideal printer. But not many people do that these days, and you can get just as effective a solution from a printer that costs a third of the Brother.