Brother MFC-J6930DW - Review 2022

Not long agone, A3 (tabloid, or xi-past-17-inch) all-in-1 (AIO) printers, such as the Editors' Choice HP OfficeJet Pro 7740, were somewhat rare, and expensive. Only not anymore. 1 reason is that a few years ago Brother made them a staple in its Concern Smart Pro line, which includes the MFC-J6930DW ($299.99) reviewed here. Like the HP model, the MFC-J6930DW comes with two big paper input trays, a unmarried-pass auto-duplexing automated document feeder (ADF), and a slew of mobile connectivity features. This Brother AIO prints well overall, with competitively low running costs, and information technology's relatively fast, merely its graphics output could exist better. Despite costing a little more upfront, only with lower running costs overall, the MFC-J6930DW is a viable culling to the OfficeJet 7740 for low-to-moderate volume printing in a small or micro function or workgroup.

A Sturdy, Well-Built Workhorse

At 18.viii by 22.6 by fourteen.7 inches (HWD) with its trays closed and weighing 51.six pounds, the MFC-J6930DW is a few inches taller and well-nigh ix pounds heavier than the HP 7740. Both models come up with two 250-sail drawers, just the Brother model does the OfficeJet 7740 one better with the addition of a 100-sail multipurpose tray that extends out from the back of the chassis. In addition, both machines also come with single-pass ADFs that browse both sides of two-sided multipage documents simultaneously, but the MFC-J6930DW's ADF holds upwards to fifty pages, while the HP 7740'due south ADF holds only 35.

The Epson WorkForce WF-7620 (which has been effectually for a few years but is even so readily bachelor) is a few inches longer from front to dorsum, but then it prints pages up to thirteen-by-19 inches. Information technology, besides, has ii 250-canvas paper drawers, as well as a single-sail multipurpose tray. Its 35-page ADF supports the older style reversing auto-duplexing ADF that scans one side of ii-sided documents, pulls the sheet back in to the mechanism, flips information technology, and then scans the other side, as does its WF-7610 sibling, which is substantially the same equally the WF-7620, except that information technology comes with only one 250-sheet paper drawer and a 1-sail multipurpose tray.

Both the MFC-J6930DW and HP 7740 take 30,000-folio maximum monthly duty cycles, but the MFC-J6930DW'due south recommended monthly print volume is 2,000 pages, compared with the OfficeJet 7740'due south 1,500 pages. The Epson WF-7620 and WF-7610, as well as the Epson WorkForce ET-16500 EcoTank Wide-Format All-in-One Supertank Printer (some other AIO capable of printing 13-by-19-inch pages), take twenty,000-page duty cycles. (The ET-16500, as an EcoTank brand model, comes with thousands of pages worth of ink, and, as a outcome, it lists for $999.)

You configure the MFC-J6930DW, equally well equally connect to deject sites and perform other walkup tasks, such as printing from and scanning to USB thumb drives, from a spacious command console that consists of a handful of buttons—power, Back, Abode, an NFC hotspot, and Abolish, equally well equally a number pad—anchored by a 3.7-inch colour bear upon screen. The USB port is located on the forepart-left side of the chassis, side by side to the control panel.

To print, scan, and copy broad-format documents, an AIO must be large enough to accommodate oversize paper—in this case, tabloid-size. To salve space on the AIO'due south depth, Brother designed the MFC-J6930DW and so that it stores paper and prints pages in mural, or wide, orientation, which has no upshot on performance and impress quality, though it does seem a little odd, until you get used to it.

Option a Connexion, Any Connection

Like near printers in this class, and especially Brother'southward Business organization Smart Pro AIOs, the MFC-J6930DW takes a kitchen-sink approach to deploying connectivity technologies, starting with the basics—Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and connecting to a unmarried PC via USB. Y'all also get the two popular peer-to-peer networking protocols, Wi-Fi Direct and near-field communication (NFC), for connecting your mobile devices to the AIO without it or your laptop, tablet, or smartphone beingness networked through a router.

Other mobile connectivity features—such as AirPrint, Brother iPrint&Scan, Google Cloud Print, and Mopria—abound, as well equally both the business and personal iterations of numerous pop cloud sites, including Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, OneDrive, and OneNote, as well as Web app connectors for Facebook and Flickr. Blood brother also provides several other cloud-axial Web apps for just about every scenario.

In addition to the Brother printer and scanner drivers, the software package includes Scansoft PaperPort 14 SE with OCR for Windows, and Mac users get Presto! PageManager. OCR, of course, stands for optical character recognition, which converts scanned text to editable text, and both PaperPort and PageManager provide document management features for archiving and retrieving your scanned (and all other) document pages.

Information technology's besides of import to note that Brother backs upwards your purchase with a ii-year express warranty, and phone tech support is bachelor for the life of the printer.

Running at the Front end of the Pack

Brother rates the MFC-J6930DW at 22 letter-size pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages and 20ppm for color, compared with the HP 7740'due south 22ppm-blackness and 18ppm-color ratings. (I tested over Ethernet using our standard Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.) The Brother AIO printed our 12-page monochrome all-text document at 19ppm—3ppm lower than its rating, nevertheless 0.5ppm faster than the OfficeJet 7740. Both machines, though, were significantly faster than the ET-16500'due south 4.7ppm. Both the WF-7610 and WF-7620 were tested with a discontinued benchmarking methodology, making comparing their impress speed here impractical. If, on the other hand, you don't need wide-format press, another of our pinnacle pick AIOs, the Epson WorkForce WF-4740, churned at 27.3ppm on this portion or our tests.

As most printers practice, the MFC-J6930DW slowed down considerably when printing our Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing color, graphics, and photos. (Our color text pages are much more complex and many of them contain considerably higher percentages of ink coverage than the pages printer makers use to rate their machines; hence, I didn't expect the MFC-J6930DW to come close to Brother'due south ratings on this portion of our tests.) It's besides important to note that the print times reported hither are for standard letter-size (viii.5-by-11-inch) pages, not tabloid-size.

That said, when I combined the results from the 12-folio text certificate in the previous test with the scores from printing our color test documents, the MFC-J6930DW churned at the rate of 12.3ppm, which is almost 3ppm faster than the HP 7740 and nearly 8ppm faster than the Epson ET-16500. As for the WF-4740, it managed fifteen.1ppm at this point in our tests.

The MFC-J6930DW printed our sample snapshots in 8 seconds, compared with the HP 7740'due south 35 seconds. When, all the same, I turned on borderless printing and told the commuter that the printer was loaded with premium sleeky photo newspaper, the Brother model took ii minutes, ii seconds to impress our examination photos—but, equally you'll see in the side by side section, the results were worth waiting for. The ET-16500 averaged 43 seconds, and the WF-4740 averaged 12 seconds.

Excellent Text and Photos

Overall, the MFC-J6930DW's print quality is good, though I did see some issues with full-page concern graphics. But first permit's talk nearly text output. As I've seen with nearly Blood brother business-centric AIOs, text quality is pristine, very much resembling laser printer output with well-shaped, highly legible characters downward to the smallest point size we test, 4 points. Granted, I need magnification to see it, but yet, it looks highly legible.

Graphics, too, look skilful, just several of our full-page Excel charts and PowerPoint handouts take very thin but distinct lines running across them in several evenly spaced locations, as though the print engine skipped a beat (though a minor one) or started over every couple inches or so. In no manner, though, are these lines thick enough to mar or backbite from the impact of the graphic, but they are noticeable.

On the other hand, the MFC-J6930DW prints terrific-looking photos, on both good quality inkjet paper and high-finish premium photograph paper. In fact, the images I printed on the latter are very well-detailed and vibrantly colored, superior to what yous'd become from the corner drug store. But since this is a business printer, the ability to print flawless graphics rather than photos is preferable.

Competitive Running Costs

Many of Brother's Business Smart Pro AIOs, such as the MFC-J5830DW Xl, are what the company calls INKvestment AIOs, where yous pay more upfront for the printer itself to save on the ongoing cost of ink. While the MFC-J6930DW isn't an INKvestment AIO, its per-page running costs, at one.7 cents for black pages and 7.four cents for colour pages, are still quite competitive.

The HP 7740, for instance, delivers running costs of 2.one cents per black page and eight.one cents per color page, and Epson'southward WF-7620 and WF-7610 costs 3.2 cents per monochrome folio and 11.4 cents per color folio to use. The WF-4740's running costs are one.9 cents per blackness page and 8.2 cents per colour folio, and the ET-16500'south per page operating costs are less than 1 cent for both monochrome and colour pages.

A Lot to Like

The Brother MFC-J6930DW is a capable function AIO with the ability to print, copy, scan, and fax tabloid-size pages. Its running costs are lower than our electric current top pick tabloid-capable AIO, the HP OfficeJet Pro 7740, with a big enough cost-per-page difference betwixt them to justify choosing the Brother model over the OfficeJet—unless, that is, your application calls for the ability to churn out pristine business concern graphics. The HP AIO is a ameliorate choice for that.

In addition, while both the Epson WF-7620 and WF-7610 are capable AIOs, since they've been out for so long, their running costs are excessive—Epson needs to update its wide-format WorkForce models. On the other hand, the MFC-J6930DW is more than suitable for in-business firm handouts and reports, making information technology a strong alternative to the OfficeJet Pro 7740 for upwardly to mid-book wide-format printing in a small or micro role or workgroup.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/printers/16884/brother-mfc-j6930dw

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