Brother MFC-J690DW Review - Review 2022

The Brother MFC-J690DW ($119.99) is an entry-level all-in-one (AIO) printer designed for dwelling house offices, pocket-sized offices, and workgroups. As a business-centric inkjet that prints, copies, scans, and faxes, information technology'south similar in features and close in price to our Editors' Option, the Canon Pixma TR8520 Wireless Home Office All-in-One. Though the MFC-J690DW prints at a relatively snappy footstep for the price, it costs likewise much (in terms of ink) for frequent use, like most other and then-chosen budget AIOs in this class. Given its high running costs and pared-down paper chapters, information technology fits best for offices that have light print and copy needs.

A Petite Office-Centric AIO

At six.8 by fifteen.7 past 13.4 inches (HWD) and weighing 18.1 pounds, the MFC-J690DW ($100.95 at Amazon) comes in a fiddling smaller than the Pixma TR8520, but they weigh about the same. The MFC-J690DW is also a few inches smaller in all directions than the Epson WorkForce WF-2860 All-in-I Printer and the HP OfficeJet Pro 6978 All-in-One Printer, the latter model being some other PCMag top selection.

Paper handling is a chip pedestrian on the MFC-J690DW. It comes with one 100-canvass input tray, every bit well as a 20-sheet automatic certificate feeder (ADF) for scanning, copying and faxing. Its maximum monthly duty bike is two,500 pages, with a recommended print volume of upward to ane,000 pages. Compared with the Pixma TR8520's 200 sheets from two drawers, the WorkForce WF-2860'due south 150 sheets from one drawer, and the OfficeJet 6978's 225 sheets from 1 drawer, the MFC-J690DW's input chapters is small. The ADF capacity is a scrap more than competitive; aside from the OfficeJet 6978 ( at Amazon) and its 35-sheet ADF, the other models mentioned so far (from Canon and Epson) handle only 20 sheets at a time, also.

As for these competitors and their duty cycles, the WorkForce WF-2860 ($117.68 at Amazon) is rated at five,000 pages per month maximum (with 800 pages per month recommended), while the OfficeJet 6978 is rated for 20,000 pages max. (Canon doesn't publish duty-cycle ratings for its consumer inkjets.)

You can make configuration changes and initiate walkup tasks, such equally running copies or scanning to the deject, from the MFC-J690DW's 2.7-inch color brandish. Aside from a handful of buttons, the LCD comprises the entire command panel. In addition to the physical command console, you can too set up, monitor, and operate certain aspects of this printer, besides equally bank check the ink levels, from its spider web-based (HTTPS) configuration interface.

Connectivity and Software

Because the MFC-J690DW's price, its connection options and software bundle are adequate, non standouts.

Its basic connectivity features comprise Wi-Fi and connecting to a unmarried PC via USB. Yous also get support for Wi-Fi Directly, for connecting your smartphone or tablet directly to your printer without either information technology or the mobile device existence connected to a network or router. Other mobile-connectivity options include Google Cloud Print, Apple AirPrint, Brother iPrint&Scan, Mopria, and support for a slew of third-political party deject sites, such as Google Bulldoze for Business and OneDrive for Business.

Most Brother AIOs these days come with a decent collection of software applications. Often among them is Dash PaperPort with OCR, for archiving your scanned documents and converting them to editable text, too every bit Blood brother's own ControlCenter scanner interface. The next model up Brother's line from the MFC-J690DW, the MFC-J895DW , comes with these programs and a few others, while the MFC-J690DW, which lists for $10 less, does not. That'southward a consideration to brand if OCR is an important reason why you're buying an AIO. You do get Brother's Cloud Apps, which include Browse to Word, Scan to Excel, Scan to PowerPoint, Scan to Searchable PDF, and Easy Browse to Email.

Fast Enough for Its Course

Like the MFC-J895DW, the MFC-J690DW is rated by Brother at 12 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages. I tested it using our standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10.

When printing our 12-folio monochrome Microsoft Word text document, it churned at x.6ppm. That'due south about 1.5ppm behind its rating and another 1ppm or and then slower than its sibling, the MFC-J895DW. The 15ppm-rated Canon Pixma TR8520 came in about 4.v pages faster than the MFC-J690DW, as did the Epson WorkForce WF-2860, and the HP OfficeJet 6978 vanquish them all, at 16.9ppm.

{{ZIFFIMAGE id="152477" notable nopopup marshal="left"> See How Nosotros Test Printers

When I combined the scores from the previous 12-folio Give-and-take document examination with those from press our colorful Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing graphics and photos, the MFC-J690DW's print speed plummeted (as most machines' practice on this test) by more than 50 percent, to 4.1ppm. That's 0.3ppm slower than its MFC-J895DW sibling, 0.6ppm slower than the Pixma TR8520, 3.1ppm slower than the WorkForce WF-2860, and two.1ppm slower than the OfficeJet 6978.

The MFC-J690DW isn't a photo printer in the same sense as, say, HP'south Envy Photo or Canon'due south Pixma TS models are. Every bit a minor- or dwelling house-office inkjet printer, yet, its duties at times may include printing photographs. Hence, I clocked it press two highly detailed and vibrant iv-by-6-inch exam snapshots.

The MFC-J690DW averaged xxx seconds per photo, which is roughly on par for this grouping. The MFC-J895DW, for instance, averaged a similar 32 seconds, while the Pixma TR8520 puttered along at a slower 55 seconds.

Strong Text, So-Then Graphics

Brother printers typically churn out excellent-looking text and skilful-looking graphics and photos. (If a Brother model falls downwards a little, information technology'due south normally on imagery rather than text.) Some of the company's higher-finish inkjet machines I've looked at recently have delivered superb output all the style around.

In my tests with the MFC-J690DW, text was adequate for most business applications, but some of the graphics and photo output was spotty at times. I noted some banding in night backgrounds, large fills, and gradients. One exam slide in item, with a dark-green-to-black gradient background, showed pregnant streaking and banding, to the extent that some designers might find the slide unusable. I too noticed a few other pocket-sized flaws on another slides and handouts, though nil quite every bit marring or serious.

Photos, on the other manus, came out looking well-detailed and accurately colored, if, at times, defective some of the vibrance of images printed on consumer photo AIOs, such as Canon's Pixma TS8120 All-in-One ($236.50 at Amazon) . But dissimilar more photo-centric AIOs, the Brother model has an ADF and a few other features that make it more suitable to business environments.

Dearly Priced Ink

As I mentioned earlier, upkeep AIOs like these are somewhat notorious for their high running costs, based on the per-page outlay for the ink. Using Brother's advertised prices and page yields for its highest-yield MFC-J690DW-compatible cartridges, I calculated the MFC-J690DW's running cost at 5.5 cents per monochrome folio. Color pages, meanwhile, should ring up at about 16.three cents each.

These numbers mimic those of the Epson WorkForce WF-2860, and are a few cents lower than the HP OfficeJet 6978's. The Canon Pixma TR8520, on the other hand, is a 5-ink printer, which makes per-page cost comparisons catchy. (The others mentioned here are four-ink models.) But its running costs are roughly the same as the MFC-J690DW's.

Nowadays, of course, you tin get lower running costs from a new inkjet printer in a few means. The most obvious? Buy a more expensive, higher-volume car. These price a little more upward front, only if you print a lot, you'll make upwards the difference over time in ink savings, and, in the meantime, you get a faster, more than feature-rich automobile to kicking.

Too helpful are some of today's ink-cost-saving programs. HP'south Instant Ink subscription service, for one, delivers ink to your door for every bit low as 3.5 cents per page, for either black-and-white or color pages. Another, Blood brother's INKvestment ink-ownership model, has you pay more for the printer up front, which holds down both the monochrome- and color-page costs to under five cents each.

Too consider Epson's and Catechism's EcoTank and MegaTank products—the "bulk ink" approaches that use reservoirs of ink that you fill up from bottles or replace equally minor bags. With these products, you also pay more for the printer (often a lot more) to gain the privilege of cheap ink afterwards, normally nether a penny for both monochrome and color pages. With these bulk-tank products, keep in heed that yous'll need to print a lot to do good from the program. What "a lot" ways depends on the printer.

A Proficient AIO...If You Proceed It Light

Like nearly other printer manufacturers, Blood brother releases its machines in stair-step fashion in terms of paper/ADF capacity, print volume, characteristic set up, and price. Sometimes the cost differences between steps are negligible. Sometimes they are both negligible and puzzling.

Take the $ten listing-price difference between the Brother MFC-J895DW and Brother MFC-J690DW. With the cheaper model, you surrender support for flash-memory devices, included OCR software, and Ethernet and Near-Field Advice (NFC) connectivity. Whatsoever one of those options alone could be well worth $10 to many buyers.

Therefore, our advice: Be certain that you won't need these features, now or e'er, earlier pulling the trigger on the Brother MFC-J690DW. Of form, resellers' and online sellers' price dynamics may change the equation on whatever given day. If y'all're fine with your AIO printer keeping to very low print volumes (say, under 100 pages a month), with no printing from SD cards or USB thumb drives, the MFC-J690DW volition serve y'all well for the price. That Brother provides a two-year warranty out of the box is a good value incentive, too—the company has faith in its printers. But if y'all need to churn more pages, await to a higher place the ladder, to Blood brother models similar the MFC-J895DW, or to some of the Catechism Pixma models mentioned before.

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Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/multifunction-printer-reviews/28755/brother-mfc-j690dw-review

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