Brother MFC-J5730DW All In One A3 Inkjet Multifunction

Brother MFC-J6930DW All-in-One Business Inkjet Printer.I purchased this printer a little overzealously in hindsight, as it's just a half a fridge too large for my home office setup that i use for my photography and design business, my previous (Brother) printer had 1 paper tray inlet, this has 3 main inputs, 2 x A3 one of which holds 500 sheets and is your daily letter & draft grinder, then 1 main tray which can switch between Glossy A4 and Satin A3 card all day long, then there is a rear inlet which sits nicely out the way at the back , this is ideal for keeping stacked with your favoured small photo or postcard scale glossy Paper and works a dream with the App that enables 1 button printing of all those cards, images, icons and nephews that have sat stagnant too long. .So, overzealous? unnecessary for my requirements? should i have bought it? Abso-ruddy-lootly I Should've!! ..... Why?Well, the printer came with a pack of 'start-up inks' - So that doesn't bode well for longevity of those cartridges right? ... Sooo Wrong! ... My 1st job right outta the box was 4x 16 A4 glossy B&W prints for a tiled -or 'Block' poster- of Mr.Bowie in a darkened room smoking a Gitanes Cigarette which is about as fat as he is; you'd think it a fairly run of the mill job -oh , there are also 6 x 16 A3 Satin of the same subject - So 170 sheets of high quality output, and when i say high, i need speckless and true to the very room the image was shot in, the subtle gradients between dark, light & smoke puffed out across satin sleeves, It is deffo NOT run of the Mill !, the finishes are absolutely what they need to be, the grainy gradients are perfect whilst the silky smoke is lux, Yup, the printer worked at business speeds and turned out Pro results.Ok, So, the ink , That 79 uk pound (as of Dec '17 (my pound sign is awol apologies!) XL Innobella Brother Replacement ink pack was purchased at the time of printer purchase and good job too, as my Yellow lasted about 18 draft quality Rasterized sheets of A4 plus approx 5-8 10x15cm photos with yellow content and it was gone!, but hey!, Starter Pack it was eh? then the Magenta, followed by blue, i have now inserted all XL colour cartridges, and of course the Black did that massive glossy gray scale run, so how many cartridges? - I'm Still Using the 'Starter Pack' unit! with my thick as a NY Sandwich XL Cart sitting , waiting , watching, with its expected 3000 sheet of heavy black print scribed on its side; And after what ive seen.... ? I cannot Wait to see whats next in the Satin A3 poster run schedule! .. I know one thing, it'l be fast, smooth and Professional in Quality .a Great Purchase.BUT!! - yerp, there is one, ... now if i could give 4.75 stars i would, because when i pay this much (although i inadvertently caught Black Friday and seemingly did pretty well as all units i see are 60-150 higher than the amazing 199(uk!) i paid ) , Still, this is a big outlay - oh yeah, check sizes!, its bigger than your last printer i assure you!, and it took 2 of us to lift it safely out of the box and up onto my workmate as nowt else will hold it right now! -- and for a printer with such a hefty RRP, we are back to the BUT! , and for me its a real biggy... Ok, Roller Markings!!!! , because on A4 & A3 glossy's that are in a print run, if you leave the printer to build any kind of stack, firstly it struggles and pushes paper upwards, but even if you print one high gloss image alone sometimes, you get 2 not instantly distinct, but they are there and remain there , two 1cm long 3mm thick & 8cm apart topside roller skid or stick marks, and as a Photographer i just Cannot have that, ..Fortunately on 96% of the B&W run they dissapeared after drying, but on cartoon and vector graphic prints they showed , especially in the orange zones even when dry. .Dont let this put you off unless you are and absolute perfectionist, in which case go spend more Cash!!the marks really do take a finicity eye to pick up, so for almost all purposes other that high gloss sunsets that require perfection , forget i mentioned the BUT! ,.......But it IS there!!! ...On the whole, Top Notch Kit!

The Brother MFC-J6930DW is a ‘proper’ multi function printer. It is for a busy home office, a small business or a large business workgroup. It is physically quite large and heavy but the build quality is superb. Mine is loaded with A4 in tray 1, A3 in tray 2 and the rear feeder contains envelopes. There is absolutely nothing this model can’t do, it will scan, copy and print all paper sizes up to A3+ and all paper inputs have a built in duplexer for double sided printing and scanning. What I like best about this model is the speed it starts up and shuts down, my previous printer was an Epson and it drove me insane, whenever you turned the Epson on from cold, woke it from sleep or turned it off, it went through some strange calibration/cleaning ritual that could take up to two minutes. The Brother on the other hand just gives a little audible jingle and then sits ready to work. Another nice feature is that this is a front loading ink cartridge system, so no faffing about trying to load the ink onto a moving print head, you just slide the cartridges into the front ink bay and you are good to go. This also means that the standard ink cartridges can be upgraded to very large XL versions for huge printing capability. Also, hats off to Brother for allowing their machines to use third party ink suppliers so that running the machine is good value. I even like the cartridges themselves as they have a little float on the top of the cartridge inside a small clear window to let you know for certain if the ink is used up. The front LCD display is also very well thought out, I have used printers in the past where the LCD is used to give utterly useless and unessessary information, but the Brother display is very business focussed and basically gives you the main machine functions, a set of user programmable shortcuts so you can select your most used features quickly, or choose from a very sensible collection of apps to enhance the printers abilities, so for example, you can add an app to scan any documents to a searchable PDF, a Word document, a PowerPoint project or an Excel spreadsheet, or you can scan and send to an email recipient or a cloud storage service. The supplied software is also worthy of mention because the properties interface is very ‘clean’ and well thought out and again allows the user to add their own quick access shortcuts, the software feels light and not weighed down with unessessary photo editing and labelling features. The only optional software offered during setup was a full version of the Paperport file management suite. The last feature I really like about the MFC-J6930DW is it’s night time ‘quiet mode’. This mode slows the print heads down and lowers the noise and vibration from the printer if for example your home office is next to a child’s bedroom, because in normal print quality this printer is no slouch, it picks up the next sheet of paper before it has even finished printing the second side of the previous sheet. There are smart phone apps that allow air printing direct to the printer, with Android phone users being able to connect to the printer even quicker using the NFC pad on the front left of the machine. The LCD display also swivels up and down in case you are using the printer while stood up rather than sitting down. The machine will also print and scan directly to/from the USB port on the front.