Brother MFC-J985DW

I've owned two Brother laser printers in the past and have had very good luck with them so when I needed to get a light duty all-in-one I felt comfortable going with Brother again. Needless to say they've done an excellent job again. Setup for this printer could not be more painless and if you're configuring it to be used wireless you don't need to install any software or even connect it to a computer. The cartridge cleaning took about 5 minutes and then all I had to do was connect it to my network and I was good to go. If you're using a Mac just add the printer and the drivers install in 1-2 minutes. I was up and printing in about 15 minutes counting the cartridge cleaning time.What I really like is that you can configure the scanner to send the scanned images straight to your email. This is so much easier than any other scanning process I've seen and as a bonus you can have multiple email addresses stored and protect them with a PIN so random people don't send scanned images to your email. The touchscreen is nice and crisp and responds well to inputs, the print speed is more than adequate and the image quality should be fine for most home office uses.Two things I noticed are that the yellow prints very lightly which is not a huge deal to me and the paper tray is really tiny. I don't do that much printing so this isn't a huge issue, but for some it may be annoying to constantly be refilling the paper tray. If you need a solid all-in-one printer for light duty home office needs I can't recommend a Brother printer enough. Beats the HP and Epson printers we've had in the past handily!I've reviewed the brother color laser printer and their large color inkjet printer. I like the color touch screen software that allows easy set-up and control over scanning, copying, faxing, and connecting to the wireless network in my home. The printers I have including this one sleep most of the time when not in use and take a few seconds to wake up which sometimes give me a message at my computer terminal, but they do wake up and do the printing requested.I mostly use my laser printer, but this has something that will increase my use on an ink jet. I tend to prefer the inkjet for photo quality type pictures, its not that the laser looks bad, but it does not always look as lifelike. It's a little difficult to express without photo evidence, but a good inkjet blender will create some truly nice colors accurately. Through various cloud printing services you can print from your smartphone or tablet as well. The main reason of the extra star over the last inkjet I reviewed was economy. I'm used to getting about 200-300 pages of color and 400 of black out of most of my previous inkjets. The cost to replace a full set is close to 100 dollars, that averages out to about a quarter a page minimum for using the printer. Too much money, this is super economical, not only does it print 2-3 times more pages per replacement cartridges, but the cost is less than a third of what I typically have to pay for most printers.Highly recommended for those who like color inkjet reproduction, or just like an economical printer with very low cost, but quality ink replacements.

Our Lexmark multi function printer had been giving us problems for months and finally died. the print quality was great but the network connections and USB all failed. So I read lots of reviews and searched the consumer sites to find a replacement. The issue of low ink costs was a huge factor. Most of the reviews were positive and every printer has ups and downs.I settled on the Brother MFC-J985DW based on the ink savings, small size, and brother reputation.Pros: The printer is nice looking and smaller than the beast I had before. The touch screen is small but usable. Wireless set up was quick. There is a separate feed for photo paper which seemed nice. paper tray holds 100 sheets which isn't bad if you are using it for home use. You can download just the driver package if you don't need the scan and fax capabilities which works well on our laptop.Cons: Very slow. High price compared to many of the other options. Poor print quality on text- I had better print quality on the fastest print speed on the lexmark (about 6 seconds for a page of text). Very slow. Photo paper tray can only be used after pulling the paper tray out and re-arranging things. Have to reverse the process to print on paper again - very clumsy. Even if you send a 1 page document, it spends 12 extra seconds flipping the paper and feeding the blank side through.This printer has 3 print speeds; normal, fine, and best. On normal it takes 34 seconds to print a Word document 1/2 of a page of text only. On fine it takes 40 seconds for the same page of text (+12 seconds to flip and feed the blank side trough). Print quality was still poor. All printers have a delay before the first page prints and I took that into account with my times. A 2 page PDF printed in just over 1 minute and a half! the driver test page )all text) took 50 seconds.I tried to print some restaurant menus so our group could decide where to go for dinner but after spending 5 minutes waiting on 6 or 7 pages I gave up. Brother claims the print speed is 10/12 pager per minute but the best I have seen is 2 pages per minute.This is going back!Update - I determined that the Word doc I was testing with was the source of the poor print quality. Overall print quality is good. No solution for the super slow print speed so I returned it. I now have a Canon Pixma MG7720 which is a much better design with a larger paper tray and a independent photo tray. It is faster and was cheaper. The same word doc that took 30+ seconds on the Brother took about 10 seconds on the Canon in the middle print quality (which was crisp).

I have had this printer for a couple of weeks.Selecting it was a bear because of all of the disparate reviews, biased websites, and crazy comments about all of the different brands. Trying to find the "perfect" one was definitely going down the rabbit hole! Part of the reason I selected this one is that I liked the idea of fair ink pricing, as well as not having to replace the cartridges very often.I was a bit scared because of some of the comments I saw (including a number of single stars!)I can say that I am very glad I purchased this printer. The print quality is fine, the ability to print double-sided prints is AMAZING at this price point, the quality of the scans is great, and not a single problem. I will admit that the color prints are not professional photo-quality (probably why the cartridge lasts so long!) but I expected that. You can get very high quality color printers, but they will cost much more, and definitely eat through your ink in a heartbeat.I don't understand people - some of the comments are clearly old OS, user error, and poor infrastructure issues ("It was difficult to set up on my Windows 7 system...." Um Windows 7 is 8 years old... how about updating your computer? "It was hard to set up with my WiFi..." I am not sure how that is Brother's problem...? WiFi is set up over the network by the user on the user's device...) yet they rate the printer lower because of it. Yes, this is not a commercial-quality printer, but it is also not priced that way. It is a home-use printer, and performs (and is priced) just perfectly for that.No problems with WiFi - I have 2 MAC's, 1 PC, 3 tablets, and 2 iPhones that can print from this device over my home network.Bravo Brother!