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Inky fingers: the best printers for words and pictures reviewed

SONY DSC

Brother MFC-J3520 Multi-function Inkjet Office Printer

Price (RRP): R3 999
Available From: These fine stores

What can it do?

The J3520:

  • Prints at A3 and smaller sizes, duplex
  • Scans to PC, email and USB/memory cards via flatbed and ADF
  • Prints direct via USB drives, memory cards and PictBridge-compatible cameras
  • Faxes  via flatbed and ADF, with junk fax filtering
  • Copies via flatbed and ADF
  • Comes with Wi-Fi, USB and Ethernet connectivity
  • Has an automatic document feeder
  • Supports Apple’s Air Print, Google’s Cloud Print, Brother’s iPrint&Scan App

The best answer here is “A bit of everything”. Brother’s J3520 is an all-rounder of note, able to print documents and images with its inkjet technology at up to A3 sizes, while also offering scanning, faxing and copying facilities. Its touchscreen makes getting to the option you’re looking for a matter of reading and pressing, and the automatic document feeder lets you copy long documents without having to stand at the printer the whole time, changing pages. Brother’s included management software will also let you manage scans and faxes from your PC, and printing from phones and tablets is possible through the printer’s support for Apple and Google’s popular Air Print and Google Cloud Print services.

What’s it look like?

This is one snazzy-looking printer with a style all of its own and a definite sense of “The future is now” to its design. The front panel is completely black when not in use, and its well-hidden buttons only light up when they’re needed – the rest of the time, you can’t even see that they’re there. Our favourite feature, though, is the printer’s automatic document feeder tray that folds into the top cover when it isn’t needed. Overall Brother has nailed the look of a printer intended for use in the year 2014.

How easy is it to set up?

Once the Brother is unpacked and the ink cartridges installed (printed instructions included and easy to follow), the hard work is mostly done. The touchscreen makes it incredibly easy to connect the J3520 to your wireless network, but if you don’t have one there’s an Ethernet port for a cabled connection or you can connect to it over USB. The included CD will help you set it up on your Mac or Windows PC; once the CD starts automatically, you’ll be promoted to go through a brief setup process that installs the driver, and you’re done.

What’s Special About it?

A3 printing is undoubtedly the ace up this printer’s sleeve. It’s priced in a similar range to the other printers here, putting it at a huge advantage and it’s not bad at photo printing either, surprising for a printer intended for office use. It also lets you manage your scans and faxes from your computer, letting you manually manage which faxes to print and where to save scans.

How fast is it?

At draft settings, the printer absolutely flies, churning out prints at just over 20 pages per minute in both mono and colour. Setting it to finer quality, the speed drops a bit – we saw our test document’s time drop from a very impressive 87 seconds down to 118 seconds.

What’s the quality like?

Excellent. Text is sharp enough on the printer’s highest quality setting that you’d confuse it with laser quality, even up close. Colour reproduction is very true to the original images seen on-screen before hitting the Print button, and photo details are very clear, with very few visible artefacts, if any. We found that even draft quality prints came out looking more than good enough for everyday use (great news for the longevity of the print cartridges), but of course finer is better as text and images just look that much more professional and polished.

Is it cheap to run?

Surprisingly, this Brother’s running costs aren’t that bad. Its up-front cost might be a bit intimidating, but at R349 per colour cartridge and R399 per black and A4 page yields of 1200 and 2400 respectively, it works out to around 24c per page.

Score_Brother

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