Brother MFC-J6510DW review

Having recently looked at Brother’s all-singing A3 inkjet all-in-one, the Brother MFCJ6910DW, it’s interesting to compare it with the £140 cheaper MFC-J6510DW, reviewed here. While still an A3 machine, it loses its second paper tray, duplex scanner and touchscreen.


Brother does its best to keep the dimensions of this big, black printer down, but the very size of the paper it can handle governs its footprint. However, the 250-sheet paper tray is telescopic, so if you only occasionally print A3 pages, you don't have to have the tray extending from the front of the machine. It's a shame there's no single-sheet, multi-purpose feed, though, as you have to empty the main tray to print even one photo.

The top surface of the machine includes a 35-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) with a flip-over feed tray, which is both high-gloss and high-static, attracting every little speck of dust.

The control panel is well laid out; there’s plenty of room, because of the wide front to the machine. The left-hand end is devoted to a set of 16 quick-access fax numbers and buttons to get at particular print features, such as duplex and copying. To the immediate left of the 83mm, widescreen LCD panel are four illuminated mode buttons and to its right is the usual cross of navigation buttons, a number pad for dialling and start and stop buttons for scan and copy jobs.


Sockets for SD and Memory Stick cards, and for USB and PictBridge connections are set into the front edge of the control panel, and a flip-down panel to the right of the paper trays gives access to the four separate ink cartridges.

At the rear of the left-hand side panel are sockets for phone and optional third-party handset and from mains plug, while USB and network sockets are mounted inside the machine, as is Brother’s habit. A wireless connection is also provided and this is easy to establish with either WPS auto setup or by entering a pass-code.

Brother provides drivers for Windows and OS X and if you're a Windows user, there's also a copy of Nuance PaperPort SE for document management and OCR.