Brother MFC-J6710DW - Performance and Verdict

The rated speeds for the Brother MFC-J6710DW are 12ppm for black print and 10ppm for colour. We think these are optimistic, but if you take off the housekeeping that happens before prints start, you might get somewhere near. Our five-page black text print gave 6.5ppm and this rose to 9.7ppm in draft mode.

On the 20-page document, the machine ran at 9.0ppm and printing duplex it still managed 3.8 sides per minute. Printing our black text and colour graphics test produced 4.8ppm on A4 paper but only 1.4ppm on A3. This is largely due to the amount of preparation time and 14s of ‘drying’ time added before starting every sheet.

This is slightly bizarre, as we’re talking single-sided print and there's no real reason why an A3 page shouldn't dry as quickly as an A4 one, where the mandatory drying time isn't invoked. Also, if you use inkjet paper, which isn't as absorbent as most plain papers, there's no extra drying time for either size.

When it comes to copies, the machine is quite speedy, producing five A4 pages from its ADF in 1:17 and five A3 pages in 2:17. 15 x 10cm photos took between 1:15 and 2:03 and a full A3 photo completed in 3:37.

Print quality from the Brother MFC-J6710DW is a bit of a mix. Black text is reasonably clean, though there is fuzziness around many characters, if you look at all closely. Colour graphics are reasonably bright and dither patterns in colour fills are not too noticeable.

However, colour copies came through very pale in our tests and some photo prints were uncharacteristically blotchy, even on Brother's own BP71 photo paper. We haven't seen this before, so suspect it's an isolated example.

The four ink cartridges are available in two capacities and using the higher yield components gives page costs of 1.8p for black and 5.3p per colour. These are both pretty good for an inkjet device at this price and with a relatively high capacity for an inkjet printer, you shouldn't be having to attend to them every week.

Verdict
Brother’s MFC-J6710DW is, in our opinion, slightly better value than the models directly above and below it in the company's range. It has three different paper sources, can handle duplex print up to A3 and has easy wireless setup. While the paper feed idiosyncrasies are annoying and the photo output was variable on this sample, overall it's a reasonable choice for a large format, small business all-in-one.