Brother DCP-T580DW
The DCP-T580DW may be Brother’s first entry into the ink tank printer market, but it’s a reasonably assured debut. While I wasn’t too impressed with its print quality on plain paper, it’s otherwise a competent, compact multifunction for the home office. It’s a particularly good choice if you print a lot of black text, and need it in a bit of a hurry. Best of all, like other refillable inkjets, it’s cheaper and less hassle to keep it in ink, and doing so creates less plastic waste.
Pros
- Compact and businesslike
- Fast mono printing
- Good value to own
Cons
- Slow colour printing
- Sub-par plain paper print quality
Key Features
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Review Price: £250
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A three-in-one wireless MFP This three-in-one multifunction peripheral can print, scan and make copies. You can share it over a wireless network, and print on both sides of a sheet of paper, too.
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Refillable ink tanks The DCP-T580DW uses refillable ink tanks, rather than expensive cartridges. That reduces hassle, and keeps running costs down.
Introduction
Until now, if you lived in the UK and wanted a Brother printer with refillable ink tanks, you were out of luck. The Brother DCP-T580DW changes that, adding new ‘tankbenefit’ functionality to an otherwise fairly typical inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP). It launches at the same time as the DCP-T780DW, a more fully featured version aimed more squarely at home office users.
The Brother DCP-T580DW comes with a full set of ink bottles rated for 7500 black pages, or 5000 in colour – you’d be lucky to get more than 200 pages from the setup cartridges included with a typical cartridge-based inkjet.
That makes it great value out of the box, provided you’ll print all or most of that volume over its lifetime. If not, you might not recoup the extra outlay: like other ink tank printers, this one costs about three or four times what you’d pay for a cartridge equivalent.
Over moderate or heavy use, refillable inkjets really are the best value way to print. But is the Brother DCP-T580DW a good example?
Design and Features
- Compact and businesslike
- Not especially highly featured
- Cheap to run
Brother has a history of producing compact inkjet devices, and the DCP-T580DW is no exception. It sits low to the desk, and doesn’t require too much space on it.
This makes it an easy device to fit into a home, and it’s home users that Brother is targeting in particular with this multifunction. It has a fair specification for the role.
There’s a 250-sheet paper tray in the base, and a simple scanner on top with no automatic document feeder (ADF).
At the front you’ll find a tiltable control panel comprising some squidgy buttons, and a single-line mono text display. It can print, scan and copy.
I mentioned the DCP-T780DW; that’s focused more specifically on the home office, so that model comes with an ADF, faster colour printing than the DCP-T580DW, and a colour screen.
There’s also an extra bottle of black ink in the box, giving it a claimed 15,000 pages before you’ll need to buy more, compared to the 7,500 you get here.
Both printers support wireless networking, and can print on both sides of a sheet of paper (duplex printing). Neither of them has fax, which these days is unlikely to be a problem.
If the idea of filling up ink tanks sounds daunting to you, don’t panic. Brother has tried hard to make its system easy to use, and for the most part it is.
The Brother DCP-T580DW has four tanks, four bottles, and physical patterns built into both that prevent you tipping ink down the wrong holes. I did manage to spill a few small drops from two of the bottles, so it’s perhaps an idea to put kitchen paper underneath while you’re adding ink.
The good news is that once you’ve done this, you can largely forget about ink for several thousand pages. With the average home user reckoned to print fewer than 100 pages a month, it may be five years before you need to buy more bottles, let alone actually top the system up.
I reviewed this printer before its official UK launch, but even going by Brother’s suggested retail pricing, it should remain cheap to run. Once you need to start buying ink, you’ll pay only around 0.2p for every black page you print. In colour only, this is a very reasonable 0.4p per page, which means a full-colour (black and colour) print will set you back around 0.6p. For comparison, you’d pay a minimum of several pence per page from a competing cartridge-based device.
The Brother DCP-T580DW lets you join it to your wireless network before filling and priming the ink system. I wish this was the law for all printers, as it lets you get on with installing apps and drivers on your devices while the printer goes through its tedious one-off ink priming process. Brother’s PC setup software is straightforward, in fact its driver software and apps generally are, too.
Print Speed and Quality
- Fast text printing. Graphics not so much
- Underwhelming plain paper prints
- Good photo quality
Inkjet printers aren’t usually especially rapid, but I was impressed by the speed at which the Brother DCP-T580DW could turn out pages of text. It needed only 10 seconds between me hitting the Print button and the first page dropping into the output tray, after which it went on to finish a five-page job in 26 seconds – that’s a rate of 11.5 pages per minute (ppm). I tried it on a longer, 25-page test, on which it hit an even more impressive 16.3ppm. I duplex printed a 20-page document onto 10 sheets of paper in three minutes, which works out at 6.7 images (sides) per minute.
Unfortunately, this MFP is nothing like as competitive in colour. It could manage just 4.6ppm when printing five relatively straightforward sheets of text and graphics. I tried it on a more taxing job, which slowed it to 3.7ppm. I’ve seen much worse results, but it’s worth highlighting that the DCP-T780DW was nearly twice as fast in this area.
The Brother DCP-T580DW’s slow colour printing extended to photos. Postcard-sized, borderless prints inched out in a little under three minutes each, while a borderless A4 print took 10 and a half minutes.
Happily, this MFP’s speeds were more competitive elsewhere, particularly when scanning. Even connected via Wi-Fi (which can be a bottleneck) it could preview a page in just nine seconds. It needed only 10 seconds to scan an A4 page at 150 dots per inch (dpi), a medium-low level of detail. At a more exacting 300dpi, it needed 14 seconds for the same job. Switched to a high 600dpi setting, it captured a 6×4” (15x10cm) photo in 24 seconds, although it needed 81 seconds to repeat the job at the maximum 1,200dpi.
Single-page black photocopies were swift, finishing in just 14 seconds. Again, colour was much slower, with the same job needing 34 seconds.
This isn’t the most impressive plain paper printer I’ve seen. Its inks don’t sit up on the page like the best of the competition, leaving graphics and even text looking less bold and impactful than they should. Still, its prints were free of obvious inkjet shortcomings such as banding or grain. Its photocopies were decent, too, with comparatively good contrast and colour accuracy.
If you’re looking for good photo printing, the Brother DCP-T580DW makes a surprisingly strong case for itself. I didn’t care for the overly warm tint of its colour photos, which gave a fake tan effect to lighter skin tones, but they were otherwise sharp and impressively detailed. I was particularly happy with black and white prints, which had a true neutral tone, rather than taking on a tint as they sometimes do when printed using colour ink. There was lots of rich contrast, too.
This isn’t the best scanner for photos and other creative work, again because the results tended to have a warm colour bias. And while Brother’s TWAIN scan interface is simple to use, it doesn’t provide the easy access to more advanced options that you get with, for example, Canon’s equivalent. That said, scans were more than good enough for general work, and certainly up to the job of archiving correspondence and other office documents.
Should you buy it?
Buy if you want an MFP that’s cheap and hassle-free to run
This is a compact MFP with reasonably straightforward ink tanks. They make it cheap to run, and also cut down on the hassle of changing cartridges every couple of hundred pages. If you print a lot, it’ll prove better value than a cheaper cartridge-based equivalent.
Don’t buy if you want great quality
The Brother DCP-T580DW has its moments, but its scan and print results aren’t brilliant. If that’s important, look elsewhere.
Final Thoughts
The DCP-T580DW doesn’t produce the best results, and it’s a bit slow when printing in colour. However, Brother has delivered yet another likeable, straightforward device.
While other manufacturers have a habit of making their refillable inkjets overly basic, the DCP-T580DW looks and feels exactly comparable to Brother’s regular cartridge-based units. This leaves it feeling quite balanced, and quite well suited to casual use at home.
That said, you may have more demanding requirements, or you might simply fancy a more dynamic printer. If that’s the case, find your ideal multifunction or printer in our Best Printer 2025 guide.
Trusted Score
How we test
Not exactly; the DCP-T580DW and DCP-780DW are the first ink tank models Brother has launched in the UK. It’s previously sold refillable models in other markets.
Brother’s inkjet MFPs fall into two ranges: DCP models are ‘digital copier printers’, while MFCs are ‘Multi Function Centres’, which tend to be a little more advanced. The D and W in this device mean it has duplex printing, and supports wireless networks.
Test Data
| Brother DCP-T580DW | |
|---|---|
| Energy consumption | 13 Watts |
| Printing A4 mono speed (single page) | 10 sec |
| Printing A4 mono speed (5 pages) | 26 sec |
| Printing A4 mono speed (20 pages) | 109 sec |
| Printing A4 colour speed (single page) | 17 sec |
| Printing A4 colour speed (5 pages) | 65 sec |
| Printing A4 colour speed (20 pages) | 252 sec |
| Scanning speed test (single page) | 10 sec |
Full Specs
| Brother DCP-T580DW Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £249 |
| Manufacturer | Brother |
| Quiet Mark Accredited | No |
| Size (Dimensions) | 390 x 343 x 149 MM |
| Weight | 6.5 KG |
| Release Date | 2025 |
| First Reviewed Date | 27/05/2025 |
| Model Number | DCP-T580DW |
| Ports | USB |
| Connectivity | 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi |
| Ink Cartridge support | BTD180BK black ink (7,500 pages), BTD180C cyan ink, BTD180M magenta ink, BTD180Y yellow ink (5,000 pages each) |
| Printer Type | Colour |
| Scanner? | Yes |
| Ink Type | Bottle |