The BROTHER DCP-J774DW is certainly very suitable printer for home use. The low profile printer design stands only 151mm tall, 400 mm wide and 341mm deeply, so it will easily fit on a shelf or desk if space is a bit tight.
It is crammed into a lot of useful features, however, including printing 1200x1200dpi (interpolated to 6000x1200dpi), and 1200x1200dpi scanner and copier.
The printer provides USB and Wi-Fi connectivity, along with mobile printing on Apple’s mobile devices, and the Brother IPrint & Scan application for Android and even Windows Phone.
It also does duplex printing, and although the 100-foil paper tray is relatively small, there is a second 20-sheet tray for photo paper, and you can even feed it onto single sheet paper through a manual feed on the PA. The rear of the ten printer.
Brother Quotes Speed 12 pages per minute when you print the text in plain paper office, and 10 ppm for color documents, although there is no speed in quotes for postcard prints (4x6inch).
Our tests got pretty close to those speeds, reaching 11ppm for text documents, and 8PPM for color. It’s not the fastest printer around, but those speeds are still reputable for a printer in this price range, and it should be perfectly suited for most home users.
SPECS BROTHER DCP-J774DW:
A4 colour inkjet printer with 6000x1200dpi resolution (interpolated)
1200x1200dpi scanner/copier
100-sheet paper tray, single-sheet manual feed
Connectivity – USB, Wi-Fi, with Apple AirPrint, Google CloudPrint
Dimensions – 151x400x341mm, 6.6kg
The text quality is excellent, with smooth and sharp characters rivaling the laser quality and don’t let your business down if you are working from home. Color graphics and photographic prints are very good, and our postcard impressions took 55 seconds to produce, which once again is quite reasonable for a printer at this price.
Brother indicates the reduced price of its ink cartridges, with a value package containing the four standard sized cartridges-cyan, magenta, yellow and black-which cost only £33.60 (£8.40 per cartridge).
That sounds good-but the catch is that these cartridges last only about 200 pages, which means that mono text documents work at a weight of 4.2 p each, and 12.6 p for color documents.
A package of values containing the four XL cartridges costs £51.60 (£12.90 per cartridge).
Page yields remain relatively modest, though, in 400 pages for mono and color printing, but at least it brings text pages at 3.2 p per page, and 9.7 p for color.
Those prices are at the highest end of the average costs still for inkjet printers, but they are tolerable for a home printer which is only needed for “work under the volume” (as the Brother recommends).
The Brother DCP-J774DW is a small, carefully designed printer that is well suited for home use-although it is a little noisier than we would have liked.
But it is the cost of the ink cartridges that you will have to think about. To be honest, the relatively low cost in front of the package of four value cartridges can appeal to home users who know they won’t be making too much impression on a regular daily basis.
However, the costs they run mean that the Brother DCP-J774DW will not be ideal for domestic or small office workers who need to print documents every day of the week.