Brother DCP-J152W review

Brother makes all-in-one printers primarily aimed at the small-to-medium enterprise users, but lower-cost models such as the DCP-J152W are also well equipped to serve as a home inkjet MFP. The DCP-J152W is a rather snazzy piece of kit. It’s got a colour screen, as well as both Wi-Fi and USB. Using a wireless network connection allows you to unlock all of the MFP’s cloud printing capabilities, as well as support for printing from popular mobile devices.

The DCP-J152W’s printing and scanning hardware is shared with that of some other budget Brother MFPs, and you’ll find its performance to be very much in line with them. You can expect slow photo printing speeds from this MFP and its relatives, but we were pleased with its print speeds for our mono text document: 10.7ppm. Draft text is even faster, at 13.9ppm; it’s paler, but just as clear to read as standard quality mono text, and it uses less ink. Lettering at 12pt has wavering edges upon a close look, but the overall quality is good.

Brother DCP-J152W Print Quality

Colour print quality is, similarly, not the best you’ll ever see from an inkjet. Its problems are more pronounced than those of plain mono text, with slightly uneven edges on letters and a bit of a grainy quality to photos and illustrations. The end result is certainly usable and comfortably readable, but emerged at a mediocre 2.8ppm and don’t compare particularly well to the sharper quality of devices from rivals such as Canon.

Photo prints are similarly a best-effort affair, rather than the best you’ll find from a home inkjet, or even from one at this price. Contrast is good, particularly on dark images, and there’s a pleasingly glossy finish to the photos. Blacks could be a bit deeper, while yellows tended to be more intense than we’d expect. Areas of delicate shading are poorly reproduced, with lots of graininess and abrupt shifts from one colour to another. If you want to print photos at maximum quality, you’ll have to be prepared to wait a while: six 6x4in photos took us a ridiculous hour and 20 minutes, while a couple of 10x8in pictures took 23 minutes. Using Best rather than Photo quality significantly improves this speed.

Brother DCP-J152W Scanner

Scan quality is better suited to document scanning than accurate reproduction or archiving of photographs. The CIS scanner has a resolution of 1,200×2,400, so you get plenty of pixels, but colour differentiation is poor. Dark colours tend to merge into each other, particularly greys and blues, while text detail at resolutions below 300dpi is poor. Scan speeds were pretty good, with a 300dpi A4 document scanning in 11 seconds and 1,200dpi photo taking under a minute.

Although it’s very basic, we like Brother’s scanner interface. You can fiddle with the brightness and contrast, and choose from a few pre-set resolutions and document sizes, but that’s about it. It’s gratifyingly fast and simple to use. Similarly, the properties for the printer driver are all refreshingly self-evident.

Copy quality is also dependent upon the scanner, but we were pleased to find that both colour and mono copies were clearly legible. The default colour density settings produced a reasonably good mono copy of an illustration, although it’s always worth checking before making multiple copies to make sure that yours isn’t colour out too dark.

A colour copy took 30 seconds, while a mono copy of the same document clocked in a 19 seconds. Having a built-in screen makes it easier to interact with the scanner directly, as well as features such as printing from and scanning to an associated Google Drive.