Brother MFC-J470DW review

Probably more important to Brother’s ideal home office user is the ability to make photocopies and scan important documents for archiving. Both colour and mono copies took 19 seconds for a single page from the platen, while a ten-page mono ADF copy took three minutes. Colour copy quality was markedly better than mono quality. Our mono copies suffered from poor contrast on images, even when we lightened them, and some lines of 8pt text were left slanted by the speed of the print head’s passing. Very small text was a little jagged in colour, too, but images were reproduced with accurate colours.

Photo scans looked a little grainy, and areas of fine shading were lost, becoming a single colour. This was particularly pronounced at the dark end of the colour spectrum, while come grey tones acquired greenish colour tints. There’s a reasonable amount of detail in captured images. For document scans, we strongly recommend sticking to 300dpi, as small text was hard to read in a 150dpi A4 scan.

Bother printer and scanner driver interfaces are functional; little has changed relative to previous incarnations of the software. The scanner interface in particular lacks the wealth of options you’ll find from rivals such as Canon and Epson, but it’s easy to make previews, manually crop images and select your desired resolution from a pull-down menu.

The printer uses four individual ink cartridges, which cost around £16 for black and £12 for the colour high-yield cartridges. This works out at a print cost of just 8.7p per page of mixed black and colour printing and 2.7p per mono page: excellent value compared to most rivals. However, although it’s good value to run and has loads of features, including an automatic duplexer, the MFC-J470DW is a relatively expensive at £88 and doesn’t have the print or scan quality to back up its price or the rest of its features. The Canon Pixma MG5550 has similar features, costs less and produces far more attractive prints.