The Brother MFC-J5855DW all-in-one (AIO) printer is, wait for it, the little brother to the MFC-J6945DW, our Editors' Choice pick among tabloid-size inkjet AIOs for small offices or workgroups. The MFC-J5855DW ($299.99) can print at up to tabloid size as well, and it's lighter, less expensive, and a touch smaller than its big sibling. Those perks come with some tradeoffs, though: a lower paper capacity, and an ADF that's limited to single-sided scanning and a maximum of legal-size paper. It's a reasonable choice for those who don't need to scan, copy, or fax at tabloid size, but the differences leave the MFC-J6945DW firmly in place as our top pick.
Setup: Get Ready to Wait
The MFC-J5855DW measures 12 by 25.1 by 17.2 inches (HWD) and weighs 39 pounds, which makes it small enough to find room for without much trouble, but heavy enough that you may need two people to set it in place. Physical setup takes a little longer than with most printers. In addition to removing packing material, loading paper, and connecting cables, you also have to slide in the ink cartridges (Brother uses cartridges instead of bottles for its INKvestment tank printers), and then wait several minutes for the printer to pump the ink into its internal tanks.
Installing the software, which includes print and fax drivers plus a scan utility, is also easy, but time-consuming. Several steps must be performed manually, starting with finding the right file to download from Brother's website. You then must wait for each step to finish before you can go to the next, choose options, and wait for that step to complete. In my tests, the setup stopped at one point with an error message, saying I needed to reboot and run a Network Repair tool. But after following the instructions, the installation continued from the point where it crashed, so I didn't have to run through all the steps I'd already completed.
Brother also offers an app for mobile printing and scanning, which worked as promised in my tests using a Wi-Fi Direct connection. Menu commands on the 3.5-inch touch-screen control panel add the ability to print from or scan to a USB drive, as well as fax, copy, and scan to a PC. You can also scan to and print from cloud services, including Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive.
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Paper handling for printing is suitable for medium-duty use in a small office or workgroup. Both the 250-sheet drawer and the 100-sheet rear multi-purpose tray can hold up to tabloid-size paper, offering welcome flexibility. You can have two different sizes loaded at all times, or have both loaded with the same paper most of the time, and easily swap the paper in the rear tray when needed. The recommended maximum monthly duty cycle is up to 3,500 pages, but if you want to keep paper reloads down to once a week or less on average, a more realistic maximum for the 350-sheet capacity would be 1,400 pages a month.
For scanning, the 50-page ADF can handle up to legal-size paper, and is supplemented by an 8.75-by-11.7-inch flatbed. Note that the menus offer options for copying single- or double-sided originals to single- or double-sided copies. But if you pick an option for duplex originals, you'll see a message telling you that automatic two-sided scanning, copying, and faxing isn't available, and that you should use the flatbed.
As expected from any tank-based printer, the MFC-J5855DW scores well on running costs. The ink cost per page works out to 1 cent for a standard letter-size monochrome black page and 5 cents for a color page. As always, however, the more important number for comparing prices is the total cost of ownership—the initial price plus the running cost—rather than running cost alone, as we discuss in our guide to saving money on your next printer. Be sure to adjust the calculations in the guide to treat each tabloid page as equivalent to two letter pages.
Testing the MFC-J5855DW: Perky Speeds, Good Output Quality
For our performance tests, I connected the MFC-J5855DW to the same network as our standard testbed PC, using Ethernet for both. On our 12-page Word text file, the printer was a touch faster than its rated 30ppm speed, at 31.4ppm (21 seconds total time) not including its first page. That makes it essentially tied for fastest in a group that includes the MFC-J6945DW and two Epson printers that both print at up to super-tabloid size (13 by 19 inches). The Epson WorkForce EC-C7000 was just 1 second slower at 30ppm (22 seconds), while the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-7840 was a close third at 27.5ppm (24 seconds). The MFC-J6945DW trailed, at 18.3ppm (36 seconds), for a solid last place.
For shorter documents, both Brother printers have the advantage of a short first page out (FPO) time, at about 6 to 7 seconds, compared with 12 and 13 seconds for the two Epson printers. If we include the time it takes to print the first page of our full Word file, the MFC-J5855DW is firmly in first place, at 26.7ppm (27 seconds). The two Epson printers were statistically tied for second, at about 20ppm (roughly 35 seconds), and the MFC-J6945DW was still fourth, at 16.7ppm (43 seconds).
The advantage of a short FPO time also showed in the results for our business applications suite, which includes several files of four or fewer pages, and also adds graphics and color. The MFC-J5855DW came in at just 1 minute and 34 seconds (16ppm) for the full suite, while the other printers were effectively tied for second place at 2:03 to 2:05 (12ppm to 12.2ppm). For 4-by-6-inch photos, the MFC-J5855DW averaged 59 seconds per photo.
A Side Note on Paper Handling: Some Issues
Unfortunately, you may not be able to take full advantage of the MFC-J5855DW's best speed for graphics. In my tests, some full-page graphics emerged with the pages rolled up like a scroll. They flattened out later when fully dried, but a tightly rolled page in the output tray gets in the way of later pages in the print job. Brother says that this is expected when using default settings and printing full-page graphics with heavy color saturation on 20-pound-weight paper. The curling is due to the printing being done in landscape orientation, with the printhead sweeping across the letter-size page in parallel with the long edge. To avoid the issue, Brother recommends using a heavier weight of paper and setting the printer to a higher quality mode, which slows down the print speed and gives the ink a little extra time to dry.
Note that I also ran into a second paper-handling issue. Occasionally, a page would fly out past the edge of the output tray, including past the piece at the far end of the tray that's supposed to stop the forward motion. If I didn't grab the pages at that point, later pages wound up under earlier pages out of order, or even pushed pages out of the tray. Brother says this can be the result of the output tray not being set correctly for the paper size, but because it was an intermittent problem, I wasn't able to confirm if repositioning the tray actually solved it completely.
Text, graphics, and photo output quality in our tests are all best described as more than acceptable for most purposes. For text, every font in our test suite that you're likely use in a business document was easily readable at 6 points, and most were easily readable at 5 points, despite individual characters showing broken loops and ragged edges at those sizes. Two heavily stylized fonts with thick strokes in our suite tended to fill in loops and the space between characters even at 12 points, but both were easily readable at that size, and one was easily readable at 10 points.
Graphics on plain paper delivered vibrant color and evenly shaded gradients, and the printer maintained a single-pixel-wide line against a black background, though just barely. I saw some banding, but only in solid dark fills on full-page graphics, and even where it showed, it was subtle. Photos on Brother's recommended BP71G glossy photo paper were solidly drugstore quality.
On our ink smudge tests on plain-paper prints (sprinkling a few drops of water on the page at least 24 hours after printing, then gently wiping it dry), color inks resisted smudging, but the pages were left with water marks. Black text smudged easily from both water and a highlighter.
Verdict: A Smaller (and More Limited) AIO Than Its Competitors
The MFC-J5855DW's key advantage is that it's smaller and lighter than any of the other AIOs mentioned here. However, that advantage grows from it having both the lowest paper capacity of the four, along with the only ADF that lacks auto duplexing. Plus, the ADF is limited to a maximum of legal-size paper.
And while it's true that the MFC-J5855DW offers a low cost per page, the MFC-J6945DW shares the same low running cost while adding a higher paper capacity and a more capable ADF, which is why it remains our top pick in the category. One note, though: If you need to print at super-tabloid size, the Epson printers are the only choices in this group, making running cost beside the point.
All that said, if you need a printer for a small or home office where space is tight, and you need to print at tabloid size, the Brother MFC-J5855DW can be the right fit.
The Brother MFC-J5855DW all-in-one (AIO) printer prints on up to tabloid-size paper, and it delivered good speed and output quality in our tests, but some missing ADF functionality limits its usefulness.
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