The Brother MFC-J5945DW ($299.99) is a wide-format all-in-one inkjet printer designed for use in small businesses and home offices. It prints well and fast, offers highly competitive running costs, and it's loaded with productivity features. It's similar in many ways to its sibling, the Editors' Choice MFC-J6945DW, with one notable exception: While that more expensive model can print, copy, scan, and fax wide-format pages, the MFC-J5945DW can only print in tabloid size. That said, if your office doesn't require wide-format media processing beyond printing, the MFC-J5945DW offers many of the perks of its sibling for $50 less.
Big and Capable All-in-One
At 14.9 by 21.5 by 17.2 inches (HWD) and weighing 45.9 pounds, the MFC-J5945DW is slightly larger than 2017's MFC-J5930DW, which it replaces, and a bit smaller than its MFC-J6945DW sibling. It's also somewhat smaller and lighter than Epson's WorkForce Pro WF-7720, that company's wide-format (print, copy, scan, and fax) behemoth, and slightly bigger and heavier than HP's wide-format (which can only print tabloid-size) OfficeJet Pro 7720. It's also important to note that Epson's wide-format machines print the larger 13-by-19-inch super-tabloid pages, while most others support only 11-by-17-inch media.
Configuration and walkup tasks, such as scanning or making copies, are handled via the MFC-J5945DW's control panel, which consists of a handful of buttons and a number pad anchored by a 3.7-inch color touch screen, shown below.
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You can also check ink and paper levels, as well as perform most configuration tasks, from the AIO's built-in web site. As shown in the image below, in addition to ink level gauges, you also get a remaining-number-of-pages estimate, as well as paper levels.
Like many of today's higher-end business-centric printers, the MFC-J5945DW comes with a 50-sheet single-pass automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning, copying, and faxing two-sided multipage documents.
The MFC-J5945DW's paper input capacity is 600 sheets split between two 250-sheet cassettes and a 100-sheet multipurpose tray that pulls out from the back of the machine. That's the same configuration as its MFC-J6945DW sibling. Epson's WF-7720 holds 500 sheets, and it has a 1-sheet multipurpose tray, while HP's 7720 comes with one 250-sheet tray.
The MFC-J5945DW's maximum monthly duty cycle is 30,000 pages, with a recommended monthly print volume of 2,000 pages.
PC and Mobile Connectivity
Standard interfaces consist of Ethernet, near-field communication (NFC), USB 2.0 (for connecting to a single PC), Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct. NFC and Wi-Fi Direct are peer-to-peer network protocols for connecting mobile devices to the printer without either it or them being part of a network or connected to a router. NFC is a touch-to-print feature that, when you tap your smartphone on the hotspot located to the left of the control panel (shown in the image below), prints the active document on your phone. Other mobile connectivity options are Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Mopria, and Brother's iPrint&Scan app for both Android and Apple iOS devices.
You can also connect to both business and individual versions of the following cloud sites: Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive, via the MFC-J5945DW's Web Connect feature accessible from the control panel. Also accessible from the control panel is the ability to scan to or print from USB memory drives, via the port located on the upper-left side of the chassis.
Running With the Pack
Brother rates the MFC-J5945DW at 22 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages and 20ppm for color pages. I tested it over Ethernet from our standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional. With its score of 20ppm, the MFC-J5945DW churned our 12-page Microsoft Word text document at 3.3ppm faster than its predecessor (with an impressive first-page-out time of 6 seconds). This score was also 2.7ppm quicker than the MFC-J6945DW, 5.6ppm ahead of Epson's WF-7720, and 3.4ppm behind HP's 7720.
For my next test, I printed several multifaceted and multicolor Acrobat PDFs, Excel spreadsheets and charts, and PowerPoint handouts consisting of text and embedded business graphics. I then combined these results with those from printing the 12-page monochrome text document from the previous test and came up with a score of 11.9ppm for printing our entire suite of 27 business documents. These results were close to 2ppm faster than the other wide-format AIOs discussed here.
Superior Print Quality
While all the wide-format AIOs we've looked at over the past few years print well overall, Brother's Business Smart series models, including the MFC-J5945DW, have turned out above-average graphics and photos, as well as highly legible, near-laser-quality text. The full-page Excel and PowerPoint charts and graphs I printed came out with solid backgrounds and gradients that flowed smoothly from one tint or color to the next. Hairlines (rules less than 1 point) printed evenly and unbroken from end to end and colors were accurate.
The MFC-J5945DW also turns out nice-looking photos, with brilliant and accurate colors and distinct details. It also supports borderless printing, allowing you to create documents and photos with content that "bleeds" to the edge of the page. As I've pointed out in several inkjet printer reviews, bleeds often provide a more professional-looking finish to marketing documents (and especially photos). Borderless output gives the MFC-J5945DW a leg up on competing color laser AIOs (and some inkjets), which can't print borderless pages of any type.
A Penny Per Page
The MFC-J5945DW is one of Brother's INKvestment Tank brand AIOs, which blend a standard cartridge system and an onboard reservoir configuration. Between the external cartridges and internal tanks, the printer holds a lot of ink. Brother says that the ink cartridges that come with the printer hold, based on a formula of 300 prints per month, 60 percent monochrome pages and 40 percent color pages, up to a year's worth of ink. Frankly, if that's all you print each month, this is probably too much printer for you.
More important than how the printer receives and stores ink is how much that ink costs on a per-page basis. Like the company's other INKvestment Tank models, the MFC-J5945DW churns out letter-size monochrome pages for just less than 1 cent each and color pages for just less than 5 cents. These numbers are considerably less than the Epson and HP wide-format models can manage.
The only wide-format business-oriented AIO I know of with lower running costs is Epson's WorkForce ET-16500, an EcoTank model. While it delivers per-page costs of less than 1 cent for both monochrome and color pages, it lists for about three times more than the MFC-J5945DW, and its much slower and not nearly as robust in terms of features, capacity, and volume.
Tabloid Fodder
The Brother MFC-J5945DW is a highly capable midrange small office printer with the added capability of printing wide-format pages. Brother's flagship MFC-J6945DW, however, also scans, copies, and faxes tabloid-size prints, and it lists for just $50 more. However, if you don't need these functions, why pay for them? If your small office's wide-format document processing doesn't extend beyond printing, the MFC-J5945DW's low printing costs, quality output, and rich feature set make it a solid choice.
The feature-rich Brother MFC-J5945DW is a wide-format inkjet AIO that produces good-looking documents at a very reasonable cost per page.
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