The Brother MFC-J690DW ($119.99) is an entry-level all-in-one (AIO) printer designed for home offices, small offices, and workgroups. As a business-centric inkjet that prints, copies, scans, and faxes, it's similar in features and close in price to our Editors' Choice, the Canon Pixma TR8520 Wireless Home Office All-in-One. Though the MFC-J690DW prints at a relatively snappy pace for the price, it costs too much (in terms of ink) for frequent use, like most other so-called budget AIOs in this class. Given its high running costs and pared-down paper capacity, it fits best for offices that have light print and copy needs.
A Petite Office-Centric AIO
At 6.8 by 15.7 by 13.4 inches (HWD) and weighing 18.1 pounds, the MFC-J690DW ($309.00 at Amazon) comes in a little smaller than the Pixma TR8520, but they weigh about the same. The MFC-J690DW is also a few inches smaller in all directions than the Epson WorkForce WF-2860 All-in-One Printer and the HP OfficeJet Pro 6978 All-in-One Printer, the latter model being another PCMag top choice.
Paper handling is a bit pedestrian on the MFC-J690DW. It comes with one 100-sheet input tray, as well as a 20-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning, copying and faxing. Its maximum monthly duty cycle is 2,500 pages, with a recommended print volume of up to 1,000 pages. Compared with the Pixma TR8520's 200 sheets from two drawers, the WorkForce WF-2860's 150 sheets from one drawer, and the OfficeJet 6978's 225 sheets from one drawer, the MFC-J690DW's input capacity is small. The ADF capacity is a bit more competitive; aside from the OfficeJet 6978 ($390.00 at Amazon) and its 35-sheet ADF, the other models mentioned so far (from Canon and Epson) handle only 20 sheets at a time, too.
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As for these competitors and their duty cycles, the WorkForce WF-2860 ($167.00 at Amazon) is rated at 5,000 pages per month maximum (with 800 pages per month recommended), while the OfficeJet 6978 is rated for 20,000 pages max. (Canon doesn't publish duty-cycle ratings for its consumer inkjets.)
You can make configuration changes and initiate walkup tasks, such as running copies or scanning to the cloud, from the MFC-J690DW's 2.7-inch color display. Aside from a handful of buttons, the LCD comprises the entire control panel. In addition to the physical control panel, you can also set up, monitor, and operate certain aspects of this printer, as well as check the ink levels, from its web-based (HTTPS) configuration interface.
Connectivity and Software
Considering the MFC-J690DW's price, its connection options and software bundle are adequate, not standouts.
Its basic connectivity features comprise Wi-Fi and connecting to a single PC via USB. You also get support for Wi-Fi Direct, for connecting your smartphone or tablet directly to your printer without either it or the mobile device being connected to a network or router. Other mobile-connectivity options include Google Cloud Print, Apple AirPrint, Brother iPrint&Scan, Mopria, and support for a slew of third-party cloud sites, such as Google Drive for Business and OneDrive for Business.
Most Brother AIOs these days come with a decent collection of software applications. Often among them is Nuance PaperPort with OCR, for archiving your scanned documents and converting them to editable text, as well as Brother's own ControlCenter scanner interface. The next model up Brother's line from the MFC-J690DW, the MFC-J895DW , comes with these programs and a few others, while the MFC-J690DW, which lists for $10 less, does not. That's a consideration to make if OCR is an important reason why you're buying an AIO. You do get Brother's Cloud Apps, which include Scan to Word, Scan to Excel, Scan to PowerPoint, Scan to Searchable PDF, and Easy Scan to E-mail.
Fast Enough for Its Class
Like the MFC-J895DW, the MFC-J690DW is rated by Brother at 12 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages. I tested it using our standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10.
When printing our 12-page monochrome Microsoft Word text document, it churned at 10.6ppm. That's about 1.5ppm behind its rating and another 1ppm or so slower than its sibling, the MFC-J895DW. The 15ppm-rated Canon Pixma TR8520 came in about 4.5 pages faster than the MFC-J690DW, as did the Epson WorkForce WF-2860, and the HP OfficeJet 6978 beat them all, at 16.9ppm.
{{ZIFFIMAGE id="152477" notable nopopup align="left"> See How We Test Printers
When I combined the scores from the previous 12-page Word document test with those from printing our colorful Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing graphics and photos, the MFC-J690DW's print speed plummeted (as most machines' do on this test) by more than 50 percent, to 4.1ppm. That's 0.3ppm slower than its MFC-J895DW sibling, 0.6ppm slower than the Pixma TR8520, 3.1ppm slower than the WorkForce WF-2860, and 2.1ppm slower than the OfficeJet 6978.
The MFC-J690DW isn't a photo printer in the same sense as, say, HP's Envy Photo or Canon's Pixma TS models are. As a small- or home-office inkjet printer, however, its duties at times may include printing photographs. Hence, I clocked it printing two highly detailed and vibrant 4-by-6-inch test snapshots.
The MFC-J690DW averaged 30 seconds per photo, which is roughly on par for this group. The MFC-J895DW, for instance, averaged a similar 32 seconds, while the Pixma TR8520 puttered along at a slower 55 seconds.
Strong Text, So-So Graphics
Brother printers typically churn out excellent-looking text and good-looking graphics and photos. (If a Brother model falls down a little, it's usually on imagery rather than text.) Some of the company's higher-end inkjet machines I've looked at recently have delivered superb output all the way around.
In my tests with the MFC-J690DW, text was acceptable for most business applications, but some of the graphics and photo output was spotty at times. I noted some banding in dark backgrounds, large fills, and gradients. One test slide in particular, with a dark-green-to-black gradient background, showed significant streaking and banding, to the extent that some designers might find the slide unusable. I also noticed a few other minor flaws on some other slides and handouts, though nothing quite as marring or serious.
Photos, on the other hand, came out looking well-detailed and accurately colored, if, at times, lacking some of the vibrance of images printed on consumer photo AIOs, such as Canon's Pixma TS8120 All-in-One ($390.52 at Amazon) . But unlike more photo-centric AIOs, the Brother model has an ADF and a few other features that make it more suitable to business environments.
Dearly Priced Ink
As I mentioned earlier, budget AIOs like these are somewhat notorious for their high running costs, based on the per-page outlay for the ink. Using Brother's advertised prices and page yields for its highest-yield MFC-J690DW-compatible cartridges, I calculated the MFC-J690DW's running cost at 5.5 cents per monochrome page. Color pages, meanwhile, should ring up at about 16.3 cents each.
These numbers mimic those of the Epson WorkForce WF-2860, and are a few cents lower than the HP OfficeJet 6978's. The Canon Pixma TR8520, on the other hand, is a five-ink printer, which makes per-page cost comparisons tricky. (The others mentioned here are four-ink models.) But its running costs are roughly the same as the MFC-J690DW's.
Nowadays, of course, you can get lower running costs from a new inkjet printer in a few ways. The most obvious? Buy a more expensive, higher-volume machine. These cost a little more up front, but if you print a lot, you'll make up the difference over time in ink savings, and, in the meantime, you get a faster, more feature-rich machine to boot.
Also helpful are some of today's ink-cost-saving programs. HP's Instant Ink subscription service, for one, delivers ink to your door for as low as 3.5 cents per page, for either black-and-white or color pages. Another, Brother's INKvestment ink-buying model, has you pay more for the printer up front, which holds down both the monochrome- and color-page costs to under 5 cents each.
Also consider Epson's and Canon's EcoTank and MegaTank products—the "bulk ink" approaches that use reservoirs of ink that you fill from bottles or replace as small bags. With these products, you also pay more for the printer (often a lot more) to gain the privilege of cheap ink later, usually under a penny for both monochrome and color pages. With these bulk-tank products, keep in mind that you'll need to print a lot to benefit from the program. What "a lot" means depends on the printer.
A Good AIO...If You Keep It Light
Like most other printer manufacturers, Brother releases its machines in stair-step fashion in terms of paper/ADF capacity, print volume, feature set, and price. Sometimes the price differences between steps are negligible. Sometimes they are both negligible and puzzling.
Take the $10 list-price difference between the Brother MFC-J895DW and Brother MFC-J690DW. With the cheaper model, you give up support for flash-memory devices, included OCR software, and Ethernet and Near-Field Communication (NFC) connectivity. Any one of those options alone could be well worth $10 to many buyers.
Therefore, our advice: Be sure that you won't need these features, now or ever, before pulling the trigger on the Brother MFC-J690DW. Of course, resellers' and online sellers' price dynamics may change the equation on any given day. If you're fine with your AIO printer keeping to very low print volumes (say, under 100 pages a month), with no printing from SD cards or USB thumb drives, the MFC-J690DW will serve you well for the price. That Brother provides a two-year warranty out of the box is a good value incentive, too—the company has faith in its printers. But if you need to churn more pages, look higher up the ladder, to Brother models like the MFC-J895DW, or to some of the Canon Pixma models mentioned earlier.
The Brother MFC-J690DW is a low-volume AIO that prints well enough for homes, home offices, and small offices. It's a capable little machine, but its high running costs limit its monthly tour of duty.
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