It sure is hard to be an inkjet all-in-one (AIO) printer these days! Compared with our top pick for low-volume home printers, the Canon Pixma TR8520 Wireless Home Office All-in-One, the Brother MFC-J895DW ($129.99) is somewhat leaner in speed and capacity, and its color graphics output is a slight step down. But both printers churn out excellent-looking text and photos, and pack Ethernet ports for connecting to home and small-office networks. The MFC-J895DW is capable for light duty in homes and small offices, but (as we've noted about a few others of its kind), the competition in this class is stiff. A printer of this kind must practically run the board to take home our top nod.
An All-in-One...Like the Other Ones
The Brother MFC-J895DW measures 6.9 by 15.7 by 13.4 inches (HWD) and weighs 18.9 pounds, making it similar in size and weight to the Canon Pixma TR8520, as well as that model's slightly less expensive Pixma TR7520 ($295.00 at Amazon) sibling. Brother also offers the MFC-J775DW, another recent entry-level AIO; it, too, is close in size and girth to the MFC-J895DW, as are several other machines that fall into the small- and home-office (SOHO) class of office AIOs.
As for paper handling, the MFC-J895DW comes with only one input tray. It holds either 100 sheets of standard paper or 20 sheets of premium photo paper. The automatic document feeder (ADF) holds up to 20 sheets, and it does not support auto-duplexing, meaning that it can't scan two-sided sheets without your assistance. The Pixma TR8520 ($319.99 at Amazon) comes with two trays that support 100 pages each, and the Brother MFC-775DW's single tray, like the MFC-J895DW's, holds 100 pages. All three have ADFs that hold up to 20 sheets.
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The maximum monthly (and recommended monthly) print volumes are trickier to compare. Brother, like a few other makers of entry-level AIOs of late, has opted not to publish a monthly volume rating for the MFC-J895DW. From my experience, it looks as though it could easily handle a thousand or so pages each month, but, as you'll see coming up, this AIO's running cost makes it prohibitive to print anywhere close to that amount. (Most other models in its price range have the same issue.)
You perform configuration and walkup tasks, such as making copies or sending faxes, from the control panel. Aside from a handful of buttons—Power, Home, Back, NFC, and Cancel—the panel consists primarily of a 2.2-inch touch screen. During my tests, I found it intuitive and easy to navigate, though the screen is little small.
Connections Galore, and Strong Software
Connectivity on the Brother MFC-J895DW consists of wired networking, wireless support, and direct-to-USB, with the following interfaces: USB 2.0, for connecting a single PC to the printer; the Ethernet jack I mentioned; 802.11n Wi-Fi (standard fare for printer wireless networking); Wi-Fi Direct; and Near-Field Communications (NFC). Those last two are peer-to-peer networking protocols for connecting your smartphone or tablet to the printer without a local network mediating between the devices.
This printer's support for third-party mobile-connectivity solutions includes Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Mopria (for Android printing), and Brother's own iPrint&Scan. The last is for printing attachments from or scanning to mobile devices. You also get Brother's Print Service Plugin for Android. Not enough connectivity options yet? On the left side of the chassis, across from the bin where the ink cartridges go, you'll find a port for USB thumb drives and a slot for SD cards.
If the ability to print from and scan to the largest number of devices and cloud sites is important to you, the MFC-J895DW is a strong pick among its peers. It delivers just about every reasonable connection option you could expect in a printer of its price class. Given this little AIO's modest price and strong feature set, you wouldn't expect the manufacturer to throw in a strong software and utility bundle, too. But the MFC-J895DW comes with Brother's standard smorgasbord, which is saying something.
For starters, you get Brother ControlCenter4, which is an outstanding scanner interface that allows you to define and manage your scan jobs in just about every way you can imagine, including creating workflow profiles that specify destinations, resolutions, and file formats. You also get Nuance PaperPort 14 SE with OCR. This is a popular document-management program for archiving and subsequently locating important files, as well as for optical character recognition (OCR), converting scanned text to editable text.
On-Point Performance
In terms of print speeds, the lower-end AIOs discussed in this review are rated rather far apart by their manufacturers. But it's surprising how close to one another they performed on our real-world tests.
Brother rates the MFC-J895DW for speeds of 12 monochrome pages per minute (ppm) and 10ppm color. I tested it over Ethernet using our standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional. When printing our 12-page monochrome Microsoft Word document, the MFC-J895DW churned at 11.8ppm, or just a whisker under its rating.
That's 1ppm slower than the Editors' Choice Canon Pixma TR8520, 1.6ppm slower than the Pixma TR7520, and 1.8ppm faster than the Brother MFC-J775DW. That's a tight grouping. When we look at the results when printing our more complex Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing business graphics and photos, the differences become even less pronounced.
The MFC-J895DW printed all 26 pages of our test documents at a rate of 4.4ppm. This is the slowest number in this test group, but by a mere tenth of a page per minute. The Canon Pixma TR8520 and Pixma TR7520, at 4.7ppm, are the "fastest" of the group, but the spread from first to last is just 0.3ppm. They're all essentially tied.
Furthermore, the MFC-J895DW printed our two 4-by-6-inch sample snapshots in an average of 32 seconds each. This time, our test unit hit the fastest print speed of the lot, if by only a few seconds. (At 37 seconds, the Pixma TR7520 was the slowest.)
Print Quality: On Par
One thing that the MFC-J895DW and its competitors must contend with is a uniform level of print-quality excellence across the field. Simply printing and copying well isn't enough to make them stand out—those are the table stakes nowadays. Nearly all printers in this price range print well. Finding one that doesn't is unusual.
That said, the MFC-J895DW churns out terrific-looking text at both small and large point sizes. Our standard serif and sans serif pages were legible down to point sizes I couldn't make out with the naked eye, although the printer didn't perform quite as well with some of the decorative fonts I use in testing.
For the most part, business graphics I printed came out looking good, too, except for some occasional banding in dark backgrounds and dark fills. Otherwise, our PowerPoint handouts and Excel charts looked fine. It's important to point out, though, that this is not the printer for churning out large stacks of handouts. The print speeds are too slow, and its per-print costs are too high.
The MFC-J895DW prints great-looking photos, especially when you push the settings to high quality and use glossy or matte photo paper. It's not unusual for inkjet printers at this (and most other) levels to print photos well, though. These entry-level, so-called "office" printers are often used in family and home-office settings, where photo printing is an expected part of the machine's job description.
Runaway Running Costs
You've surely heard that inkjet makers earn their profit from selling ink, not printers. Among entry-level AIOs, this is largely true; these printers have some of the highest costs per page. And the MFC-J895DW is up there: around 6 cents for monochrome pages, and 16.5 cents for color pages.
The competing Canon Pixma TR8520 and TR7520 are both five-ink printers, which makes calculating their precise running costs difficult. But suffice it to say that both models' costs are close to those of the Brother MFC-J895DW, if a little cheaper on monochrome pages (what most offices print more of).
You can cut your printing costs significantly by opting for one of Brother's INKvestment models, such as the MFC-J775DW discussed here. It costs a bit more than the MFC-J895DW, but its running costs are 1 cent for monochrome pages and just under 5 cents for color pages. Granted, you give up few features, such as NFC and a color touch screen, but using your printer is a lot less expensive.
Know Your Print Volume
The Brother MFC-J895DW is the type of printer that some families and small offices would buy, set up, and subsequently use just once in a while after its initial use. It may sit idle for weeks or months at a time. Conversely, an uninformed buyer might purchase it, attracted by the price, only to discover before long that it's not enough printer and costs far too much to use day in and day out. The point: While the MFC-J895DW and its ilk may cost only $100 or so, it's important to shop carefully and know your print-volume needs.
Though by the numbers in its name, it sounds like it's well up in Brother's inkjet line, the MFC-J895DW is still a low-volume printer. It's best suited to environments that don't print or copy more than about 100 pages each month. So, consider that for just $20 or so more, you can pick up Brother's INKvestment-branded MFC-J775DW and print hundreds of pages, month in and month out, at a fraction of the per-page cost. You'll give up the NFC function, a nice touch screen, support for memory cards, and a few other features, but if you don't need them, that INKvestment model will be a better value.
An entry-level, office-oriented AIO printer, Brother's MFC-J895DW prints well, churns competitively quickly, and packs some higher-end features for the price. Its running costs, though, relegate it to low-volume duties.
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