Brother MFC-J6930DW Review (2024)

Not long ago, A3 (tabloid, or 11-by-17-inch) all-in-one (AIO) printers, such as the Editors' Choice HP OfficeJet Pro 7740, were somewhat rare, and expensive. But not anymore. One reason is that a few years ago Brother made them a staple in its Business Smart Pro line, which includes the MFC-J6930DW ($299.99) reviewed here. Like the HP model, the MFC-J6930DW comes with two big paper input trays, a single-pass auto-duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF), and a slew of mobile connectivity features. This Brother AIO prints well overall, with competitively low running costs, and it's relatively fast, but its graphics output could be better. Despite costing a little more upfront, but with lower running costs overall, the MFC-J6930DW is a viable alternative to the OfficeJet 7740 for low-to-moderate volume printing in a small or micro office or workgroup.

A Sturdy, Well-Built Workhorse

At 18.8 by 22.6 by 14.7 inches (HWD) with its trays closed and weighing 51.6 pounds, the MFC-J6930DW ($1,259.00 at Amazon) is a few inches taller and about 9 pounds heavier than the HP 7740. Both models come with two 250-sheet drawers, but the Brother model does the OfficeJet 7740 one better with the addition of a 100-sheet multipurpose tray that extends out from the back of the chassis. In addition, both machines also come with single-pass ADFs that scan both sides of two-sided multipage documents simultaneously, but the MFC-J6930DW's ADF holds up to 50 pages, while the HP 7740's ADF holds only 35.

The Epson WorkForce WF-7620 (which has been around for a few years but is still readily available) is a few inches longer from front to back, but then it prints pages up to 13-by-19 inches. It, too, has two 250-sheet paper drawers, as well as a single-sheet multipurpose tray. Its 35-page ADF supports the older style reversing auto-duplexing ADF that scans one side of two-sided documents, pulls the sheet back in to the mechanism, flips it, and then scans the other side, as does its WF-7610 sibling, which is essentially the same as the WF-7620, except that it comes with only one 250-sheet paper drawer and a one-sheet multipurpose tray.

Both the MFC-J6930DW and HP 7740 have 30,000-page maximum monthly duty cycles, but the MFC-J6930DW's recommended monthly print volume is 2,000 pages, compared with the OfficeJet 7740's 1,500 pages. The Epson WF-7620 and WF-7610, as well as the Epson WorkForce ET-16500 EcoTank Wide-Format All-in-One Supertank Printer (another AIO capable of printing 13-by-19-inch pages), have 20,000-page duty cycles. (The ET-16500, as an EcoTank brand model, comes with thousands of pages worth of ink, and, as a result, it lists for $999.)

You configure the MFC-J6930DW, as well as connect to cloud sites and perform other walkup tasks, such as printing from and scanning to USB thumb drives, from a spacious control panel that consists of a handful of buttons—power, Back, Home, an NFC hotspot, and Cancel, as well as a number pad—anchored by a 3.7-inch color touch screen. The USB port is located on the front-left side of the chassis, next to the control panel.

To print, scan, and copy wide-format documents, an AIO must be large enough to accommodate oversize paper—in this case, tabloid-size. To save space on the AIO's depth, Brother designed the MFC-J6930DW so that it stores paper and prints pages in landscape, or wide, orientation, which has no effect on performance and print quality, though it does seem a little odd, until you get used to it.

Pick a Connection, Any Connection

Like most printers in this class, and especially Brother's Business Smart Pro AIOs, the MFC-J6930DW takes a kitchen-sink approach to deploying connectivity technologies, starting with the basics—Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and connecting to a single PC via USB. You also get the two popular peer-to-peer networking protocols, Wi-Fi Direct and near-field communication (NFC), for connecting your mobile devices to the AIO without it or your laptop, tablet, or smartphone being networked through a router.

Other mobile connectivity features—such as AirPrint, Brother iPrint&Scan, Google Cloud Print, and Mopria—abound, as well as both the business and personal iterations of numerous popular cloud sites, including Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, OneDrive, and OneNote, as well as Web app connectors for Facebook and Flickr. Brother also provides several other cloud-centric Web apps for just about every scenario.

In addition to the Brother printer and scanner drivers, the software bundle includes Scansoft PaperPort 14 SE with OCR for Windows, and Mac users get Presto! PageManager. OCR, of course, stands for optical character recognition, which converts scanned text to editable text, and both PaperPort and PageManager provide document management features for archiving and retrieving your scanned (and all other) document pages.

It's also important to note that Brother backs up your purchase with a two-year limited warranty, and phone tech support is available for the life of the printer.

Running at the Front of the Pack

Brother rates the MFC-J6930DW at 22 letter-size pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages and 20ppm for color, compared with the HP 7740's 22ppm-black and 18ppm-color ratings. (I tested over Ethernet using our standard Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.) The Brother AIO printed our 12-page monochrome all-text document at 19ppm—3ppm lower than its rating, yet 0.5ppm faster than the OfficeJet 7740. Both machines, though, were significantly faster than the ET-16500's 4.7ppm. Both the WF-7610 and WF-7620 were tested with a discontinued benchmarking methodology, making comparing their print speed here impractical. If, on the other hand, you don't need wide-format printing, another of our top pick AIOs, the Epson WorkForce WF-4740, churned at 27.3ppm on this portion or our tests.

As most printers do, the MFC-J6930DW slowed down considerably when printing our Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing color, graphics, and photos. (Our color text pages are much more complex and many of them contain considerably higher percentages of ink coverage than the pages printer makers use to rate their machines; hence, I didn't expect the MFC-J6930DW to come close to Brother's ratings on this portion of our tests.) It's also important to note that the print times reported here are for standard letter-size (8.5-by-11-inch) pages, not tabloid-size.

That said, when I combined the results from the 12-page text document in the previous test with the scores from printing our color test documents, the MFC-J6930DW churned at the rate of 12.3ppm, which is almost 3ppm faster than the HP 7740 and about 8ppm faster than the Epson ET-16500. As for the WF-4740, it managed 15.1ppm at this point in our tests.

The MFC-J6930DW printed our sample snapshots in 8 seconds, compared with the HP 7740's 35 seconds. When, however, I turned on borderless printing and told the driver that the printer was loaded with premium glossy photo paper, the Brother model took 2 minutes, 2 seconds to print our test photos—but, as you'll see in the next section, the results were worth waiting for. The ET-16500 averaged 43 seconds, and the WF-4740 averaged 12 seconds.

Excellent Text and Photos

Overall, the MFC-J6930DW's print quality is good, though I did see some issues with full-page business graphics. But first let's talk about text output. As I've seen with most Brother business-centric AIOs, text quality is pristine, very much resembling laser printer output with well-shaped, highly legible characters down to the smallest point size we test, 4 points. Granted, I need magnification to see it, but even so, it looks highly legible.

Graphics, too, look good, but several of our full-page Excel charts and PowerPoint handouts have very thin but distinct lines running across them in several evenly spaced locations, as though the print engine skipped a beat (though a small one) or started over every couple inches or so. In no way, though, are these lines thick enough to mar or detract from the impact of the graphic, but they are noticeable.

On the other hand, the MFC-J6930DW prints terrific-looking photos, on both good quality inkjet paper and high-end premium photo paper. In fact, the images I printed on the latter are very well-detailed and vibrantly colored, superior to what you'd get from the corner drug store. But since this is a business printer, the ability to print flawless graphics rather than photos is preferable.

Competitive Running Costs

Many of Brother's Business Smart Pro AIOs, such as the MFC-J5830DW XL, are what the company calls INKvestment AIOs, where you pay more upfront for the printer itself to save on the ongoing cost of ink. While the MFC-J6930DW isn't an INKvestment AIO, its per-page running costs, at 1.7 cents for black pages and 7.4 cents for color pages, are still quite competitive.

The HP 7740, for instance, delivers running costs of 2.1 cents per black page and 8.1 cents per color page, and Epson's WF-7620 and WF-7610 costs 3.2 cents per monochrome page and 11.4 cents per color page to use. The WF-4740's running costs are 1.9 cents per black page and 8.2 cents per color page, and the ET-16500's per page operating costs are less than 1 cent for both monochrome and color pages.

A Lot to Like

The Brother MFC-J6930DW is a capable office AIO with the ability to print, copy, scan, and fax tabloid-size pages. Its running costs are lower than our current top pick tabloid-capable AIO, the HP OfficeJet Pro 7740, with a big enough cost-per-page difference between them to justify choosing the Brother model over the OfficeJet—unless, that is, your application calls for the ability to churn out pristine business graphics. The HP AIO is a better choice for that.

In addition, while both the Epson WF-7620 and WF-7610 are capable AIOs, since they've been out for so long, their running costs are excessive—Epson needs to update its wide-format WorkForce models. On the other hand, the MFC-J6930DW is more than suitable for in-house handouts and reports, making it a strong alternative to the OfficeJet Pro 7740 for up to mid-volume wide-format printing in a small or micro office or workgroup.