Review: Brother DCP-T500W

Brother DCP-T500W

MRP: Rs 12,150

It seems like every printer manufacturer is on the “separate ink tanks” bandwagon, and Brother is no exception. Brother has been in the printer and MFD industry for quite some time and has usually catered more to offices than to home users. The DCP-T500W also targets SoHo consumers, but it has features such as a considerably affordable pricing, wireless connectivity, and photo printing that should also entice home users. I had a chance to review the unit. So let’s find out how well it fares.

 

 

Bundle

• Brother DCP-T500W
• 5 Ink bottles (C, M, Y, 2xBK)
• USB data cable
• Power cord
• Drivers and utility disc
• Quick Setup Guide
• Warranty card

 

All the necessary cables have been provided and you will not need to purchase anything separately. An OCR software was not provided with this MFD.
 

Features

The Brother DCP-T500W is a colour inkjet multifunction printer. It comes in an all-black plastic body. Most of the surface has a matte finish, which doesn’t catch fingerprints, while some areas have a fine pattern, which also doesn’t attract dust. The device dimensions are 43.5 (W) x 37.4 (D) x 16.1 (H) cm and it weighs 7.1 kg. The build quality is very good.

 

This is an inkjet printer with four ink tanks – one each for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Brother even provides an extra black ink bottle to double your black printing mileage. The ink tanks are located in a compartment with a transparent plastic door on the front left of the device. Each ink tank has a rubber cap fixed at one end so it shouldn’t fall off. The ink tanks are transparent at the front to allow easy visual monitoring of ink levels. The maximum printing resolution of the printer is 1200 (horizontal) x 6000 (vertical) dpi.

 

 

The printer opens up like a car bonnet to expose the printing mechanism. This also exposes the USB port where you can plug in the USB cable and channel it out via the provided channel before closing the device.

 

The input tray is a removable cassette that can completely slide out and detach from the printer. It has a lid that opens up and you can place a stack of up to 100 papers. The various paper sizes supported are A4, A5, A6, Exe, Letter, Legal, Photo 4x6" (102x152mm), Index Card (127x203mm), Photo-2L (127x178mm), C5 Envelope, Com-10, DL Envelope, and Monarch.

 

 

 

The output tray is nothing but a couple of flaps, which open out just above the input tray. This tray can hold up to 50 sheets. The input and output tray capacities are good enough for SoHo users.

 

 

 

The input tray accepts paper face down with leading edge in, which comes out face up with leading edge out in the output tray.

 

A rear door has been provided to take care of hard to clear paper jams if they ever occur.

 

 

 

A flatbed type scanner is present on top, capable of scanning in colour and monochrome at up to 1200x2400 dpi. The scanner is VIA as well as TWAIN compliant. The scanner lid can be lifted a bit to allow you to scan books. The maximum vertical paper size is A4, while it is Letter for horizontal.

 

 

The control panel is placed at the front and is at a fixed angle for convenient reading and usability. A single line 7-segment LCD screen is provided to display numeric values. There are separate buttons for colour and monochrome copying. There is a scan button to scan directly to the computer as an email, image, or a PDF file. The LCD is flanked by buttons to adjust copy settings. You can print up to 99 copies, at sizes 25% to 400% in increments of 1%, and even compress 2 or 4 pages into one. The maximum printing resolution of the copier is 1200x2400 dpi. A stop button is provided to immediately stop any printing jobs. There is a soft power button to switch off the device, although Brother advises against switching off the device unless required, in order to save ink.

 

 

 

Strangely, Brother has missed out on providing a USB port, which is seen as a basic feature today. The printer also doesn’t support PictBridge.

 

Software

The printer driver allows you to exercise great control over the device as you can see in the below screenshots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The scanner utility allows you to set the default scan resolution to be used while scanning from the PC.

 

 

The Control Center 4 is a utility that lets you print and scan from one application.

 

Also installed is the Brother Utilities, which is a frontend for all the various software that is provided with the device.

 

 

 

Being Wi-Fi connected, the company also has mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, which lets you print and scan right from your phone. Although rudimentary, this app can be developed and looks promising. As of now, it can print documents and photos present in the mobile device and not from other devices on the network.

 

Performance

Installing the drivers was very easy and straightforward. I tried installing the device using direct USB cable connection as well as via Wi-Fi. Both the installations are easy to do. Some may find it a bit of a challenge to install via Wi-Fi, especially because you are required to enter password using up and down direction buttons, which is really a pain because you have to scroll through all the ASCII characters to arrive at the one characters you need, and you need to do this for all the characters of your Wi-Fi password. There is no way around this due to the lack of any other convenient keypad on the device’s control panel and you are therefore required to go through this one time pain.

 

This MFD enters the ready state in just about 15 seconds, which is very fast.

 

I put the MFD through a variety of tests to test its printer as well as scanner components. I used the rear input tray to feed paper to this MFD.

 

Font size printing test: I printed a page containing all the letters in font sizes ranging from large to very small. Standard quality was selected. The print quality at all font sizes is pretty good.
 

Text print speed: I printed a page of black text in draft and normal quality to find the speed as well as quality of the print. The first page took 16 seconds in draft mode and 17.2 seconds in standard. The draft mode printing speed reached 14.3 ppm, while it reached 10 ppm for standard mode. These are fast printing speeds. The print quality is good in the standard as well as draft mode. In fact, you might want to print in draft mode as the default print quality mode.
 

Presentation document speed: This consisted of a page of multi-coloured graphs, text, charts, patterns, and photos. The first print took 33 seconds in draft mode, while it took 35 seconds at standard quality. The maximum printing speeds in draft and standard modes were found to be 3 ppm and 4.6 ppm respectively. Once again, the print quality is quite good in standard as well as draft printing quality mode.
 

Photo print: This is the test I am always waiting for whenever I test any printer because it shows its usability to a home user who is likely to want to print some photos. The A4-size photo took 5 minutes 27 seconds to print, which is pretty long when compared to other printers. The image contained all the details, but the colour reproduction is a problem area for this printer. The print has a heavy yellow and red tint, which spoils the photo quality.

 

Scanner test: The scanner performance was found to be quite good. It captures all the fine details very well and also captures the colours very faithfully. The preview scan took just 11 seconds for the first page but the subsequent pages took almost double the time. Thus, if you plan to use this to scan multiple pages, then it is going to take a whole lot of time to do so. Monochrome scan of an A4 page at 200 dpi took just 9.8 seconds, while a colour scan at 600 dpi took an much longer at 2 minutes 1 seconds.

 

Copier test: The copier test tries to find how well the printer and scanner components work in tandem. Black copies took 27.2 seconds for the first copy, while the consecutive copies took just 11.3 seconds each with a maximum of 5.3 ppm. A thing that I noticed was that the copy had a dark hue even on the white areas when I tried to increase the quality from normal to best. This looked similar to a photocopy from a faulty photocopy machine. The mono copy is a little fainter than what one would have desired.

Colour copies took 44.2 seconds for the first copy, while the consecutive copies took 28 seconds each, reaching a maximum speed of 2.1 ppm. Thus, this device is decently fast in mono copying, but slow as a colour copier.

 

The printer is considerably silent during most of the operations. It was also noticed that you can print and scan at the same time, which is a quite interesting and printing feature not seen in many other MFDs.

 

Power Consumption

The power consumption in sleep mode is 1 W, while it is 2 W in standby mode. This increased to 7 W while scanning, 9 W while printing, and peaked at 12 W while copying. This is a very economical MFD as far as electricity consumption is concerned.
 

My Verdict

From the performance point of view, the Brother DCP-T500W is a very good for SoHo and even home users as far as general printing, copying, and scanning is concerned. Wi-Fi connectivity makes it interesting because you can place it anywhere within the range of your Wi-Fi router and print from various devices on the network. The overall print quality is quite good in even in draft quality. Sadly, the photo quality is disappointing due to bad colour reproduction, even though it does reproduce all the fine details.

 

It uses four separate ink tanks and is therefore more economical as they can be individually refilled and produce better prints due to control over four different colours. The cost of printing is economical as well, at least on paper. The cost of each colour ultra high yield ink bottle is Rs 440, while that of the black ink bottle is Rs 600. Each colour bottle is rated to produce 5000 prints, while the black bottle, which is larger, is rated to print 6000. The cost of monochrome printing comes out to a very economical 10 paise per page. Colour printing also works out to almost the same cost per page, which makes this device a very viable investment for small businesses and home users.

 

Brother provides two toll-free numbers – one for BSNL and MTNL users, and another for the rest. It comes with a 1-year warranty or 30,000 pages of printing – whichever is earlier. Priced at Rs.12,150, this is a slightly expensive considering that it is not a photo printer and doesn’t have fax capabilities. Nevertheless, it is still a worthwhile buy for reasons I have mentioned earlier.

 

Pros: Good print quality and speed, Wi-Fi, Four independent refillable ink tanks, Very economical printing cost, Extra black printing ink bottle.

Cons: Disappointing colour reproduction in photo printing, No PictBridge, USB port, or card reader for direct printing.

 

Features: 3.5/5

Performance: 3.5/5

Ease of use: 4/5

Economy of printing: 5/5

Price: 3.5/5

Overall Rating: 4/5