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Brother MFC-J470DW

M. David Stone
 & M. David Stone Contributing Editor

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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Brother MFC-J470DW - All-in-One Printers
4.0 Excellent

The Bottom Line

With speed, office-friendly features, and a low price, the Brother MFC-J470DW inkjet multifunction printer is our top choice for a micro or home office.
Best Deal£359.99

Buy It Now

£359.99

Pros & Cons

    • Prints, scans, copies, and faxes.
    • Integrated Wi-Fi.
    • Duplexer for two-sided printing.
    • Automatic document feeder.
    • Fast.
    • No wired network support.
    • Low paper capacity.

Brother MFC-J470DW Specs

Color or Monochrome 1-pass color
Connection Type USB
Connection Type Wireless
Cost Per Page (Color) 11.3 cents
Maximum Scan Area Letter
Maximum Standard Paper Size Legal
Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) 2,500 pages per month
Number of Ink Colors 4
Print Duplexing
Scanner Optical Resolution 1200 pixels per inch
Scanner Type Flatbed with ADF (Standard or Optional)
Standalone Copier and Fax Fax
Type All-in-one
All Specs

If you need an inexpensive multifunction printer (MFP) for your micro or home office, be sure to take a look at the Brother MFC-J470DW ($99.99). Basically a more capable version of the discontinued Brother MFC-J430w, the MFC-J470DW($179.00 at Amazon) delivers significantly faster speed with essentially the same output quality. It also adds a duplexer for two-sided printing. That's easily good enough for it to replace the Brother MFC-J430w as Editors' Choice for a budget MFP for a micro or home office.

Like most inkjet MFPs in its price range, the MFC-J470DW can serve in the dual role of home and home-office printer. Like the Canon Pixma MX472 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer($249.95 at Amazon) and the Epson WorkForce WF-2530, it focuses more on office use than home use.

One clear indication of its office-centric focus is that the printer offers faxing and an automatic document feeder (ADF) along with its duplexer. All three features are most useful for an office. It also lacks photocentric features that would be more important for home use. It offers no PictBridge support and no way to print photos directly from a memory card or USB memory key.

Basics and Setup

Basic MFP features include the ability to print and fax from, as well as scan to, a PC, along with the ability to work as a standalone copier and fax machine. For originals that can't fit through the 20-page ADF, it offers a letter-size flatbed.

Wired connectivity is limited to USB. The Wi-Fi support will, in theory, let you share the printer in a micro office, but there's limited paper capacity, with a 100-sheet tray and no upgrade options. A better reason for connecting by Wi-Fi is that you can then both print from the cloud and print from or scan to a mobile device, using Brother's free apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

Brother MFC-J470DW

Speed and Quality

For my tests, I installed the printer on a Windows Vista system using a USB connection. Setup was typical for an inkjet. On our business applications suite, I timed the MFC-J470DW (using DisplayMate's hardware and software for timing), at 4.9 pages per minute (ppm), which makes it far faster than the Canon MX472, at 2.3 ppm, or the Epson WF-2530, at 2.6 ppm. It's even a bit faster than the Brother MFC-J430w, at 4.3 ppm. Photo speed was also good, averaging 59 seconds for a 4-by-6 print.

Output quality is typical for an inkjet overall, with text and graphics good enough for most business purposes and photos good enough for most home users.

Text quality falls at the bottom of a tight range for most inkjets. I wouldn't use it for an important presentation where I was trying to make the best possible impression, but it's good enough for most day-to-day business use.

Graphics quality is a touch below the level where most inkjets fall, but it's good enough for most business use, including PowerPoint handouts and the like. Photos in my tests were standard for an inkjet MFP; roughly what you would expect from reasonably good-quality drugstore prints.

Brother MFC-J470DW

Another plus for the MFC-J470DW is its low claimed cost per page for a printer in its price range. It comes to 3.8 cents for a black-and-white page and 11.3 cents for a color page, the same as for the Brother MFC-J430w. The more pages you print, the more money you'll save compared with the competition.

If you're particularly concerned about text quality, you might prefer the Brother MFC-J430w (still available from some third-party retailers), which scored just a tad better than the Brother MFC-J470DW for text on our tests. And if you want to print from your mobile device, be sure to take a look at the Canon Pixma MX472, which will let you connect directly from your phone or tablet via Wi-Fi. For most people, however, the MFC-J470DW is the obvious choice for personal MFP in a home or micro office, with its fast speed, low cost per page, and range of MFP features. 

Best Printer Picks

Further Reading

Final Thoughts

Brother MFC-J470DW - All-in-One Printers

Brother MFC-J470DW Review

4.0 Excellent

With speed, office-friendly features, and a low price, the Brother MFC-J470DW inkjet multifunction printer is our top choice for a micro or home office.

Get It Now
Best Deal£359.99

Buy It Now

£359.99

About Our Expert

M. David Stone

M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

My Experience

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I've covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I've written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who worked on every "Project Printer" blockbuster PCMag ever produced, often writing 15 or more reviews for the year's big printer blowout. (I snuck in a single review one year when I was writing a book, strictly so I could keep that claim alive.)

I've always worked for PCMag as a freelancer, which has freed me to take time away to write nine books, be a major contributor to four others, and write for other publications, including Wired, Computer Shopper, Projector Central, and Science Digest, where I was Computers Editor. I also wrote a computer column at one point for The Newark Star-Ledger.

Although I started my career primarily as a science (mostly physics and astronomy) and science-fiction writer (published in Analog), my non-computer-related work runs the gamut from the Project Data Book for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (written for GE's Astro-Space Division) to the script for a video overview of a top company in the gaming industry (that would be gambling, not video games). My books include The Underground Guide to Color Printers (Addison-Wesley), Troubleshooting Your PC (Microsoft Press), and Faster, Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press).

Having covered a wide range of subjects, I've developed a serial expertise in many of them. The ones most relevant to my current work at PCMag.com are all imaging technologies.

The Technology I Use

I buy new PCs for my writing desk infrequently, because it takes a week or more to customize the settings the way I want them. At the moment, I have an HP Envy tower running Windows 10, but it's old enough to have a Windows 7 sticker on it. Its latest lease on a longer life is courtesy of a newly installed 500GB Samsung SSD 870 EVO.

Elsewhere in my house is an assortment of older and newer PCs. The older ones are dedicated to specific tasks, like the one I've been using to slowly digitize all the paper stored in my filing cabinets, while the newer ones are testbeds for printer and projector reviews.

For writing, I use Microsoft Word 2003, because I find it too annoying to take my hands off the keyboard to give mouse commands using the Ribbon. My workhorse printers are a Xerox Phaser 6280 color laser and a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo for labels and stamps. I also have a Canon Pixma iP8720 for printing photos, and a Canon ImageFormula DR-C225 for scanning.

My first computer was bought to replace my IBM Selectric for writing. After rejecting both the IBM PC (which had just been introduced) and the Apple II because of the keyboards, I chose a Vector Graphics Vector 3 CP/M machine with dual floppies. The first MS-DOS machine I was willing to use for writing was the IBM AT, with its much-improved keyboard compared with the original PC and its gargantuan 20MB hard drive.

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