The Brother MFC-J5930DW ($299.99) is one of a small but growing number of color inkjet all-in-one printers for micro and home offices that can print at up to tabloid size (11 by 17 inches). It is slightly smaller and sells at a lower price than the similar Brother MFC-J6935DW, which adds the ability to copy, scan, and fax tabloid-size sheets. Both the MFC-J5930DW and the MFC-J6935DW, which are part of Brother's INKvestment line, have considerably lower running costs than most inkjets, including the Editors' Choice HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 Wide Format All-in-One Printer, but it falls short of that Editors' Choice model in that it is unable to fax or scan wide-format documents. Otherwise the MFC-J5830DW is a good alternative, particularly if keeping your cost per printed page down is paramount.

A Large but Powerful All-in-One

The MFC-J5930DW measures 14.7 by 20.9 by 15.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 45 pounds, large and heavy enough that it will need a table or bench of its own. Standard paper capacity is a generous 600 sheets, split between two 250-sheet trays and a 100-sheet multipurpose feeder. Both tray and feeder support printing at up to tabloid size. It has an auto-duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper, although the duplex printing is limited to letter size; the MFC-J6935DW can automatically print two-sided documents up to 11 by 17 inches. The HP 7740 has a lower capacity of 500 sheets, with two 250-sheet trays that can support up to tabloid-size paper, but it lacks a multipurpose feeder. The printer's maximum monthly duty cycle is 30,000 pages, the same as the MFC-J6935DW and the HP 7740, with a recommended print volume of 2,000 pages.

It includes a letter-size flatbed for scanning, smaller than the MFC-J6935DW's tabloid-size flatbed, plus a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), which supports single-pass duplex (two-sided) scanning of documents up to legal size. The tilt-up front panel hosts a 3.7-inch color touch-screen display and a numeric keypad. To the panel's lower left is a port for a USB thumb drive.

The MFC-J5930DW can connect to a PC via a USB cable, or to a local network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. It can also connect via a direct peer-to-peer connection to a compatible mobile device via Wi-Fi Direct, and supports NFC (Near Field Communication). I did our formal testing over an Ethernet connection with its drivers installed on a PC that runs Windows 10 Professional.

It supports Google Cloud Print, and works with the Brother iPrint&Scan app, and is both AirPrint- and Mopria-compliant to facilitate printing from iOS and Android devices. By using Brother Web Connect, users can scan and upload images to sites such as Box, Brother Cloud Apps, Dropbox, Evernote, Flickr, Google Docs, OneNote, Picasa Web Albums, and Sharepoint Online.

Respectable Speed

I timed the MFC-J5930DW at 16.7 pages per minute (ppm) in printing the text-only (Word) portion of our business applications suite, a little short of the printer's rated black printing speed of 22ppm.The first-page-out time was a zippy 6 seconds. In printing our full business suite, which includes PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel files in addition to the aforementioned Word document, the MFC-J5930DW averaged a solid 11.9ppm. These essentially match the speeds of the Brother MFC-J6935DW, which tested at the same 16.5ppm with the Word document and 12.2ppm for the entire suite. The HP 7740 was considerably faster in printing out the Word document (23.6ppm) but slower with the full suite (9.7ppm). In photo printing, the MFC-J5930DW averaged a respectable 56 seconds per 4-by-6 print, while the 7740 was much faster, at 25 seconds per print.

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Marketing-Quality Output

Output quality is a big plus for the MFC-J5935DW, with excellent text for an inkjet, slightly above-average graphics, and above-par photos. Taken together, the output quality is good enough for use in printing basic marketing materials. Text should be good enough for most any business purpose except for ones requiring unusually small fonts.

Graphics are good enough for PowerPoint handouts, perhaps even going to people you're trying to impress with your professionalism. Some backgrounds looked a touch faded, and I noticed mild banding in a few illustrations. These minor flaws are purely aesthetic and should have no effect on the presentation of information. With photos, there was a slight tint in a monochrome image, and the printer did reasonably well in retaining detail in both bright and dark areas. Most of the prints were of a quality better than what we'd expect from drugstore prints.

Because they use the same INKvestment cartridges, the MFC-J5930DW shares the low running costs of the MFC-J6935DW: 1 cent per black page and 4.7 cents per color page, based on Brother's price and yield figures. These are considerably lower than those of the HP 7740 (2.1 cents per black page and 8.1 cents per color page).

Tabloid-Size Printing

The Brother MFC-J5930DW provides great value in a wide-format all-in-one printer. Its virtues include good speed and output quality, an abundance of connection choices, very low running costs, a good feature set including cavernous paper capacity and a single-pass, two-sided scanner, and the ability to print at up to tabloid size. Unlike the HP Officejet Pro 7740 and the Brother MFC-J6935DW, both Editors' Choice printers, the MFC-J5930DW is limited to copying, scanning, and faxing legal-size documents, while those two models can copy and scan at up to tabloid size. You can get the MFC-J5930DW for slightly less than the MFC-J6935DW, but if you're printing tabloid-size documents, you may well want to scan them, too. Among the printers mentioned here only the HP 7740 and our new Editors' Choice, the Brother MFC-J5930DW, let you do that.

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