Brother MFC-L5915DW Review | PCMag

The Brother MFC-L5915DW is one of the more impressive mono laser printers in its class, as it should be, since it’s priced at the high end of the range, with an MSRP of $929.99. It retails for much less than that, however, at $529.99. It’s true that even at that price, you can find competitors that cost less while offering some advantages. The Canon MF465dw, for one, was faster in our tests for duplex (two-sided) printing. However, the MFC-L5915DW offers a higher maximum paper capacity, and its low running cost can quickly save far more than any difference in initial price. That combination of key strengths, plus a long list of other features, makes it our new Editors’ Choice pick for mono laser all-in-one (AIO) printers for heavy-duty use in medium or large offices or workgroups.

Design: A Heavy-Duty Workhorse

The MFC-L5915DW weighs a substantial 38.3 pounds and measures 19.1 by 19.5 by 18.6 inches (HWD), making it both big and heavy enough that you’ll probably want some help unboxing it. However, the physical setup is easy. The toner cartridge ships inside the printer, already mounted in the separate drum unit. Once the printer’s in place, you only have to remove the packing materials, including from the toner and the drum unit, slide the combined unit back in, and connect the power cord.

Paper handling for printing is better than typical for the price. The base unit includes a 350-sheet capacity, using a 250-sheet drawer and 100-sheet multi-purpose tray, plus automatic duplexing. If you need higher capacity, you can add up to two additional 520-sheet drawers ($203.99 each) for a total 1,390-sheet capacity, up to two 250-sheet drawers ($176.49 each) for a total 850-sheet capacity, or one of each, for a total of 1,120 sheets. You can also add a 15.7-inch-high cabinet stand ($241.99), which converts the printer and any additional trays into a floor-standing unit, and gives you a convenient place to store additional paper.

(Credit: Brother)

For scanning, copying, and faxing, the printer offers a legal-size flatbed and a duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF), which scans both sides of each page at the same time, so it doesn’t slow down for scanning, copying, or faxing duplex pages.

The rating for maximum monthly print duty cycle is 125,000 pages. Keep in mind that the maximum duty cycle is a measure of ruggedness, defined as the most you can print in a month without shortening printer life in terms of the total number pages it can print. The recommended maximum is up to 8,000 pages, with each side of a duplex printed sheet counting as a separate page. As a point of reference, if you add the extra drawers for maximum capacity, and print about half of the pages in duplex, that would let you keep paper refills down to about once a week.

(Credit: Brother)

Driver installation on your PC requires downloading the software from Brother’s site following a straightforward, and mostly automated, setup routine. I choose the recommended full software package for Windows 10, which includes a PCL6 print driver along with Brother’s iPrint&Scan app, and I picked Ethernet for the connection. Alternative choices include BR-Script3 (Brother’s Postscript emulation) for the driver and Wi-Fi or USB for the connection.

For mobile devices, you can download Brother’s mobile app to your phone or tablet, and you can connect to the printer by Wi-Fi Direct or through a Wi-Fi connection to the same network the printer is on.

(Credit: Brother)

The MFC-L5915DW’s low running cost is one of its top attractions. Brother offers a choice of four cartridge capacities with costs per page as low as 1.1 cents for the one with the highest yield (18,000 pages). As discussed in our guide to How to Save Money on Your Next Printer, you’ll want to consider the total cost of ownership, not just running cost, when making comparisons. However, note that if you’re printing thousands of pages per month, just a 1-cent savings per page will quickly make up for a $100 difference in initial price.

One important feature for a printer that’s most likely to be shared in an office or workgroup is secure printing, which can let you avoid the risk of someone seeing sensitive documents sitting in the output tray before you retrieve them. The feature lets you send a file to the printer, while telling the printer not to print it until you enter a PIN at the front panel. Add a third-party HID reader (which can connect to the printer’s USB port), and you can swipe a card instead of entering a PIN. Brother doesn’t sell a card reader, but it does offer a $17.99 accessory for holding the reader on the printer.

(Credit: Brother)

Another welcome extra is that the 5-inch color touch screen includes commands for connecting to Google Drive, Dropbox, and several other online systems for easy scanning to and printing from those sites without going through a PC. It also lets you easily define additional workflows for copying, faxing, scanning, and more from the front panel, offering room for up to eight workflows on each of six custom screens, and six more on two screens that are already partially filled by default commands. That works out to a total of up to 54 additional custom workflows, plus the option to modify the 10 entries that are already defined by default.

Brother MFC-L5915DW Performance: Blazingly Fast for Simplex

Compared with some of its obvious competition—the Lexmark MB3442i, the Canon MF465DW, and the Canon MF462dw—the MFC-L5915DW’s performance on our tests varied significantly for simplex and duplex printing, but it is undeniably quick overall, with stellar simplex speeds and less-impressive duplex ones.

For printing our 12-page Word text file in simplex, all four printers delivered similar first-page out (FPO) times. The 2-second range from fastest to slowest is barely more than a rounding error. For the rest of the file, all four essentially matched their ratings, putting the MFC-L5915DW in a commanding first place. For the full file, including the first page, its 38ppm speed was 7ppm faster than the next-fastest printer. For all pages after the first, we clocked it at 51ppm, extending its lead over the second-fastest printer to 10ppm. In real-world use, the difference in time for a 12-page file wouldn’t be enough to matter, and it might not matter even for an occasional 100-page document. But if most of the documents you print are 100 pages or even longer, the Brother printer’s faster speed gives it the edge.

Essentially the same comment applies for the entire business application suite, which includes Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF documents with photos and graphics. For short documents, the speed differences among these printers is too little to matter. For long documents, the MFC-L5915DW had a clear edge.

For printing the Word file in duplex (results shown in the first chart above), the Brother printer dropped from first place in this group to third place. First and second place go to the two Canon models, which don’t slow down as much as most printers when duplexing. Overall, the duplexing-speed differences from fastest to slowest between the Brother and two Canon models isn’t enough to notice for short documents, and the Lexmark printer’s slower speed isn’t enough to matter. But for documents in the range of 100 pages or more, either Canon printer has a clear advantage, with speeds after the first page of 33ppm and 35ppm compared with 27ppm for the MFC-L5915DW and 19ppm for the MB3442i.

On our photo test, the Brother printer averaged 6 seconds for printing a 4-by-6-inch photo.

Maximum print resolution for the MFC-L5915DW is 1,200-by-1,200dpi, but even with its 600-by-600dpi default setting, its output quality was in the top tier for a mono laser. Every font we test that you’re likely to use in a business document was highly readable at 8 points, one of two stylized fonts with thick strokes was easily readable at 8 points, and another, which is harder to render well, was easily readable at 12 points.

(Credit: Brother)

Graphics output was a solid step below top tier, but good enough for most business use short of boardroom-level reports. Some full-page images in our tests were a little darkened compared with what they should look like, but not by enough to hide any information. I also saw some banding in fills as well as posterization (shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually) in two hard-to-render gradients. But here again, there was no information lost. Similarly, a one-pixel-wide line on a black background was reduced to a dashed line in some segments and was hard to see in others, but was still visible. I saw similar issues with photos on plain paper, including banding and a darkening of the image that hid some shadow detail, but the photo quality overall was roughly equivalent to a 1990s black-and-white newspaper photo.

Switching to 1,200-by-1,200dpi made some of the issues for graphics and photos a little more obvious and others less obvious, but the general description for either resolution is the same.

Verdict: High Capacity and Low Running Cost Is a Winning Combo

All four of the printers mentioned here are well worth considering. The MB3442i won’t churn through as many pages as quickly as any of the other three, but it’s the only one in the group that supports faxing through the cloud, which makes it a solid choice for medical offices and others that need faxing with end-to-end encryption. And while both Canon printers have a higher running cost than the MFC-L5915DW, both offer faster speed for duplexing, which could be enough to prefer either if you print a lot of documents longer than 100 pages and mostly in duplex. Between them, the MF465dw is the faster of the two, while the MF462dw is less expensive.

For most medium or large offices and workgroups with heavy-duty print needs, however, the Brother printer offers a winning combination of low running cost and high capacity. Factor in its other features, from high-quality text output to the customizable touch screen, and that makes it our new Editors’ Choice pick for a heavy-duty-use monochrome laser AIO in a medium or large office or workgroup.