Brother DCP-J562DW printer review

A compact and versatile home printer, but marred by Brother’s expensive inks and running costs. We review the  Brother DCP-J562DW. Also see: Best printers 2016.

Also see: Best Black Friday Printer Deals

Brother DCP-J562DW review: Price and UK availability

You can buy the Brother DCP-J562DW direct from Brother for £103.20 inc VAT (£86 ex VAT). Shop around online and you’ll find it cheaper, though. The Brother costs just £85.74 at Amazon UK or £85.36 at Printer Base.

Brother DCP-J562DW review: Build and design

Brother’s new DCP-J562DW is a compact inkjet printer that is well suited for use at home, but its high running costs may make you think twice before buying. See all printer reviews.

The design of the DCP-J562DW is quite attractive, measuring just 40cm wide, 15cm and 3.5cm deep, so it’ll fit easily onto a desk or a nearby shelf if you’re a bit tight for space at home. Even so, it still manages to fit in a scanner and copier, along with two separate trays that will hold 100 sheets of A4 paper and 20-sheets of photo-paper. There’s also a manual feed at the back of the printer for envelopes or other types of paper. The DCP-J562DW provides both USB and wifi connectivity, along with two-sided (duplex) printing, and also supports Apple’s AirPrint for iOS devices, and Google Cloud Print for remote printing over the Internet.

Brother DCP-J562DW review: Print quality and performance

Print quality is a bit of a mixed bag, though. Plain text printing is very good, with smooth, finely detailed characters, and the DCP-J562DW managed a speed of 9.5 pages per minute in our mono printing tests, which isn’t at all bad for a printer costing about £100.00. Also see Printing Advisor.

Colour printing is a bit slower, at around 3.5ppm, but the quality is perfectly adequate for presentations and other types of graphics documents. However, photo printing was a little disappointing, even when using high-quality glossy photo paper. The DCP-J562DW turned out a 4×6 postcard print in a speedy 25 seconds, but our prints lacked contrast and the colours looked a little lifeless. We’ve seen better photo output from many rival printers in this price range.

Brother DCP-J562DW review: Running costs

Our biggest concern, though, is with the printer’s running costs. The first thing we noticed when setting up the DCP-J562DW was that the manual points out that the starter cartridges provided with the printer have only 80% of the capacity of the standard size replacement cartridges, which means that it won’t be too long before you have to stump up for some new cartridges. The standard black ink cartridges cost a hefty £16.79 and only last for 260 pages, which comes to more than 6p per page. The XL size black cartridges double the yield to around 550 pages, but at £22.19 per cartridge that still works out at about 4p per page, which is well above average for an inkjet printer.

Colour printing is pricey too. The standard cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges cost £9.59 each – £28.77 for all three together – and with the same 260-page yield as the black cartridges that comes to 11p per page. Thankfully the XL colour cartridges are a bit more affordable at £14.39 each and a capacity of 550 pages. That brings the price down to about 7.5p per page for colour, which is closer to the average for inkjet printers, but Brother’s claim that the DCP-J562DW provides “our lowest ever ink prices” doesn’t inspire confidence. Incidentally, we also noticed that a multi-pack containing all four standard ink cartridges actually costs 3p more than buying the cartridges individually, so Brother really needs to have a bit of a think about those ink prices.

Read next: Best budget printers 2015/2016.