Brother - INKvestment 1365 Wireless Color All-in-One Inkjet Printer with Auto Duplex Print (MFC-J1365DW), Great for Home Offices - White

PRODUCT INKvestment 1365 Wireless Color Inkjet All-in-One Printer with Automatic Duplex Printing and Color Display (MFC-J1365DW) SUMMARY Great Value – Perfect Blacks – Very Good Color REVIEW The MFC-J1365DW is a fine addition to any home office. The print quality (especially the black) is very strong. The color printing is very good overall maybe not exactly photo ready but plenty good enough. The ability to print on both sides is a strong advantage at this price point as is the included WiFi. Scanning with an optical resolution of 1200x1200 is also nice. I did find the color scanning / copying a little soft and faded. I assume with some adjustments to settings it can be corrected (I used “best” default settings for everything). For everyday use in a home office or homework, for example, it is more than acceptable. SETUP My advice is to skip the mobile setup and use the front panel to attach it to your home WiFi. It can be a little tedious using the tiny screen to enter your WiFi password, but it will save you frustration later. Like most printers that try to force you to use the phone for setup it was not easy or intuitive and I eventually gave up trying to have my phone find the printer. Throughout the setup process (both on the app and the pc [setup.brother.com], you are bombarded with commercials and coupon codes for other Brother Promotions. The app and website allow you manage all of your Brother devices from sewing machines to printers and more. PAPER HANDLING The paper tray is pretty small but so is the overall printer. The specs say it holds 150 pages. Even in quiet mode, it is pretty loud on the first page, but settles down after the first page. INK At the time of this review ink prices were not available. However, I am a little concerned about how quickly this has gobbled up ink. I printed 2 color pages and 6 black and white pages. The box / specs state that it includes enough ink for 1200 black and white and 500 color pages. My status window for the printer says that I only have enough color ink remaining for about 250 color pages and about 700 black and white pages. This is close to 50% below the estimated available capacity. There was a message in setup something about filling the internal ink reservoirs from the cartridges and it only needed to be done one time. So maybe 50% of the ink is used filling the reservoirs. Still, I worry that “out of the box” I won’t get the stated output. In some parts of the setup instructions, it calls these “starter cartridges” which usually implies less than full ink cartridges. Only time will tell on the ink consumption. PROS - Tilting Color Display and control panel - WiFi Connectivity - High Resolution Scanning / Copying - ADF (Automatic Document Feeder for Copy / Scanning) - Duplex Printing - Separate color Ink Cartridges (only replace what you need) RECOMMENDATION Overall, I recommend this for home / home office light duty use. It does everything you need and is very affordable. If you need Photo Quality Color Prints, you might need something different.

Looking for a printer these days can be a daunting job for a home office. Every big-name manufacturer advertises the latest and greatest new feature that we just can’t live without. But sometimes you just want a product that just works, while providing features that are useful and meaningful. I must admit that I have never really considered Brother for printers, always thinking that they were an entry level producer. Boy was I wrong! The INKvestment 1365 or model MFCJ1365DW is a right sized printer to fit in any space in your office or home. Its 1.8-inch LCD screen provides the proper amount of information for your print, scan and copying needs without overwhelming you with too much information. As far as the real estate it takes up in your home office the 1365 measures at 7.5” high, 15.5” wide and 13.5” deep. With a white body the 1365 doesn’t draw any undo attention to itself and blends nicely into its surroundings. It allows wireless printing from your computer and your mobile devices. The scanning bed measures 8.75 by 11.88 As far as the printing capacity is concerned, the 1365 can hold up to 50 pages of paper and can print 16 pages per minute in black and 9 pages per minute in color. The print quality in both black and white and color is stellar. Documents are printed clearly without any smudges. Color prints are bright and vibrant with very good color representation. Printing pictures really impressed me with their accuracy in color and details. For copying, the 1365 has a feeder that will hold 20 pages and can take single sided pages fed into the 1365 and produce double sided prints. For example, 20 individual pages in the feeder can output 10 double sided prints. For the scanning feature you need to download the Brother printer drivers on to your PC or load the Brother Printer app onto your mobile device. The scanning functions are controlled from there. The same feeder is also used for scanning multiple pages into your computer. The feeder moves each page smoothly through the scanning bed and out. Scanned documents display very clearly and so do pictures. There are two different versions of the Brother application, one for your PC and one for your mobile device. The PC version gives you basic Printing, Scanning tools and a link to an online for you to view more details on the 1365 and so on. The Mobile app provides much more information for the 1365 and functionality. Both versions of the app are clear and easy to use. All in all, this is the little printer that does! And what it does, it does very well. I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for an affordable printer that does what it says and does it very well.

It’s an all in one inkjet printer with all the features you come to expect in an all in one printer these days. I suppose over a lower budget printer, you gain the 20 page automatic document scanning and auto-full duplex, but the rest of it just feels like everything you anticipate to be in a modern inkjet printer. The user interface of the physical buttons and their app, however, both feel very dated, but they work. The display is bright and clear enough to see what you need, like the directions through initial setup, but panning through rubber arrow buttons and OK just feels out of place for our current tech. Print quality is decent, but the copy quality is a bit rough by default. You can see how I scanned and printed their own adjustment sheet and how faded the colors came out, the banding in the grey and missing details. A little adjusting or black only can make a little difference. Print speed is listed as 16ppm black and 9 ppm color, but it all depends on what is on the page and does feel a bit slow when you are waiting for it to come out compared to other types of printers. This is fairly common for inkjet though. The initial ink cartridges do claim to have more ink than the typical start cartridges, but then they will keep pushing their Refresh EZ Print subscription services on you so that you can keep your ink stocked. Seems to be the way for all the printer makers these days. If you use your printer a lot, they do pan out to save you money on keeping ink in stock though. You can connect via 2.4 or 5Ghz WiFi, which I suppose is an improvement, as so many electronics only work with 2.4. So, you can move out of that crowded space and take advantage of better speeds. You can also connect via USB, cable not included. There is no Ethernet port if you prefer wired networks. Overall, it is a decent printer, nothing feels exceptional about it, but might have exactly the features you are looking for, like the document feeder and auto-duplex. There are just so many printers in this range and style that it really comes down to what you are exactly looking for.