Brother DCP-J1360DW Review

Introduction

Printers aren’t usually the most glamorous device in your home, and the Brother DCP–J1360DW certainly won’t be. It’s a black, squat inkjet multifunction printer, capable of printing, scanning, and making copies. It’s not exactly ugly, just a little bit businesslike and drab.

Still, this multifunction peripheral (MFP) has all that most home users will need for everyday tasks. You can share it on a wireless network, control everything through a smart colour screen, and even use its integrated automatic document feeder (ADF) to make multi-page copies. It can even print automatically on both sides of every sheet.

Brother says that the DCP-J1360DW can print up to 16 text pages per minute (ppm) or nine in colour. I put it through our usual battery of tests to see whether it delivered on the promise.

Design and Features

• Compact and businesslike
• Not especially highly featured
• Not particularly cheap to run

The DCP-J1360DW takes a slight break from Brother’s usual design philosophy for inkjet multifunctions, but it’s a subtle difference from previous models. It’s a slightly taller, narrower device than I’ve seen from the brand, but it’s still typically compact and businesslike.

The only potential issue I spotted with the design is that the power port is, for some reason, on the left-hand panel, rather than at the back. It’s unlikely to be a problem for most users, but it’s an unusual position, and the lead sticks out very slightly, making it hard to get this MFP flush to a wall or partition to its left.

This MFP isn’t exactly bristling with features, but it’s got all of the basics covered. In its base you’ll find a pull-out 150-sheet paper tray – you can print up to 50 pages before you’ll need to empty the output. On top, you can either scan individual sheets directly from the scanner glass, or slot several pages into the ADF to make copies. Brother doesn’t state a maximum, but it coped fine with 10 pages during my testing.

The Brother DCP-J1360DW arrives with black, cyan, magenta and yellow ink cartridges good for up to 200 pages. That’s not at all bad for starter cartridges at this price. You can replace them with 500-sheet items, giving this printer reasonable legs between new supplies.

While the semi-transparent cartridges look fairly cool, unfortunately they’re not cheap. Using the best prices I could find at the time of my review, running costs worked out at a hefty 12.7p per page, with the black ink alone accounting for 4.1p of that. That’s a problem if you’re a heavy printer: reel off 25 copies of a business letter and it’ll cost you around £1 in ink alone.

I wouldn’t expect a colour touchscreen at this price, and the DCP-J1360DW doesn’t disappoint: you navigate its menu system with directional controls and a central OK button.

It works perfectly well, making it easy to access settings and configure preferences. The only slight hassle comes if you choose to enter your Wi-Fi password manually, rather than using WPS. Note that while there’s a USB connection, this printer has no Ethernet port.

Brother has refined its previously painless setup process, and unfortunately introduced a potential snag. It’s simple to download the setup software from Brother’s UK site, but be careful when prompted to input the model number: working without glasses, I accidentally typed in a similar, valid model number, then wasted 30 minutes trying to troubleshoot why the installer couldn’t find the printer on my network. At least it worked perfectly once I’d identified the problem.

The only other thing to note is that this printer has a clattery, cheap-feeling paper input tray. It doesn’t seem especially flimsy, it’s just not particularly pleasant to remove, load and refit.

Print speed and quality

• Fast text printing
• Underwhelming plain paper prints
• Dingy scans

With the printer installed, I hit it with our text printing tests. These involve printing a five-page document, timing how long it takes overall, and how long it takes for the first page to appear. It was quite quick, with the front page arriving in just nine seconds, and the whole job complete in 25 seconds. That’s equivalent to 12 pages per minute (ppm).

Perhaps surprisingly, this printer didn’t improve much on that over a 20-page job, with the speed inching up just a fraction to 12.5ppm. However, it did reach 16.7ppm when printing a single page 25 times – just above Brother’s 16ppm claim. I repeated the 20-page test with duplex (double-sided) printing enabled; the DCP-J1360DW needed three minutes, a middling rate of 6.6 images (sides) per minute.

Things were slower in colour. The Brother DCP-J1360DW delivered a first page of text and light graphics in 17 seconds, and took more than a minute to finish a five-page job (4.6ppm). Again, it was no faster on longer jobs, completing 20 pages at a rate of 4.5ppm. It made quite a meal of a more graphics-intensive, 24-page job, which emerged at just 3.7ppm.

This pattern of slower colour printing continued over my photocopying tests. This MFP could complete a single mono page in 14 seconds, or a colour copy in 32 seconds. I loaded the ADF with a 10-page job, which took about a minute and a half in black, but well over four minutes in colour.

Tests with the ADF showed up a common issue with MFPs. You load the DCP-J1360DW’s ADF face-down, and it feeds and prints the first page of the document first. While the original stays in the correct order, the copy lands back-to-front in the printer output, so you need to manually reverse the page order once it’s done.

Overall, the Brother DCP-J1360DW delivers reasonably good print quality. It didn’t excel at text, graphics or photo printing, but it generally made a decent effort at all three. Colour graphics were reasonably bold, and didn’t suffer from any especially obvious issues like banding; however, there was a small amount of bleed-through – where you can see print from the opposite side – in duplex prints. I’ve seen darker text from inkjets, but otherwise, I had few complaints about plain paper printing.

While this isn’t an especially strong photo printer, it produced decent prints on glossy paper. Colours and shading seemed natural, if a bit on the dark side, and skin tones in particular tended to be neutral rather than overly saturated. Only in one photo were they a little too muted, leaving the subject looking slightly ill.

Unfortunately, the Brother DCP-J1360DW’s scanner was more disappointing. It coped fine with most office documents, but photos showed a tendency to lose the details from darker areas, leading to dark, featureless regions where there should have been subtle shade detailing. We use a Kodak reference pattern to help quantify exposure – this scanner couldn’t distinguish between the darkest six shades out of 22.

This problem was likely behind photocopies which, while not the worst, were a little darker than the original. Colour copies in particular lost the vibrancy of the original, and came up looking too drab.

Should you buy it?

FAQs