Brother MFC-L3760CDW

Verdict

The Brother MFC-L3760CDW colour laser multifunction has almost all the features you could need in a small home office. It’s quite swift, produces decent results and won’t wake up the rest of the house if you’re having to burn the midnight oil. Unfortunately, it’s a little expensive to buy and it could prove very expensive to run – there are better alternatives available.

Introduction

If you’re looking for a multifunction printer for a home or small office, Brother’s MFC-L3760CDW should certainly be on your radar. It’s based on a colour laser printer, so it should be fairly rapid, while it can also scan, copy, and send or receive faxes.

This MFP packs in plenty of useful features, from duplex (double-sided) printing through to friendly colour touchscreen controls. It’s quite compact by the standards of colour laser multifunctions, and Brother says it’s quieter than the model it replaces – ideal if you’re in a cramped office, or you sometimes need to work while family members sleep.

At more than £300, however, this multifunction needs to show a clean pair of heels to the cheaper office inkjets competing for your money. I put it through its paces to see what it was really made of.

Design and features

• Fairly compact for a colour laser MFP
• Good specifications and controls
• Expensive to run

You won’t find a colour laser multifunction printer that’s actually small, but the MFC-L3760 is about as compact an example as I’ve seen. It’s based on similar internals to the HL-L3220CWE laser printer I’ve also reviewed, but it’s taller, thanks to the scanner mounted above its paper output tray.

This is quite a well specified device. Brother says it can turn out up to 26 colour or black pages every minute (26ppm), which is pretty speedy, while it can automatically print on both sides of each sheet of paper (duplex printing). The scanner has an automatic document feeder (ADF), letting you make multi-page scans, copies or faxes. My one slight disappointment is that this isn’t also duplex-capable, so you can’t, for example, automatically make a double-sided copy of a double-sided original document.

In the foot of this MFP you’ll find a 250-sheet paper tray, while there’s a single-page bypass feed hidden behind a fold-down panel at the front. This is good to have, as it lets you insert a sheet of headed paper without having to unload the main tray, but it’s a shame it can’t hold more than a single page.

One of the MFC-L3760CDW’s strongest features is its 8.8cm colour touchscreen, through which you can control direct functions like scanning, or change various settings. It’s very easy to use, and supports a range of more advanced features. Insert a USB stick in the front panel port and you can print the files on it, or scan a document directly to it. Alternatively, you can connect to cloud services like Dropbox or Google Drive, and do the same with them.

This isn’t an excessively expensive device by the standards of colour MFPs, but it’s certainly not cheap. Accordingly, it’s a bit disappointing that it comes with black, cyan, magenta and yellow toners rated for only 1,000 pages. In fact, these are the standard capacity consumables. Even the ‘high yield’ supplies are rated only for 3,000 black or 2,300 colour pages – while that’s much more than you’d get from a cartridge-based office inkjet, it’s stingy by laser standards.

What’s more of a problem is that this printer’s consumables aren’t especially cheap. Keeping it in toners alone will set you back around 14.2p per full colour page. The other consumables have a much longer life of at least 30,000 pages, but factor them in and the page costs rise to an unfortunate 14.8p.

Simply put, that’s too much – buy your own consumables and you could be spending £14 or so every 100 pages. It’s a good thing, then, that this MFP is compatible with Brother’s EcoPro toner subscription, which could lower the cost of each page to between 5.6p and 13p. You’ll only get those savings, however, if you choose a suitable monthly plan, and print all of the pages included in it.

Print speed and quality

• Quite strong print speeds, especially in colour
• Good all-round quality
• Comparatively quiet in use

I’m quite used to printers that don’t come too close to their manufacturers’ rated speeds, so the MFC-L3760CDW was a pleasant surprise. On longer prints, where the time taken to prepare the job has less impact, it almost reached Brother’s stated 26ppm. More impressively, it was almost as fast in colour, which is something I can almost never say.

The MFC-L3760CDW delivered a first page of black text in 17 seconds, although it needed an extra 10 seconds to get going after being left idle for an hour. It also needed an extra 10 seconds to warm up for colour prints, with the first page emerging in just 19 seconds or 29 seconds depending how long ago it was last used. Over five pages, this MFP hit 12.5ppm in black and 10.7ppm in colour. On a 20-page document, this rose to 20.7 black pages per minute and 19.7 in colour. I also timed a 50-page black text document, which came in at a strong 24.4ppm.

This MFP has a quick scanner, too. Even when connected to my test PC via Wi-Fi, it could preview an A4 page in seven seconds, and capture it at low and medium resolution (150 and 300 dots per inch (dpi)) in only nine seconds. I scanned a 10x15cm colour photo at 600dpi in 12 seconds, while repeating this job at the maximum 1,200dpi took 32 seconds – that’s much more competitive than it might sound.

With a rapid printer and scanner, it’s no surprise the MFC-L3760CDW is quick when copying. It duplicated an A4 page in just 15 seconds, whether printing in black or colour. Using the ADF to copy 10 sheets took 35 seconds in black, and just 38 in colour.

I was impressed with this MFP’s scans which, while not the sharpest I’ve seen, were very true to colours in original office documents and photographs. It also coped excellently with our test pattern, distinguishing every shade, and thus preserving details from both heavily shaded and very light parts of original images. After this, photocopies were a disappointment, as colour copies in particular were a touch too dark and dingy.

The MFC-L3760CDW made a good job of our print tests, delivering crisp black text, and reasonably punchy colour graphics. Photos were a little less impressive: while portraits tended to be warm with reasonably accurate skin tones, other subjects tended to be a little desaturated and dull. Still, overall this is quite a capable MFP.

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