Brother MFC-J5340DW

Is the Brother MFC-J5340DW worth buying?

Yes: the Brother MFC-J5340DW is worth buying at £185.90 for a home office that prints A3 spreadsheets, plans and posters but scans and copies ordinary A4 paper. It is a four-in-one inkjet that puts A3 through the printer while copy, scan and fax stay at A4, which keeps the body to 53 cm wide on a normal desk.

192 owners rate it 4.2, and the strength they reward is throughput rather than features: mono and colour both run at 28 ppm. Nothing here is decorative. You get a 6.8 cm colour touchscreen, a flatbed scanner, one paper tray and the Brother Mobile Connect app for phone printing, and the money goes into speed.

What does 28 ppm actually mean on the Brother MFC-J5340DW?

Every page per minute of A3 speed costs £6.64 on this machine, because £185.90 divided by 28 ppm is £6.64. A 100-sheet A3 job finishes in about 3.6 minutes. The same run on a 15 ppm machine, which is what £176.99 buys you elsewhere on this page, takes closer to 6.7 minutes, so the £8.91 you save up front costs you three minutes on every hundred sheets.

The unusual part is that colour prints at 28 ppm too, so a full-colour A3 poster costs the same time as a black-and-white invoice. Printing runs at up to 6,000 x 1,200 dpi in colour and 1,200 dpi in mono, and 48-bit colour depth gives gradients room to breathe on glossy photo paper and envelopes, both of which feed without changing tray.

Power draw is 36 watts, so leaving it on through a working day is cheap. It also copies up to 999 pages in a single run at 1,200 dpi mono or 600 x 600 dpi colour, which means a long A4 job does not need you standing over it.

What comes in the box with the Brother MFC-J5340DW?

The cartridges inside cover up to 550 pages, so the first month or two of A3 drafting costs you nothing beyond the £185.90. Replacements come as Brother ink cartridges made for this model, and high-yield cartridges and a value pack are both available, with reordering handled inside the Mobile Connect app. There is one paper tray, so A3 stock and plain A4 mean swapping paper rather than loading both.

Plan for 53 cm of width, 39.8 cm of depth and 30.5 cm of height, and for 17 kg of weight. That is a one-off lift for most people but a permanent spot once it is down, and a shelf that does not flex is a better home than a folding table. The flatbed takes A4 originals, and the 6.8 cm touchscreen handles paper size, duplex and copy settings without a trip to a computer.

Where does the Brother MFC-J5340DW fall short?

A3 goes in but does not come back out as a scan: the flatbed is A4, and there is no automatic document feeder, so a multipage A4 report is fed one sheet at a time by hand. A single A3 original therefore takes two passes and a little patience, which is the real cost of the £185.90 price. If A3 scanning is a weekly job, this is the wrong machine.

There is no warranty cover in the box on this model, which is unusual at this price and worth knowing before you commit. It also weighs 17 kg, so it is not a printer you move between rooms when guests arrive, and one paper tray means mixed A3 and A4 work needs planning rather than a second cassette.

How does the Brother MFC-J5340DW compare with the alternatives?

The Brother MFC-J5740DW costs £228.90, which is £43 more for exactly the same 28 ppm. What that extra buys is an 8.8 cm touchscreen against 6.8 cm, double-sided scanning and a 4.4 rating from 207 owners. Choose the J5740DW if you digitise stacks of A4 paperwork; choose the J5340DW if the page count matters and the paperwork does not.

The Epson WorkForce WF-7310DTW costs £154.19, which is £31.71 less and prints A3+ at 32 ppm, but it prints only. There is no scanner, no copier and no fax on it. Buy the Epson if every A3 page starts life as a file on your screen; buy the Brother if you still need to copy a form and send it on.