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The Brother MFC-L6700DW ($599.99) is a workhorse mono laser all-in-one printer for a small office or a workgroup. It’s fast, capable of heavy-duty printing, and offers solid paper capacity, a wide range of connection choices, a strong feature set, and a low running cost. With less-than-optimal graphics output, the MFC-L6700DW ($699.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) is not ideal if you need to print PowerPoint handouts, but it still offers more than enough for it to succeed the Brother MFC-8950DW as our Editors’ Choice.
Design and Features
A tall, matte-black printer, the MFC-L6700DW measures 20.4 by 16.8 by 19.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 40.5 pounds. At its size, it is best kept on a table or bench of its own. Standard paper capacity is up to 570 sheets, split between a 520-sheet main tray and a 50-sheet multipurpose feeder. Maximum paper capacity of 1,610 sheets is achievable with the addition of two optional 520-sheet trays. An auto-duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper is standard. The printer’s maximum monthly duty cycle is 100,000 pages, with a recommended print volume of 5,000 pages, matching the Brother MFC-8950DW. That model has a similar standard paper capacity (550 sheets).
The printer includes a legal-size flatbed for scanning and a 70-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) that supports single-pass two-sided scanning. Built into the beveled panel on the front of the scanner is a 4.8-inch color touch-screen display. To the panel’s lower left is a port that fits a USB thumb drive.
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The MFC-L6700DW can connect to a PC via a USB cable, or to a local network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. It can also connect via a direct peer-to-peer connection to a compatible mobile device via Wi-Fi Direct. It supports Google Cloud Print, and works with the Brother iPrint&Scan app as well as Cortado Workplace, and is both AirPrint- and Mopria-compliant to facilitate printing from iOS and Android devices.
Printing Speed
The Brother MFC-L6700DW averaged 47.1 pages per minute (ppm), which is very close to Brother’s 48ppm rated speed, in printing the text-only (Word) portion of our new business applications suite. Its average first-page-out time of 6 seconds bests Brother’s 7.5-second first-page-out rating for the printer. In printing our full business suite, which includes PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel files in addition to the aforementioned Word document, the MFC-L6700DW averaged 23.8ppm. These speeds are all somewhat faster than the Brother MFC-L5900DW, which we timed at 41.2ppm on the text-only portion of our tests, with a first-page-out time of 7 seconds and an average speed of 21.7 across our full test suite.
We can’t directly compare these results to those from printers tested on our old business applications suite, which included a higher percentage of complex, graphics-heavy documents, but based on points of similarity between the two tests—for example, both have a four-page PDF file and a four-page PowerPoint file—it’s clear that the MFC-L6700DW is fast for a mono laser all-in-one printer. The HP LaserJet Pro MFP M426fdw ($799.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) tested at 16.4ppm on our old suite, while the Brother MFC-8950DW averaged 10.6ppm.
See How We Test Printers
Output Quality
Overall output quality for the HL-L6700DN, based on our testing, was a bit below par, with average text, slightly subpar graphics, and average photos.Text should be good enough for any business purpose except for those requiring tiny fonts. Graphics are good enough for most internal business use, but the printer had some trouble with our PowerPoint file, an issue we also saw with the MFC-L5900DW. As a monochrome printer, the MFC-L6700DW, by default, converts the color originals to Grayscale. (You can change the setting to Color or Black by opening the driver.) The printer wasn’t able to clearly show differences in tone in a figure showing a gradient—the print showed a nearly uniform dark shade. With the other Grayscale prints, their backgrounds—two of which have similar gradients—were completely dropped, showing up as white.
The printer fared somewhat better in converting the document to monochrome when I switched to the Color setting, though even there it couldn’t consistently differentiate between similar tones. When outputting PowerPoint files from color originals with the MFC-L6700DW, you will definitely want to use the Color setting, but even with it we couldn’t recommend this printer for outputting PowerPoint documents intended for distribution to colleagues or clients. Other mono laser all-in-one printers such as the HP M426fdw, an Editors’ Choice for lower-volume printing, have done better in outputting PowerPoint documents in our testing.
Running costs for the MFC-L6700DW, based on Brother’s price and yield figures for toner and drum, came to 1.5 cents per page, relatively low for a mono laser at its price. It’s slightly better than the Brother MFC-8950DW (1.7 cents per page), Brother MFC-8950DW (1.9 cents), and HP M426fdw (2.2 cents).
Conclusion
The Brother MFC-L6700DW is a good mono laser all-in-one printer for up to heavy-duty use in a micro or home office, or medium-duty use in a small office. PowerPointoutput is not its forte, but otherwise it produced solid output quality in our testing. It is reasonably fast with a generous feature set, offers good paper capacity and multiple wired and wireless connectivity choices, and has low running costs. This mix of strengths is enough to make it our top recommendation for a mono-laser workhorse for a small or micro office.
4.0
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The Brother MFC-L6700DW is a small-office mono laser all-in-one printer that combines speed, a generous feature set, multiple connectivity choices, and good standard and optional paper capacities.
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