Brother DCP J125 Printer Review
The Brother DCP J125 is an entry-level machine, but it still offers a good range of features, which has made these printers so popular. The finish is of the high-gloss black plastic that, to our way of thinking, is starting to look dated. The flatbed scanner itself is a fairly conventional device, but the scanner lid is on extending hinges, so you can scan books as well as single sheets. Lift the whole scanner section and the USB socket is located near the front of the machine, so you have to feed the cable around inside.
The controls themselves are pretty straightforward, reflecting the comparatively simple feature-set of the machine. Set into the front face of the printer is a combined memory card slot, which can take SD, MemoryStick and xD cards, and below this is the 100-sheet plastic paper tray, a design common to most other Brother inkjets and one which always feels a little flimsy. This particular tray doesn't have a photo tray set into its lid, so to load photo paper you have to first extract the cartridge and remove any plain paper that’s loaded.
Our five-page black text print achieved a speed of 2.9ppm and in draft mode it rose to 9.1ppm. The 20-page document produced a speed of 3.2ppm and the black text and colour graphics test gave 2.6ppm. Even taking the draft mode test and reducing it by the 15 seconds it takes the DCP-J125 to process the data before starting to print, still only gives a top speed of 16.7ppm, just half the claimed speed.
A single-page colour copy took a reasonable 43 seconds and a 15 x 10cm photo on an A4 page took 3mins 17secs at the highest print quality. At normal print quality, it still took 3mins 3secs, though, which is slow compared with all the competition.
Black text print quality is fair and in normal use, it would be perfectly acceptable. In comparison with machines from most of the other makers, it's not quite as sharp or as lacking in ink spread, though it still beats most Epson prints. Fast, draft mode print is quite faint and shows some misalignment between successive passes of the print head.
Colour graphics are smooth and fairly well-saturated, though colours could be a bit brighter. This is especially true with a colour copy, which came through in very insipid colours, compared with direct prints. Photo prints are reasonable, with lighter colours well-reproduced, but dark ones tend towards black, a reasonably common failing with less expensive inkjets.
This Brother printer represents better value for money then several others in the same range and does well against similarly priced rivals from other makers. It's cheap to run for an entry-level machine and while it doesn't produce the best quality print and is certainly not the quickest, it does have a good range of facilities at a very affordable price.