Brother DCP T500W Ink Tank color Inkjet printer Review
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Brother DCP T500W has everything you could ask for in a household/ affordable small office printer. But the print quality isn’t top notch.
Introduction Every household dreams of having a color printer that can print “so many in so little”, do it wonderfully and from any part of the house. In this age, wireless capability is as necessary as the black ink. Tablets or smartphones are the devices being majorly used for everything that a computer was 5 years ago– mail, information access, reading or projects. Combine that with an ink tank system that can be replenished by the user from bottles of genuine ink, sold by the company itself and it looks like a dream come true. The Brother DCP- T500W is one such multifunction printer that can print, scan and copy up to A4 size documents without attaching any cables to it. It is a Continuous Ink-Supply System (CISS) based printer with wireless connectivity built-in to handle jobs remotely. At Rs 10,359 it is one of the cheapest printers based on user-refillable ink system to use Wireless network. But how well it can perform? CISS based printers have gathered traction amid uncertainties to its success; and then there are competitors – a whole lineup from Epson and Canon among others to face. Here are some subtle insights.
Deign and Ink Tank System Epson DCP T500W has a usual Brother design with a few tweaks to enhance the utility of its controls. But it’s not without some common flaws that it shares with its kin. Since the printer works on a CISS system, there would be ink tanks. And instead of attaching them to the side, like
Epson does, it fits them well within the printer chassis (at front). This saves a lot of space and zeroes any chances of damaging the tank assembly while you’re moving the printer. At front, the tanks are hid behind a small, vertically moving door, thorough which the ink levels are “supposedly” visible. Within, individual ink slots (four of them) are capped by a rubber lid secured to the printer body. I discuss more about refilling them under the next subhead.
Another reason why Brother DCP T500W feels so compact is the absence of ADF tray over the scanner. The scanner rests on a scanner assembly that can be lifted to reach the inner bay to clear paper jams service tracks. But it’s light and can be lifted easily, apart from cutting down overall size of printer. The scanner lid is connected through a movable joint and auto adjusts when scanning/copying a book. Part of an advanced Brother series, the printer still uses a big control panel with buttons and a tiny Screen at front. After
HP, a few companies have started using touchscreen based panels that are much easier to use. Ironically, T500W has interchangeable panel tops for non-English users, where touchscreen based OEMs would just download a new firmware. The changeable panel tops feels loose as a result and I am skeptical of their availability. Anyways, the buttons are tactile, spaciously spread out; and the printer isn’t short of basic features.
Coming to the paper handling mechanism, it is the worst affected part of the printer design. There are two aspects to it – adding of paper to tray, and picking up of paper from the tray, for printing. The output tray serves as lid to the main (input) tray. With the tray inserted, there is no way you can add paper unless you pull it out, partially or rather fully, if the page is of a different size/type, and the lid lifted (output tray) to access the input bay. You can’t help but frown if the most accessed part of the printer is a chore to access, but this becomes a pain mainly due to the second aspect.
The paper lifting mechanism of Epson DCP T500W doesn’t work well. Pages with two different thicknesses can’t be kept together; glossy pages aren’t lifted at once, and never lifted if it’s just a single sheet. Many a times, printer would lift multiple pages at once, and you left to improvise by keeping rough pages beneath to add support. Among missing things, I really wanted automatic two-sided printing to be this machine. HP takes a lead in all these features at this price with its
OfficeJet 6830 model. But it wouldn’t be able to match the extremely low running costs T500W can achieve.
Ink bottles and Cost per page Like every company that offers refill ink for its CISS based lineup, Brother has ink bottles marketed for the DCP- TxxxW series. And the good news is, there is a score of other companies offering it in the market both online and offline, shall you face availability issues.
The DCP T500W comes with a starter pack of 3 color ink bottles (CMY) and 2 bottles of black that the tank needs to be filled up with. The task has to be undertaken by you as once filled you cannot transport the printer, so make sure you keep it on a washable surface and fully insert the bottle nozzle inside the tank opening, before you squeeze it. This is a ritual with any ink tank printer. Coming to the CPP, it’s a feather in the cap. T500W has a listed page yield listed of 5000 for each color and 6000 for black. This brings us to a straight calculation of 5p/page for both black and color prints. Practically it will be much more but comparing these ISO/IEC based figures to non-CISS based machines, the difference is huge, over 200 times. Any LaserJet near this range can’t get any lower CPP than 1Re per page (black) and Rs 3/page for color (costlier ones); it can’t get any lower than Rs 3/page for cartridge based printers. This is certainly a very alluring proposition for a printer at this price. But not all‘s well with the page coming out of the printer.
Print Quality Brother DCP T500W uses a four ink system which makes one expect good quality out of it. But CISS systems have never even hit the barrier low cost inkjet systems pass by easily. Inkjet systems are epitome of quality printing but in the budget categories meant for home use, they lose sheen. Still compared to CISS systems, they can do better; and he T500W is no different. It is as average as an ink tank system can get. Particularly for documents printed from smart devices. After a minute the printer spits out a word document with no regard to sharpness or texture of the text. Disappointing. The four ink system does improve color prints to stretch it to the inkjet quality levels. Though they are rendered darker than what they appear on screen and since it’s not a photo printer, much can’t be expected of it either. But still, the colors are accurate and details are printed well for a printer of this price. It has provision to print 4×6 photo, Index card, Photo-2L and borderless A4.
This is where I get reluctant with the CISS system and if I were to buy it for business/ homework projects purposes, I would rather avoid. Unless bulk color printing with average quality is what you are looking for, T500W is difficult to include in the list.
Print Speed We weren’t impressed with T500W’s printing speeds either. Checkout the print time for various paper and document types, listed in the table below.
| Document Type (Single side , over 50% print area) |
Time Taken |
| Word document (A4, black) |
58s |
| Word document with image (A4, Color) |
70s |
| Single side PDF document (A4, black, small image) |
107s |
| Photo (4×6) |
2m 34s |
| Photo – Borderless A4 |
7m 56s |
As pointed out before, wireless printing combined with the continuous ink system can help T500W gain user base. The printer has a strong reception of wireless networks and we were surprised to see the kind of range and reliability it keeps. Brother also has a very user friendly app for it on
iTunes, Play Store or
Microsoft store. You need to connect the printer to a wireless network first and a device connected to the same network can then communicate with the printer through the app. The printer doesn’t support Wi-Fi Direct, which would have eliminated the need for a wireless router. Also, since it doesn’t connect to the internet, cloud printing isn’t supported, i.e. you can’t print from outside of your home network (unless a live server is in between). The iPrint&Scan app, as the name says, can be used to print from a smart device or scan documents to it with a Brother printer. The app isn’t very light, but has got smooth and simple interface to deal with the printer. You can select paper type and size among other information as shown in the screen grab. It can also print mails and webpages opened in the app itself. Compared to the PC interface, there are some limitations to the app too. Like it can’t print two photos (4×7 prints) on one A4 size sheet, cannot show ink levels and doesn’t notify when printing completes.
Final Verdict Brother DCP-T500W surely enjoys the inherent advantages of a CISS system, drastically bringing down printing costs; without having any extra protrusions of ink boxes on its body. While network capability makes it “ready for workgroups”, the Wi-Fi feature (wireless router needed) adds freedom to print from mobile platform as well. You can print borderless photos, among other documents, directly from your smartphone and with a four ink system the quality is expected to be great. But print quality isn’t the best ink tank printers can actually attain. Text documents, in particular lack crisp outlines and heavy texture you would expect from a printer of this price group. Color prints, though accurate in color and perfectly fine in resolution, are a few shades darker than what they appear on screen. Moreover, its paper lifting mechanism and fussy trays tested our patience enough to shy away from recommending this. If you are hell-bent on saving ink costs we suggest you take a look at its competitors, CISS models from Epson or Canon.
Model Number
DCP-T500W
Printer Type Printer Type
Ink Jet Printer
Home / Office
Home Printer
Color / Black and White
Black and White Printer
Function
Print, Scan, Copy, Wireless Network, Mobile Print
Paper Size
A4, LTR, LGL, EXE, A5, A6, Photo (102 x 152mm / 4” x 6”),
Paper Handling Input Tray
100 Page
Output Tray
50 Page
System Requirements Windows
Windows: XP / XP x64 / Vista / 7 / 8 / 8.1
Macintosh
Mac: OS X v10.7.5/v10.8.x/v10.9.x
Print speed Black
27ppm
Color
10ppm
Specification Weight
8.3 Kg
Display
1-Line LCD Display
Automatic paper sensor
No
Memory
64 MB
Connectivity
USB/Wifi
Warranty
1 Year
