Brother MFC-L8970CDW review: Reasonable speed and strong quality, but is it worth the asking price?

The Brother MFC-L8970CDW sits at the top of the Japanese manufacturer's updated range of color laser devices for workgroups and small businesses. It's one of three multifunction peripherals in the new 8XXX range – there are also two single-function printers, including the HL-L8570CDW, which we've also reviewed.

The MFC-L8970CDW has an enviable specification. On top, you'll find an automatic document feeder (ADF) that can handle no fewer than 80 sheets. It can duplex (double-side) scan each sheet in a single pass. Just in front of this, there's a color touchscreen so huge it looks like someone's left their tablet behind.

The scanner and display unit sit atop a color laser printer rated at 31 pages per minute (ppm), or 20 images per minute (ipm) when printing in duplex – 20 sides printed onto 10 sheets of paper each minute. This printer combines a 50-sheet multipurpose feed and 250-sheet cassette. That's the only slightly off-note in an otherwise comprehensively well-specced device – at this price we'd expect to be able to load in an entire ream.

Alongside its duplex print, scan, copy, and fax party tricks, this MFP supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless networks, and gigabit Ethernet connection. Its vast screen has plenty of room for mundane setup and operational features, along with space for up to 64 configurable shortcuts – useful if, say, people frequently need to make a double-sided copy of a double-sided original, and want to avoid having to dig around in the copy menu.

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While it's a shame the MFC-L8970CDW doesn't have a bigger standard cassette, you can upgrade it to a maximum 1,340 pages with a combination of additional 250 and 520-sheet trays. There's no stapler unit or sorting bin, however, which rules it out of true departmental roles – it doesn't really have the speed for it anyway.

Brother says the MFC-L8970CDW is designed for a recommended 7,500 monthly pages or an 80,000-page maximum. It certainly feels well put together, with sturdy trays and impressively robust-feeling paper stops in the printer and ADF outputs. The usability is good, too, from the large display down to details such as the clearly displayed paper orientation icon in the main tray – helpful if you're reloading paper and need to know which will be the print side.

Things start to get more complicated when you look at consumables. The MFC-L8970CDW supports a dizzying range of no fewer than 16 different toners rated from 1,800 to 10,000 pages, on top of which there are drums and waste toner containers each good for 50,000 pages. Heavily used examples might find themselves needing a new fuser or transfer belt unit, too.

That's a lot to manage, particularly if you're used to competing devices that just take four combined toner/drum consumables. Nobody would blame you for signing up to a managed print service – Brother's start at around £7 per month – but if you are buying consumables and you stick with the biggest 10,000-page toners, you can get running costs down to less than a penny per page of black text, or 6.8p (ex VAT) for color. Factor in all the lifetime consumables, and these still only rise by fractions of a penny.

This isn't a cheap MFP, but it does arrive with XXL toners rated for 7,500 black and 6,000 color pages – these alone are worth a few hundred pounds.

Brother MFC-L8970CDW review: Setting up

This isn't the ugliest laser MFP you'll see, but it has the misfortune to combine a comparatively deep and narrow laser printer with a wide and deep scanner unit. The result is some mushroomy overtones, plus the more practical need for more depth and width on a counter than you might expect. This is compounded slightly by vents on the right side and a USB slot on the left – the latter bizarrely under, and inset from the overhanging touchscreen in such a way that the casual user is unlikely to ever find it.

This device is bulky and heavy enough that it's a two-person lift over any significant height or distance. There's the usual amount of tape to extract, along with some orange plastic spacers for the toner/drum tray. While these were easy to remove on the HL-L8570CDW printer we tested, here the left-hand spacers were reluctant to part company with a metal pin at the front.

With such a large display, it's no surprise that this MFP is easy to join to a wireless network. It's easy to use and configure, too: adding a shortcut is as simple as tapping one of the plus icons and navigating through the menu to the feature you want to access. Overall the menu system feels more like a consumer device than a business-class one, and that's a good thing: too many enterprise printers bamboozle non-technical users with complex control panels.

As you'd expect, the MFC-L8970CDW includes various security features and protocols, including IP filtering, SSL/TLS encryption, secure boot, and user authentication. There's also an NFC reader, configurable for authentication and workflow personalization.

Brother MFC-L8970CDW review: Printing, scanning and copying

At this price, we're slightly surprised Brother hasn't given the MFC-L8970CDW faster print speeds. It's always the case that a range-topping device can seem slow when it shares a print engine with more basic models, but we'd expect more than a modest 31ppm for this money. This is especially the case given this MFP didn't get all that close to Brother's figures, managing only 23.8ppm across 25 pages in our standard black text test. It was slower still on our color graphics test, although here its 21.5ppm is fair – our test document is graphics heavy, and few printers sail through it at top speed.

We often get faster results over long documents, as these minimize the relative impact of the time it takes a PC to prepare and send the job. Sure enough, tested over a 50-page text document, the MFC-L8970CDW hit 30.3ppm – laudably close to Brother's claim. Using the first 10 pages of the same document we timed duplex printing at 10.9ipm.

As we found with the HL-L8570CDW printer, this MFP defaults to 2,400x600dpi Fine print quality. Normal (600x600dpi) is no faster, so we completed our tests with Fine. The MFC-L8970CDW printed six 6x4" photos on three A4 sheets in 32 seconds, and needed 35 seconds to complete two 10x8" images on two pages. From standby it could print a first black or color page in 18 seconds, needing only another 3 seconds if we'd left it unused for an hour first.

This MFP is unusual among office-focused devices in that its scanner goes up to a very detailed 1,200 dots per inch (dpi) -- 600dpi is a more common maximum. It's very quick: we were able to preview an A4 page in just five seconds, and needed only six seconds to scan it at 150dpi. At 300dpi this job still completed in 10 seconds. Even when scanning photos at higher resolution, this MFP didn't hang about. It captured a 6x4" print at 600dpi in 13 seconds. At 1,200dpi the same job needed 52 seconds – that's much more competitive than it sounds.

The Brother MFC-L8970CDW isn't that quick off the mark when copying, returning a single black page in 13 seconds and a color one in 15 seconds. It's much more impressive when using the ADF, completing a 10-page simplex copy in 32 seconds whether in black or color.

This ADF's ability to capture both sides at once ought to make for rapid duplex copying, but the reality wasn't quite so impressive. While our original 10-page, 20-sided document rapidly fed through, the printer didn't kick into action until it had almost finished. There's not much wrong with a speed of 15.4ipm on this test, but it seemed like this MFP should be capable of more.

Brother MFC-L8970CDW review: Results

With so many features to get right, it's not unusual for a multifunction to slip up in at least one area. The happy news here is that the MFC-L8970CDW doesn't, and in several ways it's extremely good. This MFP's main weakness across our tests was murky black photocopies in which darker shades bled together, leading to the loss of detail. We're not sure why, given that color copies were perfectly exposed and quite faithful to the originals.

Elsewhere, text quality was as good as you'd expect from a laser printer, with crisp characters that stood up to close scrutiny – only under magnification could we spot a tiny bit of stepping on some curved outlines. Color graphics were generally very impressive, particularly when it came to shade control: while many lasers struggle to differentiate shades and colors without bands of halftoning patterns, here the content shone through without obvious artifacts.

It is worth noting that this printer has something of a cool color bias, leading to less perky photos than you might get from some rivals. Skin tones could fall victim to this, particularly in illustrations where lighter skin tended to be rendered a little pale. Overall, however, all of our print results were strong.

If a color laser MFP is likely to fall short anywhere, it's in the scanner. But while the MFC-L8970CDW was in a hurry to get the job done, you'd be hard pressed to tell from the results. It captured among the best images we've seen from a business-oriented scanner, with well-judged exposure and sharp focus more than up to the task of archiving everyday office documents. More unusually, it was comfortable scanning photos at higher resolutions, displaying a wide dynamic range that allowed it to capture detail from among the lightest and darkest shades. This scanner managed to distinguish all but the darkest couple of shades on our Kodak Q60 test target – far better than the average for a business device.

Brother MFC-L8970CDW review: Is it worth it?

This multifunction offers a huge range of features, and while it might not have the fastest printer, it's generally quick enough to dispatch all the jobs it will encounter in busy workgroup use. The payoff for your patience is that it'll complete almost anything you want to a very high standard – it offers one of the best scan and print quality combinations we've seen.

On the flip side, a heavily used MFC-L8970CDW fleet might need stock of up to eight different consumables. Even if each is reasonably priced and comes with a long service life, that makes management more of a headache, and suggests this device might be best viewed through the lens of a managed print contract.

It's hard to shake the impression that this MFP might be overpriced. While sharing its print specifications with the HL-L8570CDW, it's twice as expensive -- its scanner and display are both good, but we're not sure they're worth that premium. And while it's good to see the MFC-L8970CDW arrive with such generous inbox toners, remember that the HL-L8570CDW gets those too. Overall, this is a strong MFP, but it might be worth waiting to see if its price drops before buying.

Brother MFC-L8970CDW specifications