The Brother MFC-J4540DW provides everything you need to have a similar experience to printing in an office from home.
The Brother MFC-J4540DW is the flagship model in a range of six new mini business inkjet printers designed to support the move to permanent hybrid working. Like many companies, Brother UK is itself moving to a hybrid model with staff expected to function as effectively at home as they are in the office. With this in mind, the new printers come with all the office features you can think of squeezed into affordable home-friendly designs. As the premium model, the Brother MFC-J4540DW has a few extras including a touchscreen interface and an NFC module built in. The so called All In Box or XL version of this printer also includes enough ink in its XL cartridges for up to three years of printing. Be aware that this is the regular version and its standard cartridges will yield only 3,000 mono and 1,500 colour pages, but that’s still a heck of a lot for a cartridge-based inkjet. It’s the largest of the new Mini Business range, but the Brother MFC-J4540DW is still reasonably compact, despite its prodigious capacity for both paper and ink. Two separate paper drawers provide room for 400 sheets of paper and that bulge in the bodywork on the right flank allows room for its unusually large ink cartridges. The 20-sheet ADF (automatic document feeder) takes up very little room on top of the A4-sized scanner bed and the rounded corners help reduce the overall bulk. The tilting control panel houses a 2.7-in colour touchscreen and the NFC module while to the left is a USB Host port for walk-up printing from a USB thumb drive. The electrical and Ethernet cables plug into the side rather than the rear so that you can push this printer closer to the wall. If you prefer to use a USB data cable instead of Wi-Fi the port for that one is inside the body of the machine with the cable feeding out of the same side. It’s all quite neat cable management. The multimedia tray is at the rear and this is where you can insert envelopes or headed letter paper for single print jobs. Overall it feels fairly well made and certainly well designed, even if it still looks like an ungainly lump of off-white plastic. At least the pale finish helps it to blend into the background. Being the flagship model, the Brother MFC-J4540DW comes with all the bells and whistles. It’s a four-in-one which means it can print, scan, copy and fax. There’s plenty of room for paper with two paper trays holding 250 and 150 sheets plus a 20-sheet ADF and a single sheet multipurpose slot. The output tray is a little more limited at 100 sheets. Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct are built in and there’s an Ethernet port available too. More unusually for this mid-price category, there’s also NFC (near field communication).
