Putting a cutting edge into the printer market
Desktop printing is mature enough that it’s hard for printer manufacturers to come up with groundbreaking new features, but the Brother Print & Cut MFC-J1800DW ($199.99) does just that. Brother bills it as a five-function all-in-one (AIO) printer. The fifth function? Cutting. The printer can cut a copied or printed letter-size page in half before spitting out the paper. For anyone who uses half-letter size, whether for business needs or crafting, that’s a lot easier than changing paper in the tray or cutting by hand. And, with the notable exception of running cost, the MFC-J1800DW is otherwise comparable to the Brother MFC-J4335DW, our top recommended AIO for personal to micro office use. In short, it handles the standard AIO functions nicely, and adds its own sharp touch.Print and Cut, Any Way You Want
The cutting capability is not only unusual, it’s also the main reason to consider the MFC-J1800DW, since it’s not hard to find others that can match or beat it otherwise for a lower price—the MFC-J4335DW being a prime example. If the ability to cut pages appeals to you at all, however, the good news is that the feature also comes with more flexibility than you might expect.
The Windows-compatible printer software lets you shrink everything in a letter-size document to print each page on half the sheet before cutting. You can also set the printer to duplex, which automatically reorders the pages of a multi-page document after shrinking, so the even-numbered pages will be on the opposite side of the sheet from the previous odd-numbered page, and you can clip them together like a book, with the pages in the right order. An additional choice in the Windows print driver and Brother’s Mobile Connect app (for Android and iOS) lets you print and cut, which simply prints the page normally and cuts it into two 8.5-by-5.5-inch sheets.
I tried all of these variations in my tests, and all worked as promised, delivering nicely readable text and well-formed graphics at the shrunken sizes, and with as clean a cut from the printer as on the other three edges of the page. Note also that Brother says the cutter can handle up to 58-pound paper, which makes it useful for printing items like menus and invitations.
The only option for cutting with copying, labeled Cut Copy in the printer’s 2.7-inch touch-screen control panel, is equivalent to the cut and fit version of the print feature, which also allows printing copies in duplex, and also worked as promised in my tests.
Physical setup is both standard and straightforward. The MFC-J1800DW weighs 18.3 pounds and measures 6.8 by 15.7 by 13.5 inches (HWD) with the output tray closed, making it small enough to share a desk with comfortably. Setup consists basically of inserting the four ink cartridges—one each for cyan, yellow, magenta, and black—loading paper, running the mostly automated alignment routine, then downloading and installing the driver and other software. The last step in particular takes a while (the total setup time was over an hour), but requires little effort.
