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The Brother DCP-J132W is a low-cost MFP with the appearance of a business printer but performance and capabilities that are aimed at both the home and small office. It’s a no-frills affair, with just a mono LCD status screen, rather than the colour screens of more expensive models in the same range.
As with Brother’s other MFPs, the scanner lid’s hinges can be raised up to easily accommodate books and thick documents, and the printer has both USB and Wi-Fi. The latter means that you can print to the J132W via Brother’s Android and iOS mobile printing apps and use it with Google Cloud Print and Apple AirPrint services.
Its print engine is one of Brother’s slower inkjet models. When it comes to our mono text document, though, we were pleased to find that 25 pages emerged at a rate of 10.7ppm, which is in line with the manufacturer’s quoted 11ipm. However, our heavily illustrated colour business document printed at a mediocre 2.8ppm: our 24 pages took just over eight and a half minutes.
Brother DCP-J132W Print Quality
Standard quality mono text is dark and reasonably well defined, although jagged edges are still visible upon close examination. Draft prints, which save on ink and print at a slightly faster 13.8ppm, aren’t as solid and dark when it comes to 12-point lettering but the clarity of individual letters is, if anything, slightly better. Our colourful documents and web page prints showed that the printer handles illustrations reasonably well. Reproduction of our shaded graphs was good and 8pt serif text that only looked jagged on close examination, but images were generally a little grainy with occasional marks from the print head. The end result is more functional than beautiful.
Functional rather than beautiful is also a fair description of the DCP-J132W’s photo prints. 6x4in prints suffer from a minor paper alignment issue common to Brother inkjets, which leaves a very thin white edge on one side. Whites are clear and black tones are reasonably well defined, if a little pale. However, areas of subtle sharing show jagged speckling. Photos take a long time to print, too. Two 10x8in prints took 23 minutes at best quality, and six 6x4in prints over an hour and 20 minutes. However, if you drop the quality from Best to Photo, print speed increases to six 6x4in prints in 13 minutes and 22 seconds, and the resulting prints looked entirely acceptable, if a little less vivid.
Brother DCP-J132W Scanner
The built-in 1,200×2,400dpi scanner is also standard issue for Brother. We were generally happy with colour copy quality: images were a little grainy, with slightly exaggerated red tones, but even small font sizes were easy to read, if not completely sharp. Contrast was a little poor on mono prints, but was improved by reducing the ink density setting for our copies. Our colour copy emerged in 32 seconds and a mono sheet took 20.
When it came to scan quality, you’ll want to stick with resolutions of 300dpi and above to ensure that text is reproduced sharply, as our 150dpi text scan was haloed and difficult to read at any magnification. Photo scans lack detail when it comes to areas of subtle shading, reproducing multiple hues as a single block of colour. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to blue and grey/black tones. There’s a reasonable level of detail, but close examination showed that high contrast areas where a pale colour abutted a dark one, suffered from imprecise edges.
The scanner interface is easy to use, although it’s rather short of options compared to those from companies such as Canon and Epson, which admittedly use the same high-end interfaces used by their professional quality dedicated scanners. The Brother interfaces for both printing and scanning have an office-like feel to them: basic options that are clearly labelled, but you’re limited to only a handful of pull-down menu settings and manual image cropping when it comes to scanning.
Brother DCP-J132W Conclusion
The DCP-J132 makes some slightly distressing squeaking noises in use, but it’s cheap to buy and surprisingly cheap to run, at a cost of 2.7p per mono page and 8.7p per page of mixed black and colour printing, assuming you buy high yield ink cartridges. Its print speeds are also good in comparison to similarly priced MFPs. However, you’ll get better print quality if you spend a bit more and buy the Canon Pixma MG5550 or, if you’ve only got around £50 to spend, the Epson Expression Home XP-312, which produced better looking prints and scans.
