Brother MFC-T780DW

This is the MFC-T780DW’s headline result: on our figures it is the cheapest printer to run in the entire guide. Brother’s BTD180 bottles are rated for 7,500 black pages and 5,000 per colour, which works out at about 0.29 cents for a black page and 1.03 cents for a colour page using genuine ink. That is a shade under the Epson EcoTanks on colour and roughly thirty-five times cheaper per black page than the cartridge inkjet at the bottom of this guide.

The other half of the running-cost picture is what comes in the box: Brother includes up to three years of ink, based on printing around 150 pages a month. Combined with a three-year warranty, the first three years of ownership cost close to nothing beyond the purchase price for a typical home-office user. As with all supply pricing, verify current bottle costs before buying.

Bottom line on running cost: The lowest cost per page in our guide — about 0.29 cents black and 1.03 cents colour — with up to three years of ink included. This is the category the guide weights most heavily, and nothing here beats it.

Print quality is solid rather than exceptional. Text is clean and readable for everyday documents, and colour graphics, charts and simple presentation material come out well enough for internal and client-facing office work. Brother’s tank inks are built around document durability rather than photographic range.

Where it lands behind the class is photo output. This is a four-colour machine aimed at documents; if photographs matter, the six-colour EcoTank Photo in this guide is a different tool entirely. For the reports, forms and everyday colour a home office actually prints, quality is dependable and consistent page to page.

Bottom line on print quality: Good, consistent document output with usable business colour. Not a photo printer, and a step behind the sharpest tanks here, but entirely adequate for office work.

Speed is a genuine strength, and in an unusual way: the MFC-T780DW is rated at 16 pages per minute in black and 15.5 in colour. Most inkjets fall off a cliff when colour is involved — the entry EcoTank drops from 15 to 8 — so a colour-heavy document set runs markedly faster here than the raw black figure suggests.

Paper handling is where the entry positioning shows. The 150-sheet tray and 20-sheet document feeder are both smaller than the 250-sheet trays and 35-sheet feeders on the HP and Epson office tanks, and the feeder scans one side only. For low to moderate volumes that is fine; for long multi-page scanning jobs it means more reloading.

Bottom line on speed: Fast for a tank, and near-identical black and colour speeds are a real advantage on mixed documents. Held back by a smaller tray and a 20-sheet single-sided feeder.

The core office features are present: a 20-sheet automatic document feeder, automatic two-sided printing, dual-band Wi-Fi, USB, and mobile printing through Brother’s app plus the usual cloud services. For scanning, copying and duplex printing it does what a home office needs.

Two absences shape the score. There is no fax and no Ethernet, so if you need either — a wired connection for reliability, or fax for a profession that still runs on it — this isn’t the machine. The 1.8-inch colour display is also small and isn’t a touchscreen, which makes walk-up operation fiddlier than on the touchscreen tanks. None of this affects print output; it affects how the printer fits an office.

Bottom line on features: The essentials are covered — ADF, auto-duplex, dual-band Wi-Fi — but no fax, no Ethernet, and a small non-touch display keep it below the fuller-featured office tanks.

As a refillable-tank printer, the MFC-T780DW avoids the structural problem that drags down every cartridge machine in this guide: you buy ink in bottles at a few cents a page, with no cartridge-authentication scheme and no subscription required to reach the advertised cost. Brother’s BTD180 bottles are widely stocked and third-party alternatives exist, though we score on genuine-ink figures.

On reliability, the three-year limited warranty is the standout — every other printer in this tier ships with one year. Tank inkjets do need occasional use to keep printheads clear, which is true of the whole category rather than this machine specifically.

Bottom line on consumable freedom: Full refillable-tank freedom, no lock-in or subscription, and a three-year warranty behind it.

Value is where this printer makes its strongest case. At its list price it sits in the same bracket as the office tanks it competes with, but the package around it is better: up to three years of ink in the box and a three-year limited warranty, against one year on the Epson, Canon and HP tanks here. For a buyer thinking in total cost of ownership rather than sticker price, that is a meaningful difference.

The honest counterweight is the feature list. If you need fax, Ethernet, a touchscreen or a bigger paper tray, the HP Smart Tank 7301 or the Epson ET-4950 earn their premium. If you don’t, this is the cheapest machine here to own and run over three years.

Bottom line on value: The best ownership package in the tier — lowest running cost, three years of ink, three-year warranty. You trade fax, Ethernet and a touchscreen for it.