As the premiere model in Brother's line of monochrome all-in-one printers for small to medium businesses, the Brother MFC-L6800DW ($699.99) has the chops for high-volume printing. It offers a winning combination of speed, high duty cycle, good paper capacity, competitive running costs, a strong feature set, and solid text quality. It does suffer from poor graphics quality, a trait it shares with the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-L6700DW. For a slightly higher price, the MFC-L6800DW has a higher duty cycle and a much faster scanner, two reasons it replaces the MFC-L6700DW as our Editors' Choice small-biz mono laser all-in-one printer.
Design and Features
In most ways, the MFC-L6800DW ($919.00 at Amazon) is identical to the MFC-L6700DW; see that printer's review for a full description of features. Like the MFC-L6700DW, it measures 20.4 by 16.8 by 19.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 40.5 pounds. Its standard paper capacity is 570 sheets, split between a 520-sheet main tray and a 50-sheet multipurpose feeder, and its maximum capacity is 1,610 sheets. It has an auto-duplexer for printing on both sides of a page. Connectivity includes USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct. They both support Google Cloud Print, and work with the Brother iPrint&Scan app as well as Cortado Workplace, and is both AirPrint- and Mopria-compliant to facilitate printing from iOS and Android devices.
Running costs for the MFC-L6800DW, based on Brother's price and yield figures for toner and drum, are 1.6 cents per page, relatively low for a mono laser at its price and effectively matching the MFC-L6700DW's.
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The MFC-L6800DW is built for heavy-duty printing, with a maximum monthly duty cycle of up to 125,000 pages and a recommended max of 7,500. The Brother MFC-L6700DW has a maximum monthly duty cycle of 100,000 pages, with a recommended print volume of 5,000 pages. That model has a similar standard paper capacity (550 sheets).
While both printers have legal-size flatbeds and automatic document feeders (ADFs) that support single-pass two-sided scanning, the MFC-L6800DW's is modestly larger: 80 sheets compared with the MFC-L6700DW's 70 sheets. This difference is inconsequential, because you can always add more pages to the feeder during the scan. The big difference is that the MFC-L6800DW has a considerably faster rated scan speed, up to 50 images per minute (ipm), where each side of a page is considered one image, for black-and-white scanning and 20ipm for color scanning in simplex mode and up to 100ipm for black-and-white scanning and 34ipm for color scanning in duplex. The MFC-L6700DW's speed rating is up to 28ipm in black and 20ipm in color for simplex, and up to 56ipm in black and 34ipm for color in duplex. While the two printers' color speeds are the same, the MFC-L6800DW is far faster in scanning black-and-white documents.
Printing Speed
The Brother MFC-L6800DW averaged 47.1 pages per minute (ppm), which is very close to Brother's 48ppm rated speed, in printing the text-only (Word) portion of our new business applications suite. It had an average first-page-out time of 6 seconds. Both these speeds exactly match those of the Brother MFC-L6700DW, which is rated at the same 48ppm. In printing our full business suite, which includes PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel files in addition to the aforementioned Word document, the MFC-L6800DW averaged 23.4ppm. This effectively matches the MFC-L6700DW's 23.8ppm speed; just 1 second separated the two printers across the entire suite. What's more, the pair are the fastest mono laser all-in-ones that we've tested since we switched to our Windows 10 test suite earlier in the year.
Output Quality
Overall output quality for the MFC-L6800DW, based on our testing, was a touch below par, with average text, slightly subpar graphics, and average photos. Text should be good enough for any business purpose except for those requiring tiny fonts.
Its graphics issues were limited to PowerPoint printing. A figure that should have shown a gradient in tone showed up as a uniform black, and it had trouble in showing any difference between similar shades in other graphics. Photo quality should be fine for printing out images from webpages and the like, which is about all you can expect from most mono lasers.
Conclusion
The Brother MFC-L6800DW takes its place at the top of Brother's SMB mono laser all-in-one food chain. It's built for heavier-duty printing than the Editors' Choice MFC-L6700DW, and its scanner is considerably faster. If you don't need these two features, you can save $100 by going with the MFC-L6700DW. But a busy office in need of high-volume printing and scanning will do better with the MFC-L6800DW, our new Editors' Choice small-office monochrome all-in-one printer.
The Brother MFC-L6800DW offers a winning combination of terrific speed, an ample feature set, a good set of connection choices, and the capacity for high-volume printing.
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