The Brother MFC-J1205W is an entry-level family and home-office AIO that prints well and, as an INKvestment Tank model, offers reasonable running costs.

Canon, Epson, and HP have embraced ink tanks filled from bottles, but Brother is so far sticking with ink cartridges. The company's latest entry-level all-in-one printer, the MFC-J1205W INKvestment Tank Wireless Multi-Function Color Inkjet Printer ($99.99), features reengineered cartridges and reformulated inks and, Brother claims, comes with enough ink to last you for a full year of printing. Like other INKvestment Tank models, the MFC-J1205W offers competitive running costs, but as you'd expect from its price, it's relatively slow, with low volume and capacity ratings and a stripped-down feature set. If you don't need to print and copy more than about 50 to 75 pages each month, it may be a good fit as your family or home-office printer.

While Brother printers have a reputation for quality and durability, I've never heard anybody praise a Brother AIO as attractive or stylish. I wouldn't call the MFC-J1205W unusually attractive, but it does have an understated design devoid of clutter and is simple enough not to stand out or draw unnecessary attention to itself.

Measuring 6.3 by 17.1 by 14.1 inches (HWD) and weighing 12.3 pounds, the MFC-J1205W is light and petite. As a low-volume printer, copier, and scanner (no fax), it has a metric ton of competitors. I'll be talking about five entry-level AIOs ranging from about $80 to $150 here, including Brother's MFC-J491DW, HP's Envy Pro 6452 All-in-One, Epson's WorkForce Pro WF-3820 Wireless All-in-One, and Canon's Pixma TS6420 Wireless Inkjet All-in-One and Pixma TR4520 Wireless Printer.

Like all multifunction printers, the MFC-J1205W comes with a flatbed scanner for scanning and copying documents and photos. However, it's the only unit in our group except for the Canon Pixma TS6420 to lack an automatic document feeder (ADF), obliging you to put pages on the glass one by one. If you anticipate needing to copy or scan multipage documents and don't want to hang around to handle one page side at a time, you'll want to look elsewhere.

As an AIO, the MFC-J1205W supports several walk-up tasks such as making copies, monitoring consumables, configuring individual user and group or department security settings, and generating usage and security reports.

For jobs too complex for the control panel, the Brother, like most modern printers, has a built-in web portal or interface for configuring security, monitoring consumables, and generating reports. You can open the portal over your local area network (LAN) in any web browser, including your smartphone's or tablet's.

Paper handling is meager, with a single 150-sheet tray. The MFC-J1205W's maximum monthly duty cycle is 2,500 pages, with a recommended monthly print and copy volume of 1,000 pages.

Compared to most of the other AIOs mentioned here, the Brother's volume ratings are just above average. The printer's MFC-J491DW sibling has the same ratings, though only a 100-sheet input tray. With just an 80-sheet paper tray and 1,000- and 100-page maximum and suggested monthly volumes, the HP Envy Pro 6452 is the least robust but not by enough to make a significant difference.

Canon’s Pixma TS6420 holds up to 200 sheets split between two 100-sheet trays, one up front and the other in back. Canon hasn't published monthly volume ratings for its consumer-grade printers for a few years now, but it's a safe bet that trying to print more than a few hundred pages per month could get a bit grueling. The other Canon in this matchup, the Pixma TR4520, also holds 200 sheets divided between front and back. Both Pixmas will also hold up to 20 sheets of premium photo paper.

The Epson WF-3820 is the hardiest of the bunch. It comes with a 250-sheet drawer that you can also configure to hold 50 sheets of photo paper or 10 envelopes. Its maximum monthly duty cycle is 26,000 pages, more than 10 times greater than the MFC-J1205W's, though its recommended monthly print and copy volume is just 1,300 pages.

According to its marketing and support docs, the only software you get with the MFC-J1205W is Brother's cross-platform (Windows, macOS, iOS, Android) combination driver and interface utility, iPrint&Scan. This started a few years ago as a competent AIO interface and has evolved into a highly useful scanning tool, but it can't do everything. It isn't robust enough to perform as a standalone interface with multiple users printing, copying, sending documents to the cloud, and more.

Fortunately, Brother's downloads page reveals that the company doesn't expect you to get by with just iPrint&Scan—as with its more costly high-volume machines, Brother offers an assortment of free productivity and convenience apps. For scanning, sharing, searching, and organizing your documents in a simple, integrated document management solution, for instance, Brother throws in Kofax PaperPort, which also provides OCR for converting scanned pages to searchable or editable text, a utility for creating and editing PDFs, and support for various file-naming routines. A connection repair tool helps keep your network healthy (not only for your printer connection, but all connections), while a wireless setup helper helps manage your Wi-Fi network.

As for connectivity, the AIO's standard interfaces are USB 2.0, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Wireless Direct (equivalent to Wi-Fi Direct). The last is a peer-to-peer networking protocol that permits you and your family's handheld wireless devices to connect to the printer without either it or them being part of the same network or connected to the same router. Additional mobile device support comes via Apple AirPrint, Brother Mobile Connect, and Mopria. 

You can also print without getting up from the couch with Amazon Alexa voice commands, a common feature nowadays among family- and home-oriented machines.

Brother rates the MFC-J1205W at 16 monochrome pages per minute (ppm), which is nothing to write home about but respectable for a $100 printer. I ran my tests over a USB connection from our Intel Core i5 testbed running Windows 10 Pro. First, I timed the device as it churned through our one-sided, 12-page Microsoft Word text document. The MFC-J1205W managed 19.4ppm, which not only beat its rated speed but topped all the others in this group except for the Epson WF-3820 (21.3ppm).

Next, I clocked the MFC-J1205W as it printed our collection of colorful and complex business documents, which includes Adobe Acrobat PDFs containing assorted colorful typefaces, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with charts and graphs with dark and gradient fills and backgrounds, and colorful Microsoft PowerPoint handouts. I combined these results with the score from the previous test. This time, the MFC-J1205W averaged 8.4ppm, which is in the ballpark with other entry-level machines apart from the WF-3820, which was half again as fast.

I finished by timing the MFC-J1205W as it printed our colorful and detailed 4-by-6-inch snapshots. While no threat to a five- or six-ink photo printer, the Brother delivered near-drugstore-quality photos in an average of 38 seconds each.

Even low-end Brother inkjets consistently produce great-looking, near-typeset-quality text with attractively spaced and kerned characters and high legibility down to about 4 or 5 points. The business graphics I printed contained difficult-to-reproduce details such as hairlines thinner than 1 point and dark, dynamic gradient fills. This AIO also prints photos well enough to turn some of those hundreds of images cluttering your smartphone into keeper memories. Colors are accurate, though not quite as bright and vibrant as those of a photo-centric consumer printer.

According to Brother, the MFC-J1205W is the smallest INKvestment Tank model available. It's also one of the most expensive to use—I've seen running costs of just under a penny per monochrome and 5 cents per color page from higher-end INKvestment Tank printers, but with this AIO you'll spend about 2 cents per black page and 7.5 cents per color. 

Brother says the four ink cartridges in the box can last you an entire year, but that's only if your annual print and copy volume is under 750 pages. That comes out to about 63 monochrome or 50 color pages per month. If you print and copy more than that, there are several bulk-ink solutions worth considering, including Epson's EcoTank ET-2760.

Of the machines mentioned here, though, most have relatively high running costs. Canon's Pixma TR4520, for example, delivers monochrome and color pages for around 8.7 and 18.7 cents respectively. Epson's WF-3820, at 3.6 cents per monochrome page and 11.7 cents per color print, isn't all that appealing, either. As a non-INKvestment Tank model, the Brother MFC-J491DW costs more than twice as much to use as the MFC-J1205W, but HP's Instant Ink-compatible Envy Pro 6452 lets you commit to 700 pages per month for a $24.99 subscription—or 100 pages for $5, which comes out to 5 cents for each black or color page.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, however: If your print and copy volume is only around 100 pages each month, cost per page is not all that critical. 

Overall, the Brother MFC-J1205W is a strong entry-level AIO for $99.99. However, one of my ongoing concerns about these discount-ink machines is that they often differ widely in features and capacity, sometimes making compromises that are too great. If you need an auto-duplexing ADF for scanning and copying multipage double-sided documents, or an auto-duplexing print engine for printing two-sided pages without user intervention, it's worth paying the extra cost for a more capable printer such as the $329.99 Canon Pixma G7020 MegaTank, our Editors' Choice among entry-level bulk-ink AIOs. Still, if you don't print and copy a lot and don't mind a slightly high but livable cost per page, the MFC-J1205W should serve you well.

The Brother MFC-J1205W is an entry-level family and home-office AIO that prints well and, as an INKvestment Tank model, offers reasonable running costs.

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I focus on printer and scanner technology and reviews. I have been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. I have authored or co-authored 20 books—including titles in the popular Bible, Secrets, and For Dummies series—on digital design and desktop publishing software applications. My published expertise in those areas includes Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, as well as prepress imaging technology. (Over my long career, though, I have covered many aspects of IT.)

In addition to writing hundreds of articles for PCMag, over the years I have also written for many other computer and business publications, among them Computer Shopper, Digital Trends, MacUser, PC World, The Wirecutter, and Windows Magazine. I also served as the Printers and Scanners Expert at About.com (now Lifewire).

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