I'm the office administrator for a 120-person professional services firm. I manage about $180,000 a year in supplies and services across eight vendors, which means I live in spreadsheets, shipping notifications, and the occasional printer-themed headache. When it came time to replace two aging office printers, the choice narrowed to two searches I see all the time: the Brother MFC-L8690CDW colour laser all-in-one and a Brother inkjet that uses LC404 cartridges.

That might look like comparing an SUV to a sedan, but for an office buyer, this is exactly the comparison that matters. I spent a month testing both before we bought. Here's what I learned.

What I compared and why

I evaluated both options the way I evaluate any office equipment: total cost of ownership, output quality, reliability, and the amount of support they'd need. Not just sticker price and speed. Let me rephrase that: I cared about the sticker price, but I cared more about what happens after the box is opened.

I'm not going to say one is universally better. It depends on how many pages you print, what you print, and whether your IT team has time for printer babysitting.

Upfront cost vs. the cost that sneaks up on you

The LC404 inkjet is cheaper up front. You can find Brother inkjet models that use LC404 cartridges for around $150 to $250, depending on the vendor and current sales. The MFC-L8690CDW is a bigger investment — typically $600 to $800 based on major office supply quotes I checked in January 2025. Verify current pricing before you order.

Before you go any further, get the sales tax out of the way. I keep a sales tax calculator open wherever I'm comparing equipment. At 8.5% sales tax, the laser has about $59.50 in tax and the inkjet has about $17. That $42 difference feels significant, but it disappears after one extra set of replacement cartridges.

And that's where the "brother lc404 printer" search turns into a trap. The LC404 isn't a printer model — it's the cartridge. The printers that use it are inexpensive, but the carts are small and rated for lower page yields. If you're printing a few pages a week at home, that's fine. In an office, you're replacing them often, and the per-page cost adds up.

Cost per page: don't round too early

Brother lists the MFC-L8690CDW at up to 31 pages per minute in both black and colour (Brother product specifications, brother.com, January 2025). Speed is nice, but the number I pay attention to is cost per page.

Here's a tip I wish someone had given me years ago: use a rounding calculator when comparing page yields. If a colour page on one printer is 24.7 cents and you round it to 25 cents, it doesn't sound like much. But over 30,000 pages, that 0.3 cent difference is $90. The LC404 inkjet has a lower upfront price, but its cost per page is higher. The MFC-L8690CDW uses toner with much higher yields, so the running cost is lower — even after you factor in drum replacements.

Everything I'd read said inkjet was the sensible choice for a small office. In practice, at our volume, the laser became cheaper by month eight. The conventional wisdom about inkjet savings assumes you don't print very much. We print a lot.

What Brother MFC-L8690CDW colour laser printer reviews won't tell you

Most Brother MFC-L8690CDW colour laser printer reviews focus on specs, speed and output samples. Those are useful. But they don't tell you what it's like to run the machine in a real office. Here's what stood out after a year with it.

The colour output is consistent. For client-facing proposals and marketing documents, that matters more than any spec sheet. A document printed on the MFC-L8690CDW looks finished. The LC404 inkjet could produce more saturated colours on glossy paper, but for everyday documents and pitch decks, the laser was more professional. When we started using the colour laser for final proposals, a client actually commented on how clean the documents looked. That's the moment I became a believer in the "quality is brand image" argument: the output you hand someone is part of your company's impression.

The LC404 inkjet wasn't bad. Text on plain paper looked perfectly good. But we had to be careful on coated stock and heavy cardstock. The laser handled those without smudging. For us, that consistency was worth the higher upfront cost.

Why is my printer offline? The reliability dimension

If you've ever typed "why is my printer offline" into Google thirty seconds before a deadline, you know that the most expensive printer is the one that won't print. This is where the comparison gets personal.

We started with the LC404 inkjet on Wi-Fi. It went offline about once a month. Sometimes a restart fixed it. Sometimes I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver, which is not a good look when the CFO asks why the board packet is late.

I don't want to blame the inkjet itself. It was mostly a Wi-Fi issue. But that's the point: a printer that relies on consumer Wi-Fi uses more help desk time than a printer on a wired connection. The MFC-L8690CDW is connected via Ethernet in our office, and it has gone offline exactly once in twelve months. That one time was after a firmware update, and it took me ten minutes to fix.

So when you compare Brother printers, compare the network options as carefully as you compare speed. A cheaper printer can end up costing more in IT time. If you do stick with Wi-Fi, check the printer's auto-off and sleep settings first. A printer that sleeps too hard is the most common reason for an offline status.

The hidden cost of your time

I want to say we spent about two hours a month fiddling with the LC404 inkjet, but don't quote me on that exact number. What I know is that after we switched to the MFC-L8690CDW, my phone stopped ringing about printers. There's something satisfying about a machine that just prints. After years of managing temperamental devices, that is a bigger metric than most spec sheets mention.

Paper jams are another hidden cost. The MFC-L8690CDW is not jam-proof — no printer is. But when it does jam, the front access makes it easy to clear. The inkjet's paper path felt tighter, and clearing a jam was a two-person operation more often than I'd like.

One more office detail: if you're printing customer invoices or mailings, USPS defines standard letter and large envelope dimensions at pe.usps.com/businessmail101. The MFC-L8690CDW's duplex and envelope handling made it much easier to produce a clean mail merge without hand-feeding. That's not a feature on the marketing page, but it saves my assistant a few hours each month.

Which Brother printer should you choose?

Here's the part that might be unpopular: if you print less than roughly 500 pages per month and the purchase price is the only number that matters, the LC404 inkjet can make sense for a small office or home office. Get one with Ethernet if you can, and budget for regular cartridge replacements.

But if you're an office that produces proposals, presentations, invoices, labels, or any document that lands in front of a customer, I'd choose the MFC-L8690CDW. The higher upfront cost is really the cost of lower per-page expenses, fewer offline incidents, and output that makes your company look good. If that sounds like a stretch, think about the last time you received a faded, streaked document from someone you were about to hire. It changed how you saw them, even if it wasn't fair.

As for the calculators: don't skip them. A sales tax calculator and a rounding calculator won't tell you which printer to buy, but they'll stop you from making a spreadsheet mistake that hides the real cost. The best printer for you is the one that stays online, prints what you need, and doesn't make you explain to your boss why a "cheap" solution turned into a support ticket.