Which ink does the Brother MFC-J5855DW use?

The Brother MFC-J5855DW takes four separate LC406 cartridges: LC406BK black, plus LC406C cyan, LC406M magenta and LC406Y yellow. Buying them singly is the point of the design, since you replace only the colour that has run out.

Running costs are low for an inkjet. The LC406BK is rated at 3000 pages and lists near $25, which is about 0.83 cents a page, a figure most mono lasers cannot match. Each colour is rated at 1500 pages for around $20, about 1.33 cents. A page carrying all four inks comes to roughly 4.83 cents. That holds up over a year of use, because the black cartridge is rated to outlast each colour by two to one, and black is what an office gets through fastest.

Brother imposes no firmware lockout on the J5855DW, so genuine and third party LC406 cartridges both work. The LC406 range is recent enough that chip revisions are still appearing, so ask a compatible seller which printer firmware they test against before ordering a full set. The printer may show a non genuine ink notice, which can be dismissed, though ink level reporting is the first thing to become unreliable once you are off Brother cartridges.

The print head on this machine stays in the printer rather than riding on the cartridge, which changes what a missing colour means. A new cartridge will not fix a channel that has dried out, so run the print quality check sheet from the front panel first and read which of the four blocks has gaps. One cleaning cycle usually clears a partial block. Cleaning cycles spend ink into an internal absorber pad with a counter of its own, so running several back to back can bring on a maintenance message on a printer that was working fine.