Brother HL-2170W review

Brother's HL-2170W is a compact mono laser printer with the bare minimum of controls: a single button and three status LEDs to tell you if you need to change the drum or toner, or if there's a more general error.

A sturdy paper tray can take up to 250 sheets of A4, while a useful single-sheet feed slot above it allows you to print on individual envelopes or sheets of headed paper. Unfortunately, although our prints on envelopes were correctly positioned, the envelopes themselves got crumpled. Conventional prints had no problems with crumpling or curling.

We were pleased with both text and greyscale image prints. Text was dense and well defined, although some of the small font sizes in our mixed text and graphic greyscale test looked slightly greyish. Images were accurately rendered, and we were generally pleased with the quality of shading. Some of our photos looked a little grainy at normal settings, but the highest HQ1200 resolution setting produced excellent results.

Print speeds were by no means the fastest we've seen, but compare well to similarly priced mono lasers. The 2170W should be fine for light to medium print loads in the home or small office.

The 'W' is the clue to why this is the most expensive of Brother's new HL-2170 series. As well as the usual USB and Ethernet ports, it has built-in WiFi networking. This is slightly more fuss to configure than plugging in a cable, but detailed instructions in both the manual and the software installer make it foolproof. You first have to connect wirelessly to the printer's own Setup network to give it the details of the network you want it to connect to. The latest 802.11n standard isn't supported, so adding the Brother to an 802.11n wireless network could slow things down.

Print costs are reasonable at 1.35p a page if you buy high yield toner cartridges. If you do a lot of printing, you'll have to replace the drum every 12,000 pages, which adds 0.45p per page.

Author: Kat Orphanides