BROTHER HL-2070N review

There are few network-ready mono lasers on the market for less than £200, so Brother's HL-2070N is promising.

Its quoted 20-page per minute (ppm) maximum speed and 10 seconds time-to-first-page compare well to similarly priced printers, such as Hewlett-Packard's LaserJet 1160, but most of these lack a standard network port.

The HL-2070N is aimed at small workgroups and home offices, where Brother sees it working alongside a colour inkjet. At less than 17cm tall it's remarkably squat. There's only one consumable to install before it's ready to print, although the toner and drum are replaced separately thereafter.

This approach should keep running costs low as the drum is replaced only when necessary, rather than with each new toner cartridge, but prints from the HL-2070N work out at 2.2p per page. This is high for a laser printer: pages cost no more from HP inkjets that use the #339 black ink cartridge.

The printer has no control panel, and printing a configuration page requires three rapid presses of the Go button. The device automatically leased an IP address on our network, and Brother's simple installation program detected it without a problem.

We quickly took a dislike to the HL-2070N's paper handling. Its specifications are sensible enough, with a 100-sheet output tray on top and a fully enclosed 250-sheet input tray in the base, but in practice it's far from perfect.

First there's the noise, which makes it sound as if each page is subject to an usual amount of friction as it passes through. The edge of the first sheet into the output tray scrapes along until it comes to a stop.

Another problem is that the front and rear edges of each page are curled downwards by the time the page emerges from the printer. The extent of this is more pronounced than we've seen before, and our test prints were still curled several days later.

This gives rise to another issue: although the driver supports manual duplexing, putting printed paper back into the input tray with the correct orientation led to paper misfeeds. The HL-2070N didn't crumple manually fed envelopes, though.

Text quality was good in our tests, but greyscales were less impressive and photos lacked contrast in dark areas. The HL-2070N was true to its claimed speeds, printing the first page of our letter test in 10 seconds and almost reaching 20ppm in our 50-page tests, but this is scant consolation for frustrating weaknesses elsewhere.