Brother HL-L3230CDW Colour Laser Printer – Single Function
Brother HL-L3230CDW Colour Laser Printer – Single Function, Wireless/USB 2.0, 2 Sided Printing, 18PPM, A4 Printer, Small Office/Home Office Printer, Light Grey/Dark Grey
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| Weight: | 18 kg |
| Dimensions: | 16.14 x 18.15 x 9.92 cm; 18 Kilograms |
| Brand: | BROTHER |
| Model: | HLL3230CDWG1 |
| Colour: | Light Grey/Dark Grey |
| Batteries Included: | No |
| Manufacture: | BROTHER |
| Dimensions: | 16.14 x 18.15 x 9.92 cm; 18 Kilograms |
Initial setup of the printer on the wired network is easy with printer drivers working from Windows. Setting up the scan to file or pdf is just as easy.
The copy function is great with the document feeder, however if you need to scan double sided you have to use the scanner bed and manually change the pages.
Duplex feature works great for printing
Smart piece of engineering, multifunctional and shipped with1000 pages ink supply. Promptly dispatched and easy set-up. Excellent agent support including registration and swapping out as soon as fault found with fan of first delivery. High quality print and multiple variations on output easily selectable using led screen.
I like this as it’s compact and perfect for the home office. Wireless printing works well and colour quality is good enough for document use. I haven’t tried it with high quality pape
As an Epson and Ricoh man changing manufacturers was a bit daunting. As my GP surgery seemed to have no problem with brother lasers I took the plunge and bought this. I have been genuinely pleased with both the print quality and the quietness of the printer. The only down sides are: don’t try filling the paper to the max marl – leave it 5mm below the mark as sometimes it has trouble pickup top sheets after a refill. I cannot seem to print in black if a colour toner is empty or missing. (I need to play with this some more). Overall a fantastic small business printer.
Well I have been using inkjet printers for a long time. So this type of printer is new to me, and a big change. OMG it was so heavy. Yes it did get up stairs to my desk, just. My’ so well packed. I was very impressed with the build, it seems solid and sturdy. Used the quick start guide to get going, yes I know I am just impatient, but I had job waiting , the puter and printer said hi and almost got going straight off. I did use the usb cable, and have not tryed with wifi thats to come. Also printed a colour picture on photo paper, not to bad once I had got the settings right. Have tryed scanning, worked well. Now the print side of it works well. So quiet, so far I have printed about 500 sheets of A4 and have no grumbles, I get what I want, good clean copys. Its a little slow, compared to an ink jet, but the quite is heaven. So I am feeling well pleased with myself for buying tech and getting it right.
Setup was a breeze. There isn’t really much to do to get it physically working. Until I tried connecting it to our wireless network. I was expecting some troubles as we have a very secure WiFi setup and very few things will connect automagically. I ended up having to connect using the printer’s virtual keyboard on the touch screen. And that’s where the problem came to light.
The keys on the virtual keyboard are tiny. It was impossible to touch the correct key without touching at least three surrounding keys. Luckily, I have a capacitative stylus (that I got to avoid using my finger on supermarket touch screens). Even then, I had to use the fine point.
Once it was setup, however, it’s been a dream. Print quality is very good (except for colour photos, but I expected that) and using the scanner to produce OCR’d PDF documents works so much better than it had with my HP monochrome MFD.
The printer is in my bedroom, so noise levels were important. And it is unexpectedly quiet.
One week after delivery I am totally satisfied.
This machine is VERY well built and performs superbly in my small home office environment. The documentation is easy to follow and the whole machine is really well packaged.
Installation was a breeze and presented no problems at all.
Operation is very straightforward and requires no specialist knowledge or experience.
The print quality is excellent and I was surprised at how Black the Blacks were in the printed paged. Colours are vivid and do not exhibit the “high gloss” effect seen on some makes of printers/toners. This makes the printer perfectly capable of printing colour photos in all but professional photographer’s quality.
The scanning results are of good quality and quick! This machine allows for double-sided scanning via the auto document feeder. This is done by having optical sensors in both the top and bottom of the document feeder and is a real “boon” for scanner users.
For example, A 2-page (4 sided) A4 document, with text and coloured graphics, set to scan all 4 sides at 300dpi resolution and produce a multi-page pdf file, takes about 7 seconds to complete and produces a file of 1,047 KB (1.04MB) in size and the same document scanned at 600dpi takes 31 seconds and produces a file of 6,121 KB (6.12MB) in size., with excellent quality in both cases. The resulting file from a scan may be saved on a USB device, via the on-board USB socket, or sent directly to a computer.
Overall, you will be hard pressed to beat this machine for quality AND value.
footnote : I have not used the FAX functions as I don’t know anyone who still uses a FAX machine!
Good price point.
Software works okay for Windows client computers (7,8,10). I might have even printed from an Ubuntu Linux system too.
Software auto updates okay, both the printer and the client software.
Colour and greyscale prints are all good.
Picures are okay though some colour fuzzlement (technical term!) has been seen in pictures. We haven’t had time to play with settings and/or upgrade to better quality paper etc. to see if we can improve this. Anyway, you have to factor in jpeg quality and other graphics ‘alogrithms’ and originating picture dimensions to really check this out. So until I’ve printed one of the bigger png’s I’ve recently bought I shouldn’t bad mouth this printer. I bet the one I’m thinking of was actually a small jpg from a Web page that was over magnified.
It can print from Android though client software is a pain to set up. (That’s not Brother’s fault though it would be a nice-to-have from them if they could manage their own dedicated software print stack.)
1 “intermittent” fault – client printing sometimes can’t sort out 2-sided printing, as in, flip on long or short edge seems to get stuck in one mode or the other and doesn’t tell you and just won’t flip to the other mode. You just waste paper and toner finding this out.
Apart from that – and the PC client software seems to (always) work without that problem from some applications (LibreOffice, Word) – this printer is great.
I like it. My 8 year old daughter loves it as well.
I had inkjet and laser printers before but both eventually died. ( old laser was 9y.old)
Yes you might say that lasers are more expensive to buy and tonners cost 9more..BUT.. For occasional home printing ink will cost you more. It simply dries out and every time pronter have to go through cleaning cycle which eats your ink..
Laser is just powder that gets heat up.
Ok. Back to this one.
Once you hook it up to wifi either through WPS button.. ( takes 5sec ) or enter yout password on touch screen ( takes 20sec)
It set. My both android phones and ipad pro recognized it and connected straight awya. No need for brother app unless you want to scan things onto your phone/tablet directly.
Love the duplex ( two sided) printing as well.
Saves paper for my daughter home works prints.
Printer also can hook to your google drive , drop box and other cloud storage apps.
Very quiet. Easy to use. Love it.
Having become increasingly annoyed with the cost per page of inkjet refills, when our HP multifunction printer gave up the ghost this Brother unit seemed to be the best ‘no frills’ choice of laser printers. Set up was simplicity itself with connection to iPhones (over AirPrint) and computers over WiFI posing no issues. Timing was spot on as well – we got the printer only a month or so before homeschooling began due to coronavirus so it’s had some heavy usage!
Print speeds are very good as is quality – photos not quite as good as an inkjet but that’s to be expected and they’re 90% there; ‘normal’ files with text and images are fine though and to be honest printing photos in my opinion is always better from a dedicated supplier rather than printing at home.
We’ve just got the warning regarding low toner levels from the starter set that came bundles with the printer, this coming at just over 900 pages (lots of home school printouts….) so the 1000 page suggestion seems spot on. A non-Brother 3000 page refill pack looks to be around 70-80 so again massively cheaper than an inkjet.
Any bad points – none really from y perspective, obviously this doesn’t have any features such as fax, binding, finishers etc. but that’s not what we bought it for so not really a negative for me personally. In summary – a great printer and highly recommended!
Ease of set up
We unpacked printer and removed the internal protection (on cartridges and paper tray). Down loaded driver from the Brother web site and it connected to WiFi very easily. Test print (a letter in draft) was uniform and clean, possibly because of our budget paper, the print was slightly below expectation, though very clean looking. Where presentation justifies, it might be worth selective printing onto decent paper.
Day 1. Optimistic
I’ll update later when used more. This is today’s setup review: The printer gladly looks for wifi access points even though the wifi interface is disabled. It will sit for a very long time, then time out. No mention of the wifi interface actually being turned off! A separate leaflet in the document pack mentions how to turn on the wifi module (but fails to stress that this is an important first step). Very poor software design.
Seems to come with 1000 page cartridges, as opposed to the possible 3000 page ones. Still not bad for the money, I suppose. I’ll try some aftermarket cartridges when these run out -as I don’t fancy paying as much as the price of the printer for new cartridges.
Prints seem fine. Gray blacks, but that’s probably to be expected form a “laser” (LED) printer.
Upon opening the box and checking the contents, I was surprised and a little disappointed to find instructions only in French and Dutch. Fortunately I can read and speak some Dutch so it wasn’t a major problem. The mains lead was a two-pin continental connection. Although wi-fi seems to be the preferred connection, I wanted to do it USB. There is a USB socket on the back of the printer but no USB lead is supplied. I have amassed a collection of connections including USB and three-pin mains leads. Setting up the printer was easy, I was stepped through the process after inserting the CD. Print quality on ordinary plain paper is good but not as vivid as some printers I have looked at. Due to the lack of English instructions and UK mains lead I could not give it five.
Absolutely no complaints about the product, the print speed via wifi is very good, print quality is excellent. I have not tried a full colour picture print yet, but letter and graphics are crisp and clear. As colour laser printers go, it is nice and small, but it is bigger than many small B&W printers, as you have to have 4 different toners inside. So Brother has tried to keep the size down and has a reasonable footprint, but slightly taller than a B&W one. Trust me, you will not get many worthwhile colour lasers this small.
Like most modern printers you can print from your phone and tablet too. It was not the easiest thing to set-up on my wifi, as it is secure and password protected, but the software did sort it all out for me, but initially I had just downloaded the drivers and tried to manually add it, and that failed. So I had to go with the full-fat software that is a bit bloated with apps and utilities I don’t want and had to do an advance install to stop them cluttering up my computer.
Very pleased with print quality, both B&W and colour. Even photos print very well on the recommended 120gsm Colotech+ Gloss Coated paper. Not noticeably inferior to a good inkjet print unless compared side by side and even then not bad at all. Colours were slightly different but either could be ‘true’. Obviously settings can be altered. I have access to a good Epson 5-colour inkjet printer for any important photos.
Negative points: It is a big beast! Not ideal for domestic use unless you have an appropriate computer room or office. Check the dimensions! You cannot do semi-manual scanning of double-sided documents using the ADF by feeding them in one way then the other way as can be done with an ancient (14 yrs) Brother scanner/copier/printer at work. You have to scan each page of double sided documents individually using the flat bed. The virtual buttons on the display screen need pressed firmly. Slight concern regarding reports of the fuser falling to bits and of paper handling problems but is not going to get heavy use. Brother original toner very expensive but apparently compatibles are available.
Having had it a month I’d give it 5 stars for sure. Just hope I’m not back in a year to report disasters and problems!
Then in Ubuntu I went to System tools, Preferences, Settings, Printers and by the miracle of Open-source the printer was there and working. ( nice one Ubuntu). I find it easy to control setting from the web interface ( you will need to log in, check out the Brother web site for Default password). There are other drivers for this printer available on the Brother web site by i have not investigated them as yet, to whether they provide more functionality. HOWEVER there is a Caution, not to do with the printer but with Amazon. In the section under the advertisement entitled something like ” Also brought together” – they show the printer + a set of toner cartridges. DO NOT BE MISLED these are not compatible with the HL-L3210 CW they don’t fit. This printer uses TN 243 carts. the ones they show are for an older model printer. Don’t assume that because Amazon links them together they will work. One of the reasons for buying this printer was because I mistakenly thought they were compatible and at 35 pound or whatever this was a good deal. So 10/10 to Brother for their product BUT 0/10 to Amazon for their misleading ( whether intentional or not ) advertising.