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 |
Being sick of inkjet printers drying up between use I finally decided to get a colour laser. A great price for a multi function colour laser printer.
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
Goes the EXTRA MILE!
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.
Good printer overall but issues with wireless connectio
This is a LARGE printer, suited to a small office. Print quality is good and off brand cartridges are reasonable, especially when compared to the dreaded inkjet! It has features such as double sided printing and full colour. One problem we have encountered, it recently and spontaneously lost connection to our PC leading us to use a USB cable!
– Read the dimensions! We just made it fit where we needed it although it is wireless so could be set up anywhere with sufficient space.
+- The toners cartridges are pricey but work out better than inkjet page per print
+ No hassle or faults that come with inkjets
– Periodic long-term maintenance as the drum will need replacing eventually
+ Overkill for the home environment but with 4 kids doing homework all sent online but requiring printing it seems like this will be a solid investment
+ Paper feed scanning plus scanning bed,
+ duplex printing without turning the page by the long side and reinsert paper thank god
+ Software is easy to use, set up Install and WiFi instructions clear and easy, don’t forget to get the password and SN number off the back for firmware updates and registering for warranty.
+ In summary use laser printers at work and love how quick efficient and low maintenance they are. Our old inkjet from certain brand that now has disgusting chipped ink cartridges forcing buying from them saying empty when not and even when you buy only official product 2 out of 3 cartridges have to be returned as the don’t work. Paper wouldn’t feed right is now where it belongs, in the scrap. Expensive buy in but to press print and it work flawlessly is well worth it.
Would recommend over any inkjet.
Perfect home office printe
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
Set up via USB cable is a doddle. Please note it doesn’t come supplied with one but only needs a std printer cable, so unless it’s your first ever printer you’ve probably already got the right one.
Windows 10 onwards has the basic drivers required pre-installed for printing but you’ll need to download a driver for scanning or you can use the drivers on the supplied CD.
Setting up Wi-Fi connection was again straight forward the only pain being entering the password on the small LCD screen means you have to scroll through upper & lower case alpahbet for each letter but you only have to do it once.
Printing from an Android phone is again straight forward once you download an app. The Brother iPrint & Scan app doesn’t have great feedback but for basic printing etc. it works fine. Setting up is just selecting the model of your printer once it’s scanned for those available and allowing access t media etc.
For a basic home printer it does what you want without any frills it’s great. If you need scan multiple docs or print lots of pages really fast you’ll need an higher spec model.
Has replaced my Xerox. Read reviews and heeded guidance about getting out of the box; was a tight fit! Set up was a doddle and I am not IT literate, followed pictures and it worked. Print is really good although colour seems to take time but worth the wait. Hoping the toner lasts a long time. My one concern is the power connection; seems delicate.
Great quiet printe
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.
I bought the Brother HL-L3210CW Colour Laser Printer, I have noticed the reviews are for several different models and I found that confusing when wanting to research the model interested in it would be better to just see reviews for one model.
Setting up to Wifi is as simple as it gets, just push the wps button on your router and the wifi button on the printer and it’s done. WHY THE INSTRUCTIONS DO NOT JUST SAY THAT! is one of life’s annoying mysteries! I set it up using my iPhone and it was sorted without the usual hair pulling and swear words. Printing is clear and I use 120gsm paper without problems.
Even though I checked the measurements this printer is huge and heavy! I like the sleep and auto shut off which is a necessity for my poor memory. The printer looks and feels solid made and everything looks and works as it should and price wise for a colour laser is one of the lowest I’ve seen, replacement toner’s are reasonable compared to some other models but it’s always something to check out before purchasing so you know it’s agreeable with your budget.
The app (for iPhone anyway) is rather basic and seems old as it’s not user friendly or particularly easy to others I’ve used. Every time I open it I must sign in and it seems slow, luckily I don’t have to use it and just print with air print but if you want to change the settings then prepare for a quiet undisturbed time so your swearing won’t bother other family members.
I would buy again in future but I do hope they make it smaller and lighter in years to come.
Really solid printer, well built and easy to physically install. A few plastic tabs to remove, keep a good look out as there are plenty inside the trays etc.
I use it on Linux and Windows and it works fine as a scanner and printer. The bundled set of Apps that windows comes with are useful but notifications can be a little annoying it like me you turn it off when not in use.
Problems are around the installation. It asks you to either use a cable to connect it directly – a cable that isn’t provided. OR you connect via WIFI.
Connecting via WIFI is where the problems start. It asks you to provide an IP address which you can’t get until you connect it to WIFI so it can get a WIFI address. Leaving you in a catch 22 situation of which there isn’t enough web pages, help guides and logic to get passed.
Linux has something like 12 ways you can connect to it, all require you to know in advance what the IP address is.
Save yourself a load of hassle and buy the cable you need. (See picture for the two ends you need, luckily I had one from an older printer) It is a USB A to USB B style cable. You only need this to help setup the machine in the first place, then you can rely on WIFI.
Even when installed and working the Machine tells me the IP Address correctly on its display, the BT Home hub tells me the IP address is 0.0.0.0 and can’t detect it as being turned on. Even when it is printing from my PC via WIFI.
I got this printer to replace an HP printer that had broken after less than 2 years and I’m glad that I did. It prints very well and is easy to set up. Getting a wi-fi connection is easy especially if you have WPS on your router (although oddly, the instructions that come with the machine don’t tell you how to do it by this method but brother do if you search their web site). I have only had it a short while so cannot comment on reliability but brother printers seem to have a good reputation and I have had no problems to date. I would certainly recommend it.
Feels well built.
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.
Good quality, great price.
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.
Cannot Fault I
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!
See the note at the end about extracting from packing carton.
In this 3000 series, Brother has produced a ridiculously easy printer to set up and use, which gives crisp and accurate results. The printer is quiet in operation, though there are mechanical clicks in feeding, etc. It is quicker than any consumer inkjet as well as far cheaper to run. It works well with the cheapest paper, even double-sided, and gives superb results with heavier papers and thin card – there’s a straight-through feeder if needed, though you’ll need plenty of space behind for that.
Some rival models have cheaper-to-use ‘official’ consumables, a few have cheaper-to-use remanufactured toners.
But if you buy remanufactured high-capacity toner cartridges and then refill these several times, in the way that U-refill Toner Ltd. recommends, it’s about as cheap as any colour laser printer gets. There are no cheating lockout chips which prevent using third party consumables or refilling.
Operation is very straightforward: press ‘on’ and allow a few seconds warmup (the failing of all laser printers, though these are actually LED , not laser), then print from your USB, wired or wireless network; it can (I think) also be set to print wirelessly from a phone. Copying and scanning are as straightforward: a few seconds after switch-on, press the touchscreen for what you want and feed the originals in. No messing about unless you want something awkward, in which case the manual is voluminous and online – I downloaded it as a PDF and have it ready in the computer.
This model is ‘basic’ in Brother’s L5000 touch-screen controlled printer/copier/scanner/fax series; the top model is faster and is the only one with auto-duplex copy/scanning as well as the duplex printing all models have. Worth 100 more? Your call. They share consumables with the MFC-L basic printer-copiers and and HL-L printers, including new drum units at 18,000 cycles, waste toner box similarly and transfer belt and fuser unit at 50,000 cycles. That’s better than most rivals, and low-volume users will probably not get to replacing the last two before wanting a more modern replacement – 100 packets is a lot of paper!
The paper draw (the usual half-packet paper load) is at the bottom of the printer. Single sheets can be fed in from a drop-down tray just above the paper draw – all very convenient. The 50-sheet auto-feed scan unit lifts up for flatbed copying, and rises to accommodate books and hold them flat ; below it, the paper is delivered onto the top of the ‘works’ in the centre section. Paper is fed from front to rear, and unless the ‘straight-passage’ exit is opened at the rear, paper then exits forwards between the printer and the scanner; there’s plenty of space for a pile of copies.
Unpacking and setup is similar to other lasers, beginning with getting rid of plenty of sticky tape, and removing the securing whatchamacallits – Brother has allowed for serious mishandling during shipping across the world. There’s a driver CD in the info pack and a fold-out setup sheet, but best to go online for help. The instruction sheet is OK, and the YouTube setup videos meticulous.
The central ‘works’ of the printer includes the four “drum unit + toner cartridge” sets, the paper transfer belt below them and the fuser at the back. A latch opens up the whole scanner and top of the printer to replace these; they’re very easy to get at – drum/toner units just lift out. Essentially, to set up a new printer, each of the four drum unit/toner cartridge assemblies needs to be taken out (just slide the lock tabs and lift), the securing cradles removed and disposed of, then the units dropped back in, one by one. Takes a few minutes. Note that, as with all lasers, don’t touch any roller surface or gold electrical contact or you’re likely to damage it with finger grease. While they’re out, check one for how to pop out the toner cartridge on its own – by sliding the green tab on the right when pulling the handle. This is what you’ll replace when toner runs out. Only a ‘Toner Value Pack’ starter is supplied as new – typical these days.
Finally, a WARNING.
The lifting points of the printer (it’s quite heavy, though much less than older models) are at the BOTTOM SIDES and nowhere else. Unlike some other brands, there are no warnings or help at all for where to lift the printer out of its box (except on the printer, so only visible when it’s already out!) The correct lift points are difficult to access and not at all obvious, deep in the box. I found ‘secure’ points halfway down, but they turned out to include the handle to open the printer, and by lifting there, the safety catch is operated, so that only the securing tape then holds most of the weight. If this breaks, the printer falls apart – which can destroy it! In the end, I discovered that the strong bag in which the printer is packed in the box can be used to lift it out safely – though it needs to be pierced to construct handles.
Easy to set up. Solid build. Good print quality.
I already have a trusty Brother laser printer which i’ve had for years. It’s done masses of printing and hasn’t put a foot wrong. I wouldn’t even be buying this printer were it not for the fact that my daughter needs the colour option for her school work. Given my Brother laser has been the best and most long lived printer i have ever owned ( and i’ve owned a few) i didn’t actually consider another brand. I selected this simply because it was a Brother and on the functions i require.
The printer arrived safely in it’s original box well cushioned in frames of polystyrene. I ordered it from the UK to be delivered in France. Happily it came with a continental plug rather than the uk one so for me that was great ( i despise rewiring plugs!)
The downside was it came with instructions in german…not so good. However i persevered and continued with the installation. There were numerous bits of blue tape securing things. These were easily removed. It came with 4 preinstalled colour cartridges which required the guard taking off (HINT move the yellow tabs to the side to release the cartridge and they pull out easily).
With all this done i powered up. The touch screen is good although i’d like to see a firmer screen more akin to a modern smart phone. This screen has a bit of give but it’s fine. Navigation is easy.
You aren’t provided with a cable to connect it to the computer but i have about a thousand of them collected over the years so not a problem. My plan is to have this wifi anyway so i’ll only use that if i have to.
A google search on the matter advised me to download the “brother printer app”. I’m on android and this was quickly found on PLAY. Then i had to just follow the instructions and link up the two. This wasn’t intuitive and i would not have worked it out without the internet instructions. The info was easy to find so don’t be put off by that. The app is easy to navigate and with 10 minutes of powering up i had my first wifi colour print out in my hand. The quality of the print is pretty good. All that remains is to see how well the cartridges last.
Pros
Minimal junk in the box
Easy to set up based on simple internet instructions
Good print quality
Sturdy build quality
Cons
Lack of instructions in english (easily solved with internet search)
Lack of cable to link to PC but as wifi this is largely a moot poi
So far so good
I read the reviews, some good some not so good. My wife has insisted on buying Epson’s for the past few purchases and she used them mostly for her work at preschool. I’m semi retired now, if that situation really does exist. I wanted something that I could rely on for work. I bought it because the Epson had failed again. I set my wife’s lap top up first using the disc supplied, perfectly straight forward. My full size computer recognised the new machine and didn’t need the disc. That was until I tried to scan to email. I thought oh dear here we go. No such thing. Part of the disc installation was directly related to scanning. Disc in, down load, scanning sorted. Time will tell on how reliable and cost of running. I’m known for taking a leap of faith on a lot of things.
Good, good, good.
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.
My 8 year old daughter loves it.
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.
After ordering this printer yesterday and recieving it today – I cannot fault the delivery time or service.
Item was well packaged and secure, no real comments there.
THIS ITEM CAME WITH A UK PLUG AND INSTRUCTIONS (for me anyway – I have seen a lot of reviews stating it came with german/dutch instructions and a european plug – this wasn’t the case for me – intitally these reviews put me off).
Very easy step-by-step instructions to follow with diagram guide to get all set up. I chose to go wireless and this was also super easy except my computer couldn’t find it which meant I had to manually set up the wifi on the printer itself – P.I.T.A when coming to put my wifi password in when all you have are up and down arrows to chose your lower/upper case letters, numbers and symbols, so good luck if you have a fancy pants password like Y0Lo#4/yF
When installing all the software and getting to the point where you want to install updates, it does ask for a password, the software states this ‘password’ was on the back of the printer – however there was no password to be found (although it does give you the two default passwords that brother uses – one of these worked for me).
All-in-all about 30 minutes to unpack, install and update.
As far as print quality goes – I’m not too impressed (otherwise would have given 5 stars), doing the whole page covered in a rainbow gradient – there are horiontal lines running the full length of the page, I can only assume that this is due to the toner cartridges as there are starter cartidges that come with the printer. I can only hope that when I replace these with full fresh toner cartridges that this problem might rectify itself.
Also, when installing the software/drivers from the brother website (I didn’t touch the CD at all) for some reason searching via model number didn’t work, so you need to do the ‘browse devices’ option.
Really impressive home / small office printe
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!
Brother HL-L3230CDW was reduced to 129. I read a number of reviews on printers and this appeared to score well on build quality, ease to set up, print quality, full colour, double sided printing (duplex), cartridge life [if compared with ‘get you started’ cartridges] and replacement cost, (which are comparable to our old larger inkjet cartridges). I had a walk around a large electrical outlet and all of the display printers seemed to support the various reviews. Had they carried this printer, I would have be happy to pay 10-15 move to support the high-street but not 50 which seemed to be a comparative divide.
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
Setup issues, but otherwise ok
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.
Box contents and installatio
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.
great print quality, great build quality, not the easiest to set-up
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.
Excellent value especially at reduced price. My Canon inkjet printer and Samsung multifunction laser printer died within 2 weeks of each other, both aged about 8 years. The inkjet printer used to drink ink even when sleeping so researched colour multifunction laser printers which should work out a lot cheaper to run.
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!
I like this printer a great deal. It’s an ideal printer for a home office or small business with mid-level printed output — the recommended duty cycle is 300-1500 pages per month. The printer is not by any means small, and the box it comes in is absolutely enormous. This is a heavy printer, and may need two people to lift it. The printer is supplied with a complete set of 4 full-sized toner cartridges. This printer can take two sizes of toner (manufacturer codes TN243 and TN247 — roughly 1,000 pages at 5% coverage per cartridge, and 2,500 page coverage at the same level). The toner cartridges supplied with the printer are the smaller TN243 size, but nonetheless full-sized products rather than reduced size starter versions.
This is an efficiently functional, boxy, but pretty rugged all in one wireless printer/scanner/copier. The plastic it’s made from is matt and for the most part fairly pale in colour, although around the output, flatbed, and controls, there’s a darker contrasting grey.
I connected this directly to my router from the machine itself. Setting up in this way is slightly fiddly as the on screen keyboard is tiny, making selecting the correct characters a bit awkward. Apart from this, the printer has a fairly easy to use combination of touch screen and button interface, although it does feel a little odd to have to use a physical back button rather than an onscreen one. The screen is decent enough for the job it does — but in quality terms not remotely comparable to the touch screen on a smartphone.
The printer is supplied with a software installation disc, but can be downloaded from the manufacturer’s website if you don’t have a drive — indeed, as long as your broadband is decent speed, this is probably easier than faffing about with the usually out-of-date software supplied in hard format with a new printer. I didn’t need to install any new software as my preceding printer was from the same brand, and I’d kept my software up to date — to connect, I just sought out a newly available printer with my iMac, and it connected without issue. The software isn’t always intuitive/as easy as it could be to navigate. Features such as double-sided or reduced quality printing aren’t available from the top-level menu. Draft/resource-saving options could be made more prominent.
You can also print to this from a smartphone/tablet, if you install the Brother app. I have an iPad and an Android phone. The app was easy to install on both, and with this in place the printer could be identified immediately. The space/memory saving interface of the app isn’t my favourite thing ever, but works reasonably well — and even using this you have options to make resource-saving choices such as printing multiple pages to one, and using the duplexing unit to print double-sided. The problems I have discovered with using the app to print are that this does seem to impose constraints on printable file size that aren’t present when working from my desktop, and processing files for printing can be quite slow.
Output speed is a reasonably quick 18ppm (at 5% coverage), though if duplexing function is used this does work rather more slowly.
The copier function works really well, using either the flat bed or sheet feed options with A4 pages, and can also cope with reproducing book pages (though thicker books need to be opened out well to prevent light bleed from turning the centre of a copy black). Adjustments to copying settings can be made fairly easily via the touchscreen menu.
This is a very good cheap laser colour printer as far as a Linux user is concerned. I am using Ubuntu 18.04.LTS. To install this printer was a breeze. Simply enable and set up network from the control panel on the printer, my wireless ssid was detected and then I entered the password and within a couple of moments the green wi-fi light was on and it was connected to my wireless network. I confirmed it was connected by checking the ip in my router control panel.
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.