BROTHER HL-L8240CDW Professional Compact Colour LED

Good Double Sided Colour Laser Printer for small office / home office
My first double sided colour laser was a Samsung (think it had tie in with Kyrocera?). It was big. It was fien for text but less good with photos. I used to print a third to a half of documents which were hard copies of PowerPoint workshop presentation for classroom candidates. It accepted non-Samsung toners but photos were even worse; the gradations were blotchy. Nevermind, got a Canon A3 photoprinter to print the certificates for candidates so as to avoid them feeling cheated of their course fees. Years later moved onto an all-in-one printer scanner by Canon. The photos and certificates output were fine especially once laminated but of course nowhere near the A3 photo printer quality. after 12 years the Canon won’t print more than one sheet at a time. It served longer than its useful life and was not worth a service & repair cost.
This was 2021 / 2022 and I was going to buy a HP colour laser as replacement, not cecessarily all-in-one. Had in mind a HP because of all the 40 or so my work assignments sent me to during the previous decades, one by one, brands stopped producing PC’s etc. One by one, Sony VAIO, Toshiba, they disappeared. However HP brand remains the consistent brand one could find in countries few have heard of. But then in computer magazines I came across articles reporting HP (among others) have started putting recognition micro-chip onto inkjet cartridges. So a year later upon reading reviews by others here they kindly reminded me situation is same on laser toners. Thus no rush, spent a few months on and off reading as many reviews as possible to select replacement. It was thanks to other reviews that I chose this Brother for I would not have given Brother another thought. All I knew before this printer was Brother made sewinng machines, well in Asia where Singer didn’t have as big a presence.

Some good points of this Brother HL-L8260CDW. Partly due to it being just a printer rather than all-in-one, I could manually handle it to the first floor office by myself. However, the footprint size is still the same. It is also fortunate that the ventilation slots is on the right hand side because its placement is right angles on top of a filing cabinet (but unfortunately the button are therefore on the inside (butt against a wall)). No worries – saved by the fact that the machine sleeps and wakes very quickly. The Canon multifunction printer used to take couple minutes to wake up, warm up before able to print. This Brother can do it is about 15 seconds, not sure, but certainly far faster than booting up the laptop. So switch it on at the start of day and forget and it won’t use much energy.

The best aspect of this printer ? Yes indeed, it can use non-Brother toners. Amazon cookies popped Cool Toner. It even tempted me to buy it at a discount price of about 60 for a set of 4 colours. When setting up the printer, took out (almost tempted to bin the original Brother toners but didn’t because that would not be responsible); anyway put the 3rd party toner cartridges instead. No complaints. Works fine but of course can’t tell you now how good compared to original Brother toner.

This was going too good to be true.Always wanted to get rid of the cable and cable protector around the office. So let’s try wireless connection for printing. Not being a computer geek, here was the first hurdle. Owing tom company security policies and therefore the privacy settings used with FireFox browser, most things are disabled so as to prevent data leak of clients’ data. Thus could not get onto the website support page indicated by the Brother documention which came with the printer. Nevermind. With different search engines and different browsers eventually found U-Tube tutorials. However, not quite enough tuturials to lead me by the hand to set it up. What is SSID and what is router? Is it any different with was supplied by the ISP? No mention. So using logic and thought it backwards, the laptops, all out laptops, could only connect wirelssly to one connection at a time. So deduced the wirelss printing facility must use this same “circuit”. Thus what the tutorials referred to were what the ISP supplied (as I had not changed them).
Hurray it worked. One after another got each laptop connected. They were Win7-64 Home, Win7-64 Pro, Win8.1, Win10, and Win11 operating systems. All connected 5 hours after unpacking the Brother printer.

Would I recommend it ? Yes with one reservation. When taking old Canon to local municipal tip for disposal, they would not accept it – told me to take it to a waste business machine disposal company. But the local tip would have taken a smaller inkjet printer for disposal. This Brother would be the same but nevermind, the saved on ink by using laser toner would go towards proper disposal come ??? 10+ years time.