Kevin C. Wong

Brother HLL2350DW Laser Printer [/]

I bought a Brother HLL2350DW Laser Printer almost three years ago for $165 on Amazon.

Features

  • Monochrome laser printer (I don't want to deal with color toner). 1200 dpi (I think). It comes with a starter toner which lasts a few hundred pages. Regular toner is 1200 pages (high yield toner 3000 pages) which is enough for me for at least a few years or until the toner dries (which is why I didn't buy high yield toner).
  • WiFI 802.11n which is a bit old now and probably a security risk for my WiFi network. This model doesn't have Ethernet. Configuring WiFi using the LED panel is a bit of a pain but I managed to do it for my Airport. My newer TP-Link WiFi router supports WPS and with that it was easy as you click WPS start on the router and the printer and they'll connect and configure automatically and after that it works fine.
  • There is also a USB port so I guess you can connect your computer directly and print from there and also configure from there with their Windows setup utility.
  • Mac connection is nice in that macOS will download the right driver so printing just works. Same for my iPhone and iPad. Maybe you don't get all the fiddly settings with the macOS driver but it seems good enough.
  • It has duplex printing so it can print both sides of a page. Kind of neat. 100 page output tray and 250 page input tray. You can also manual feed paper which you mostly use for one-off prints using special paper.
  • Goes to sleep and starts up when you print. Sometimes that first print job doesn't go through after sleep so you have to print again. When it's sleeping it's utterly quiet.
  • It seems to have very low RAM. Printing plain text it can handle fairly long documents. I print a spreadsheet and it can handle one page at a time (if you print too much the print queue says that job failed). I printed B2 Keep on the Borderlands and it could do a few pages at a time.

Overall it's a nice cheap printer that works fine. Not necessarily the nicest administration UI but I guess you only need to set it up once. You can use third party toner (unlike with HP printers which use microchip security toner). I would be inclined to buy a Brother printer again.