Brother HL-L8260CDW
Colour Co laser printing made simple
This is a basic colour laser printer without many frills – there’s no scanner built in, and in place of the touchscreeneen on modern inkjet printers there’s a two-line LCD that looks like it’s from a calculator.r. But it does have built-in Wi-fi,i, with support for direct outputut from Apple and Android apps as well as online storage services.s. There’s also a Gigabit Ethernetet port for wired networking andd USB 2.0 for connecting to a singleingle PC. Rather than tart up the case, Brother has minimalised it into a round-d-ededgedd cube, and to us it looks rather smart.
The supplied software makes the printer easy to set up on a network, and despite the tiny screen the menu options are clear. The 250-sheet paper tray has a visible gauge so you can see when it needs refilling, and up to 150 printed sheets stack themselves neatly on the top.
The main reason to choose a colour laser printer is speed, and Brother reckons this model prints ‘up to’ 31 pages per minute (ppm) in both black-and-white and colour. That would make it faster than most similarly priced colour laser printers and a lot faster than most inkjet printers, especially in colour. In our tests, though, the HL-L8260CDW was in no hurry to start work after we clicked Print, and on our fairly short documents this brought down its results to 22ppm in mono and just 7.4ppm in colour – not so fast.
Nor is it especially cost-effective. A new set of TN421 toner cartridges, rated for 1,800 pages of colourol andd 3,500 of blackblack, will cost you £100 more than the printer itself (£345 from Printerbase www. snipca.com/25344, supplied with smaller ‘starter’ toners). High-capacity TN423 cartridges, giving you better value at 4,000 pages of colour and 6,500 of black, are another £100 again. That works out at about 1.7p per black-only page or just under 10p for colour, not counting the new drum and belt you’ll need after 30-50,000 pages.
Compare this with HP’S Pagewide Pro 477dw multi-function inkjet printer (£340 from Amazon www.snipca. com/25346). Its Professional mode, closer to laser quality, is a bit slower, but even full-colour pages came out at 21ppm. And running costs are only about 0.8p for black or 3.2p for a colour page. Brother’s text and business graphics are crisper, but HP’S photos look better, and it has a scanner.
It looks smart but it’s not so fast nor very cost-effective