Brother HL-L8260CDW
Good-quality prints that can emerge at an impressive rate, but not quite up there with the best
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £204 (£245 inc VAT) from printernet.co.uk
Stripped-back and kept deliberately simple, the Brother HL-L8260CDW is a compact, business-ready colour laser with wireless capabilities built in. It’s a chunky cube and, after the full-colour touchscreens used elsewhere, its two-line LCD screen and button controls leave it feeling a little old-school.
Luckily, it’s easy to set up, with Brother’s software finding the printer and configuring Wi-Fi connectivity automatically, then going on to install the necessary drivers. The menus on the device are clear, while the driver does a good job of surfacing all the features and options. The 250-sheet input tray and 50-sheet multipurpose tray should help you avoid the need for regular reloading – there’s even a gauge on the front of the main tray to show how close you are to empty – while prints stack neatly in the 150-sheet output tray at the top.
In terms of print quality, Brother’s laser plays to its strengths as an office printer. Black text is dark with crisp edges, while charts and other business graphics are rendered cleanly with smooth colour graduations. Photo reproduction isn’t so effective: the output tends to look posterised, missing subtle shifts of colour and struggling to bring out highlights.
Performance is a mixed bag, too. Once the HL-L8260CDW gets going it can churn out pages at an impressive rate – but it needs a think before it kicks into action, taking more than 18 seconds to deliver the first page of our five-page colour report and nearly 1min, 10secs for the A4 photomontage – 20 seconds longer than the Oki C542 and Kyocera P5026cdn. That affects its overall speeds of 22ppm monochrome and 7.4ppm colour, although it’s close to the Oki and beats the Kyocera when it comes to pages of black text. In fact, when printing duplex it matches the Oki’s speed of approximately 13ppm.
Print costs are reasonable for a colour laser, at roughly 1.2p per mono print and 9.4p per colour, and the Brother isn’t short of useful features. Beyond support for the core cloud printing services it can print directly from Google Drive, Box or Dropbox, or from Brother’s iPrint & Scan mobile app. It also has a Gigabit Ethernet port for businesses with a wired network, while a range of security features – including secure pull-printing – help secure the device and the print jobs. This is a good, solid office laser, but it isn’t quite up there with the best.