Brother HL-L3210CW
Affordable to buy and run, this colour laser is an attractive option despite its omitted features
SCORE
PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk
Brother is a multiple winner of PC Pro’s Excellence Awards based on user satisfaction, and the HL-L3210CW provides a glimpse into the brand’s popularity. It’s the lowest-priced colour laser on test yet it can churn out a lot of prints each month at decent speed. What you don’t get is any frills: there’s no scanner, you only get a single-line mono LCD screen, and it’s unable to automatically print on both sides of a piece of paper.
Your first task is to install the four colour toner cartridges. They’re already sitting in the correct place – you just need to pull out the tray, remove the cartridge, take off the protective seal and pop them back into place again. It’s more fiddly than setting up the HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw, but only marginally.
On the whole, we were impressed by its print quality. Black text comes out slightly lighter than the other laser printers on test, which saves on resources but means you miss out on boldness. This was obvious in our mixed text and pictures document, where text surrounded by darker images accentuated the effect.
We found this lighter touch beneficial when printing lighter flesh tones in photos, but dark areas and black aren’t as deep as they are on the prints produced by the LaserJet Pro M255dw. A little light banding appears in large areas of colour, such as a clear blue sky, but you need to look closely to spot it.
Based on the price and yield of the consumables, mono prints work out to around 3p each. This is better value than the Lexmark MC3426 but the HP LaserJet undercuts it (at 2.6p), while the mono-only HP Neverstop drops the cost down to 0.7p. The Brother’s colour prints are better value than the other laser printers at 12.8p per print, but note this is a lot more expensive than most of the inkjets.
In our speed tests, the HLL3210CW was slow to deliver its first page, taking 16 seconds. However, as we expect to see with laser printers, it soon picks up speed.
It isn’t as quick as the pricier
Lexmark for mono pages, printing at just shy of 16ppm where the MC3426 approaches 20ppm. However, it did beat the HP LaserJet M255dw in the 25-page sprint.
When printing out even more pages, the HP put its head down and overtook the Brother in our 50-page marathon. Here the Brother dropped to 15ppm, where the other three laser printers get faster results than in the 25-page test.
The Brother’s best speed results came in our colour tests. Here it matched the Lexmark, reaching speeds greater than 15ppm, which makes it the joint fastest of all the printers we tested. It wasn’t quite as fast to produce the six 6 x 4in colour photos, taking 28secs compared to the Lexmark’s 20secs, but that’s hardly a lifetime’s wait. Similarly, we can’t complain about its 27secs to produce two 10 x 8in photos, which was the slowest of the laser printers but still miles ahead of the inkjets.
“It matched the Lexmark MC3426, reaching colour speeds greater than 15ppm, which makes it the joint fastest of all the printers”
So the printer’s cost cutting isn’t reflected in its quality or its speed; instead, it’s focused on that limited screen and duplex printing. We can cope with Canon’s two-line LCD screens, which feature prominently on its G series inkjet tank printers; they use menus displayed as a heading and a set of options you can scroll through. By contrast, Brother’s single-line system is unwieldy. It can’t display enough information onscreen at one time to let you work out what’s going on without going back and forth using the buttons. You will curse. Arguably, though, duplex printing is the skill you will miss the most. To add insult to the injury, there’s so much space within the Brother’s chassis that it seems almost criminal not to include a page-flipping mechanism; after all, significantly smaller inkjet printers are capable of housing the machinery required to flip the paper over and print on the other side.
The fact that it has a manual paper-feed slot on the side, which you can use to re-feed a single page into the printer for printing on the back, is just rubbing salt into the wound. It means that you don’t have to open the bottom paper tray and work out which way up the paper needs to go back in, but having to re-feed each sheet in manually is an almighty faff.
There’s a lot to like about this printer, particularly its affordable price. However, we’d pay a little more to get the screen and the duplex power of the HP LaserJet M255dw.