The Brother HL-2270DW is a monochrome laser printer that costs £186 (and you can find it cheaper online) - a very low price, especially considering that it includes Wi-Fi. The small or home office that might consider this printer, however, should note that its toner costs are on the high side.
The Brother HL-2270DW supports USB, ethernet, and wireless connectivity. The CD-based installation procedure is well documented and progresses smoothly.
See also: Group test: what's the best mono laser printer?
The minimal control panel merely offers a bunch of blinking LEDs; to Brother's credit, though, they're labeled with words. The sole button is labeled 'Go' - a somewhat confusing name, as its tasks range from waking up the printer from sleep mode to canceling a job to disabling wireless.
Paper handling includes automatic duplexing (two-sided printing), a somewhat bendy 250-sheet input tray, a 100-sheet input tray on top, and a front manual-feed slot discreetly hidden behind a shiny logo panel.
The Brother HL-2270DW performed adequately in our tests. Connected to a PC, it printed monochrome pages consisting primarily of text at a below-average rate of 17.5 pages per minute, and a small, simple photo at a middling 5.9 ppm. Mac speeds were about the same: 17.7 ppm for monochrome text, and an above-average 6 ppm for four pages of mixed text and graphics in a PDF file. Graphics quality was slightly rough and grainy, but acceptable.
You flip open a front panel to reach the printer's consumables. The toner and drum components are separable, but you must remove them together, using a handle that would be easier to find if it were a color other than black. A green (thank you, Brother) lever releases the toner from the drum. Since the drum lasts a lot longer than the toner cartridges do, having to drag out the drum every time you want to replace the toner is somewhat annoying.
Toner is expensive. The HL-2270DW ships with a 700-page starter cartridge of black toner. The standard-size replacement costs £43.19 and lasts for 1200 pages, which works out to a high 3.6p per page. High-yield black toner cartridges cost £71.99 each and last for 2,600 pages, for a higher-than-average 2.8p per page. The £85 drum unit, when replaced after about 12,000 pages of use, will add less than a penny to each of the next 12,000 pages.
Want a little bit more for a price that's still low? Check out the Brother HL-2270DW's close cousin, the Brother HL-2280DW, which tacks a colour scanner on to the top of the same machine.
See also: Group test: what's the best printer?
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