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Brother HL-2170W Laser Printer - Great Printing For Less

By David Jacobson

Brother has been making laser printers pretty much since the 1990s, and is one of the second tier brands; they tend to go for the value end of the spectrum, and for business printers. The Brother HL-2170W is their current entry into the niche of "value laser printer".

It's a sleek design, because good industrial design does sell products (just ask Apple), and that sleek design conceals a printer with a lot of useful features in a reasonably small package, with good pricing. In particular, the HL-2170W has both wired and wireless connectivity built in, making it a useful contender for a family printer or for a dorm room or college student.

Laser printers are designed for speedy print operations and the Brother HL-2170W does even better than the average laser printers printing around 23 pages per minute thanks to its 32 MB processor. This of course applies only if you are printing text and unfortunately you won't be getting any speedy results when it comes to printing graphics so only offices that have a lot of documents to print will benefit from this printer. On the upside, you are able to print very clean documents under the 2400x600 dpi setting.

The machine's paper tray holds 250 sheets, which is a good amount - and better than the creaky 50 page sheet feeders we've grown accustomed to at this end of the market. It's got a good, but not great, multifunction bypass tray for printing on letterhead and envelopes. Toner loads from the front, and a toner catridge is good for about 700 to 800 pages, vice the 1000 they claim on the carton - this is why our estimate of cost per page is higher than Brother's official press release.

One of the fantastic features about the Brother HL-2170W is its wireless interface. Although the wireless can be a bit of a pain to set up since there is no printed documentation available, you can enjoy the freedom of letting other desktops with wireless cards and laptops to print from a distance after you have successfully set the printer up. The printer also works reasonably well with Apple computers also and the setup difficulty can be significantly reduced if you have a router that supports SecureEasySetup.

There are a few minor annoyances in addition to the lack of printed documentation and noise is one of them. If you are in an office environment that isn't very noisy, expect this laser printer to do all the noise for you.

All that said, if you work in a typical office environment, there's enough background noise to make it acceptable. Just don't expect to print and watch television at the same time if you've got it at home.

The Brother HL-2170W is typically available for under $100, and can often be found for half of that on sales. For the price, it performs well, and the wireless connectivity, once configured, is one of the things that you wonder why you didn't do it earlier. It's not a great graphics printer, and it's got documentation issues, but overall, we can recommend this for any small office that wants a new laser printer, or for college students going off to live in the dorms.

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