Brother HL-2170W Review

Overview

Brother HL-2170 is a compact monochrome laser printer. This is good for several reasons, it’s cheap to buy and use, has a wireless network, and it’s not a machine that looks bad.

The Printer

The Brother HL-2170W is a reasonably fast printer on its own, it prints up to 23 pages per minute in black, and with 32MB of memory, it just means that you won’t lose time waiting for the first page to come out. It has a 250 sheet paper tray, although we have seen it bigger for the size of this unit, it is quite impressive. We think that if Brother decides to give the HL-2170W, the smaller tray might be even lower. It comes with a manual feeder for legal or odd-size paper.

Brother HL-2170W has the highest resolution of 2400 x 600 dpi and a maximum monthly duty cycle of 10,000 pages. Brother places the recommended monthly volume of 250 – 2000 pages. It provides an overview of the arrangements designed for HL-2170W, which are home and small office use.

Pricing and Maintenance

This printer is very cheap to buy; An MSRP of around $ 149.99 is typical. Consider that for a laser printer for wireless that installed at this price, and it is quite attractive. The low HL-2240 model from Brother that doesn’t have wireless is around $ 119.99. So, in other words, for an additional $ 30, you get 2170W wireless. This is not bad considering the wireless card runs from 20-50 dollars only.

Like other Brother printers, the drum and toner are separate units. This is good so that every time you need to replace toner, you pay less per toner than other brands, like HP. However, it would help if you considered that in the end, you have to replace the drum, which is usually around $ 100 per piece.

HL-2170W uses two types of toner, TN330 (Low Yield) and TN360 (High Yield) toner. They print 1,500 and 2,600 pages, respectively. Toner out of the box prints 1,000 pages. TN330 runs around $ 45, while a higher yield version runs about $ 60.

The DR360 drum from this printer costs around $ 90, although you don’t have to change it often. It depends on your use; this is an exciting feature from Brother. Some people never replace a drum for a lifetime for their product.

What we like

Besides the obvious reasons for buying the Brother HL-2170W, as mentioned in our overview, there are some unique qualities that we like about this printer. First of all, its compatibility, The HL-2170W is fully compatible out of the box with Windows, Mac, and Linux, quite impressive and wise from Brother in our honest opinion. Brother also has excellent Linux support for their printers, which is not dangerous for those who don’t care but a big bonus for those who do.

The HL-2170W has a one-button wireless configuration button, it is said to be a magic button, which you press and you are online. Unfortunately, although it functions as described, in some cases, because there are many variants of network settings out there, that can be a little complicated. We don’t have a problem with our unit tests, but like any wireless product, there are always cases where it doesn’t function properly.

What we don’t like

There’s not much we don’t like about this printer, but on a more environmentally-friendly note, it’s a little on the higher end in terms of power consumption. It sleeps at 8 watts, is ready at 80 watts, and prints at 460 watts. This is higher than many laser printers out there, especially compared to environmentally friendly printers by HP, which consume a fraction of the power compared.

Our Decision

If you are looking for a small and fast laser printer, then we highly recommend Brother HL-2170W. Wireless printing is an attraction, but as a reminder, this is a small home and office machine and allows it to be printed without restriction by those in the network to drain the life and money of this unit quickly.

Wireless networks are also not as easy as advertised. Many people have trouble setting it up, but again, that’s the nature of wireless nowadays.