Brother HL-3070CW Review

The Brother 3070W is a color digital printer. This LED printer competes with the laser printers when it comes to quality and might even beat the lasers in terms of price. This machine offers colored printing at a meager amount, which is also the right choice for small offices and home use.

Printer Set-up and Design

The set-up for the 3070CW printer is simple by setting the printer in place, load the cartridges and papers then connect the cables. There is a guide wherein the printer must test for a print to confirm that the unit is working well. There is also an installation CD for software set-up support.

The 3070W printer has a 250 pages paper tray that can load up to the legal-size paper but is not upgradeable. The manual feed for thicker pages is a big problem on this machine because the user has to put the sheets one by one to the slot. There is a rear panel that folds down, creating a paper path. The control panel has a tiny LCD that is very hard to read at any angle. The buttons for navigating are so confusing because the buttons for entering and cancel located to where the right and left arrows used to be in other printers. However, despite its small footprints, in general, the machine is straightforward to operate.

There is an additional feature on this brother unit that has not been seen in some color laser printers and LED printers. This feature is Wi-fi connectivity, and the engine configuration is high-speed. The printer can print files from USB directly.

Print Speed and Quality

Print speeds of the Brother 3070CW were rated very well. It is its strongest point. In a four-page printing test, the first page came out in less than 11 seconds, and the next three pages came out in just 21 seconds. The average rate of printing is 17 pages for every minute for both colored and monochrome prints.

Print outputs are of high quality for photos, graphics, and texts, which is sometimes lacking in other color laser printers. The text prints are readable even at 6 points. Photo and graphic prints also came out good. This means that the 3070CW printer can be useful for printing documents for essential businesses.

Toner Cartridge

The unit comes with a standard cartridge that can print up to 1,000 pages for every color, and there is a separate drum for each color. The toner cost of the 3070CW printer is quite an offset for this low-priced printer. The replacement color cartridge costs $70 for every color, which can print up to 1,400 pages or an average of 5 colors for every page while a black cartridge, which can print up to 2,500 pages, costs $75 or an average of 3.4 cents for every page. A new set of drums costs $150 or an average of 1 cent for every page. This replacement is needed when 15,000 pages have already printed.

Conclusion

The Brother 3070CW is not as good as expected. The LED features do not affect the running cost of the unit. It also does not affect the quality of color prints. The printer has an excellent printing speed despite its low price but has a prohibitive running cost, especially if the workload has a lot of colored prints needed.