Brother HL-2170W – Cost Effective Text Printer

Pros

The Brother HL-2170W offers fast print speed for text documents, has an unpretentious price tag, small initial lag time, the wireless option for the printer is also comparatively easier after a few initial jerks.

Cons

The Brother HL-2170W’s wireless fitting offers a great deal of difficulty, the printer lacks auto duplexing and poor graphics quality.

Introduction

The Brother HL-2170W is a monochrome laser printer and feasible alternative modern inkjet printers in the market. The printer might have a low initial cost, but with the fact that the modern photo, tricolor, and high capacity ink cartridge for the printer can cost anything between $20 to $100 per refill, the running cost of the printer could easily be equal to that of owning an inkjet. And to cut this short you can also buy a printer with an inexpensive black and white laser printer.

Although the Brother HL-2170W has got its own set of flaws like the print quality offered by the printer is really crippling, but then the printer makes up for it with its brisk print speed for text documents and the 802.11b/g wireless functionality just for $150. The HL-2170W is a nice choice as a text only printer and if you have a photo printer and want to get a text printer then we would recommend it to you.

Design

The Brother HL-2170W overall has the same design and shape as the other Brother printer the HL-2140  priced at $129.99, but the Brother HL-2170W comes with  32MB of committed memory and for additional $20 you even can get the 802.11b/g wireless interface and taking the overall price of the printer to $150. The printer measures 6.7 x 14.5 inches (H x W) and weighs 15 pounds. In terms of design the printer is pretty down-to-earth and comes in the same lusterless grey body, found in most of the printers.

The front rim of Brother HL-2170W folds down and unveils the toner port and just as other laser printer, the paper tray here also is located on the façade of the printer and is removed completely from the body for refilling. If you use the printer for general home use then you probably won’t need frequent refills for the printer, because the printer can hold 250 sheets of typical 8.5 x 11 inch paper. There also is a manual paper feeding slot which can easily handle a wide assortment of paper sizes, including the Legal, Letter, A4, Executive, A6, A5, B6, envelopes and B5. We tested the printer in our lab by printing 150 sheets and never experienced any sort of paper jamming or even a very slightest of delay.

The control panel of the printer is also as simple as the body of HL-2170W and comprises of one huge comprehensive “Go” button used for wake-up, error recovery, wireless on/off, job cancel, and manual feed, and three tiny LEDs that indicates the status of drum, error and toner status. Apart from this the printer has few other features to show off. The one thing that becomes pretty clear with the very first look at Brother HL-2170W is that it surely is not the prettiest face in the party; the printer is more towards utility than fashion. The design for the printer clearly will be appreciated by the nerds.

System Configuration

Starting price: $134.84 – $152.00
Manufacturer: Brother International
Part Number: HL-2170W-US
Printer Type: Monochrome Laser Printer
Operating System: Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows XP x64, Windows 2000, 2003 x64, Server 2003; Linux: Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Compatible with Windows 7

Dimensions (W x D x H): 14.5 x 14.2 x 6.7 inches
System weight: 15 lbs
Print Technology: Electrophotographic laser
Media Type Supported: Legal, Letter, A4, Exec, A6, A5, B6, B5, Envelopes: Com 10, Folio, C5, DL and Monarch
Supported Media Type: Labels, Cards, Plain paper, Envelopes, Transparencies and Recycled paper
PC Connection: Hi-Speed USB
Software Included: Drivers & utilities
Compliant Standards: WHQL, RoHS and Section 508
Features: Automatic redialing and Fax forwarding

Performance

The Brother HL-2170W came out as one of the fastest printer in our speed test in our labs and delivered an imposing 17.48 pages of plane black test per minute. If you compare this test with the speeds delivered by laser printers from the same price bracket, you will find that the printer is clearly the fastest in most of the speed tests.

But like most of the printers the speed here doesn’t comes with quality, and the Brother HL-2170W also was nothing more than satisfactory in our quality tests, although the text print quality was pretty good. But sadly the same can’t be said about the graphics printing, and the same was the case with the photo printing as well. The small sized photos appeared furry. So on a whole the print quality tests scores for Brother HL-2170W weren’t as great as the speed test scores where and if you are in need of speed only then only thing printer is great for you.

Support

Brother backs all of their monochrome laser printers with one year standard Express Exchange limited warranty on top of a telephonic toll free trouble shooting technical support. If you want online support then you can get it through Brother’s web site offering FAQs, complete support center and driver downloads.

Word from the Experts

The Brother HL-2170W monochrome laser printer is a great money saving alternative for you if you are looking for an only text printer to accompany your existing inkjet. But if you are expecting a lot from it then it won’t withstand your expectation.