You wait ages for one LED printer to appear, then along come two in a single group test. Typical. This one is a Brother HL-3170CDW, a reasonably compact printer that’s aimed at the small, busy office or home setup, where the users need lots of connectivity and reliability.
As stated, this is an LED printer that has a tantalising range of features available. The 333MHz processor, with 128MB of memory, helps drive a printer that has ample connectivity in the form of USB, Ethernet and 802.11 b/g/n wi-fi. Mobile connectivity is supported well, with AirPrint, Cortado Cloud Print, Google Cloud Print, iPrint&Scan and WiFi Direct and, of course, you can administer over the network just as well as if you were standing in front of the tiny LCD control screen.
Additionally you also get an automatic double-sided print to save paper and a ‘Deep Sleep Mode’, which can be configured to send the printer to sleep for a specified amount of time after the last print. When in this mode, the printer then drops to a very economical 1.5W power consumption, and to add to that, when a print does come through, it takes about 12 seconds for the printer to ‘wake’ up and start printing.
There’s a 250-page input tray as standard, which fed our text test pages through at a rate of around 16 pages per minute, with the first page appearing within 18 seconds of the request being sent through. The colour print rate was good too, with our non-scientific method of counting pages coming to around 12 pages per minute.
The page quality was very good indeed, on a par with the Samsung model. However, in this case, the Brother worked every time we sent something through, and it was quiet too.
The text page quality was sharp and readable, and the colour page test was remarkably good and of a much higher quality than we initially thought it would be. In fact, the HL-3170CDW had the best overall print quality in the group so far.
The replacement cartridges are reasonably priced as well. The genuine Brother multi-pack for this model costs in the region of £145 and offers a yield of 2,500 for the black and 1,400 for the three colours. This setup comes to around 2.1p per page for consumer costs, but we also found a premium brand that offers a 2,500 page yield for the black cartridge and a better 2,200 pages in the colour cartridges for just £124, making the consumer running costs 1.4p per page.
Although the initial cost of the printer is £150, again depending on where you shop, the lower running costs and higher than normal yield of the average toner replacements make for a far more efficient printer. And considering the quality of the print you get, the ample connectivity and the power saving feature, the Brother HL-3170CDW certainly has a lot going for it.