Brother HL-L3230CDW - Review 2022

The Brother HL-L3230CDW ($249.99) is an entry-level colour laser-class LED printer designed for employ in home-based or pocket-sized offices and workgroups, or equally a personal printer. It's similar in many ways, including toll, to our recent Editors' Choice, the Blood brother HL-L3270CDW. Both machines offer the same loftier duty bicycle and paper capacity, too as, unfortunately, the same high running costs common to entry-level printers. Choosing between them comes down to a few very minor differences: The HL-L3230CDW lacks the touch screen, onboard cloud apps, and NFC connectivity of the HL-L3270CDW, instead offering Wi-Fi Direct printing. Once you lot cull your preferred characteristic set, though, either model should serve as an excellent small office companion.

Just Different Plenty to Matter

First, let'south talk most the difference between LED and traditional laser printers. While these two technologies achieve essentially the same thing, with no perceptible differences to the user, LED arrays accept some advantages over lasers—they're smaller and less expensive to industry and they use less ability. This, in plow, allows Brother and other printer manufacturers to make smaller, more power-efficient printers that produce output that is, in many cases, comparable with or ameliorate than laser counterparts for less money.

The HL-L3230CDW measures 9.nine by xvi.ane past 18.1 inches (HWD) and weighs 39.seven pounds, which is slightly smaller and lighter than the HL-L3270CDW. That's also a few inches taller and deeper and about 5 pounds heavier than the Canon Color imageClass LBP612Cdw, but a niggling smaller and about 10 pounds lighter than the OKI C332dn, also an LED automobile.

Paper input capacity consists of one 250-sheet drawer and a one-sheet override tray for whipping out one-upwards envelopes, a sheet of labels, a check, or anything else that would crusade you lot to open and possibly reconfigure the paper drawer. This is the aforementioned input configuration equally the HL-L3270CDW. Catechism'south LBP612Cdw, on the other manus, holds only 150 sheets and ane in the override tray, and the OKI C332dn supports upwardly to 350 sheets, with 250 in the main cassette and 100 in the huge multipurpose tray.

In addition to being slightly smaller and lighter than the HL-L3270CDW, the HL-L3230CDW besides comes with slightly different connectivity options. While both machines back up Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and connecting to a unmarried PC via USB 2.0, for peer-to-peer mobile connections the HL-L3270CDW offers nigh-field advice (NFC) while the HL-L3230CDW supports the somewhat more mutual Wi-Fi Direct protocol. Both permit you print from your smartphone or tablet without information technology or the printer connected to a local surface area network or router, simply Wi-Fi Directly works similarly to standard Wi-Fi 802.11, where your smartphone "sees" the printer every bit a wireless interface, whereas NFC is a touch-to-connect protocol where, to impress, yous merely touch your mobile device to a hotspot on the printer.

The HL-L3230CDW comes with an old-school ane-line monochrome LCD and respective physical analog buttons for navigating a set of drill-down menus. In addition to Wi-Fi Direct, the HL-L3230CDW'southward other mobile connection features are Apple AirPrint, Brother iPrint&Browse, Google Deject Print, and Mopria.

Brother HL-L3230CDW 3

iPrint&Browse facilitates most mobile device impress jobs, such equally printing from mobile versions of Microsoft Office apps or Google apps and printing from deject sites. The HL-L3230CDW, unlike its HL-L3270CDW sibling, doesn't support Brother'south Cloud apps, a collection of shortcuts (or more than precisely in this instance, workflow profiles) that reside on the printer and connect to specific cloud sites such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, and OneDrive, or Microsoft's online version of OneNote. In other words, the HL-L3230CDW can't print directly from cloud and social media sites, which may or may not matter to your dwelling house-based part or organization.

Meanwhile, the HL-L3230CDW's maximum monthly duty cycle is, like the HL-L3270CDW's, 30,000 pages, and its recommended monthly print volume is 1,500 pages. The Canon LBP612Cdw'due south duty cycle is the same as the two Brother machines, and the OKI 332dn'due south is fifteen,000 college.

Fast for its Class

Epson rates all its L3000-series models at 25 pages per minute (ppm) for both monochrome and color pages, which is surprisingly fast for budget-minded printers.

I ran my tests over Ethernet from PCMag Lab'south standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows x Professional. The HL-L3230CDW printed our 12-page Microsoft Word monochrome text document at an average charge per unit of 25ppm, the same every bit the HL-L3270CDW and right in line with its rating.

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The Canon LBP612Cdw came in at nigh 7ppm backside our Brother test unit, much slower. The OKI model mentioned earlier was tested with a previous methodology, disqualifying it for meaningful speed comparisons here. A slightly more expensive but direct competitor, HP's PageWide Pro 452dw single-function inkjet, printed the same text pages at 32.4ppm. (I'll get to why I'one thousand using this comparison in a infinitesimal.)

Continuing my tests, I clocked the HL-L3230CDW as it printed several colorful Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents replete with circuitous concern graphics (most of them full-folio) and embedded photos. Then I combined those scores with the results from printing the 12-folio Give-and-take document above. As expected, the HL-L3230CDW's score plummeted past more than fifty percentage, to 10.1ppm.

This may seem tedious for a machine rated at 25ppm for colour pages, but information technology's only 0.3ppm behind its HL-L3270CDW sibling. In near cases, our complex real-world business documents cause virtually printers to bog downward considerably during the page-imaging process. The PageWide Pro 452dn inkjet, on the other hand, leaped out in front of them all past at to the lowest degree 5ppm, making it the hands-downwards fastest color graphics printer in this group.

Quality Output

Fast impress speeds are great, only good-looking output is even better. Similar its Editors' Choice sibling, the HL-L3230CDW churns out text, graphics, and photographs that you and/or your organization will exist proud of. For some fourth dimension now, nearly-typesetter-quality text has been the standard from Blood brother laser-class printers. This is my 3rd HL-L3000 series LED machine this year, so far, I've seen bright and accurate colors, precisely joined corners on borders and frames, respectable detail, and generally streakless backgrounds, gradients, and fills in the Excel and PowerPoint exam documents I've printed. Photographs, too, while not inkjet quality, were more than than passable for well-nigh business applications. I wouldn't hesitate to use the HL-L3230CDW's output in most concern scenarios.

The Buzz Kill: Cost Per Page

Brother's highest-yield toner cartridges (3,000 black pages or 1,400 color) deliver running costs of about two.6 cents per monochrome page and 15.6 cents per color print. It's also of import to note that afterward every 18,000 pages, you'll accept to replace the drum unit, and that adds another 0.7 cent to the cost per folio, bringing the running costs to iii.3 cents for black and 16.3 cents for color.

If you print thousands of pages each month, those numbers add up apace. Canon'due south LBP612Cdw, on the other hand, delivers running costs of just more than half a cent college for both blackness and color pages, and the OKI C332dn, at one.4 cents higher for monochrome prints and 2.1 cents more for colour pages, are higher nevertheless.

None of these running costs are bonny—unless yous plan to impress under, say, 500 pages per month, that is. Surely, you've recognized the theme here that the more you impress, the more a college-priced, higher-volume model makes sense. You can find laser models that cost $1,000 or more than, like Dell'south Smart Printer S5830dn, that print black pages for less than a penny, but present the all-time high-volume values come from inkjet laser alternatives, including the HP PageWide Pro 452dw mentioned earlier. Its highest-yield ink cartridges deliver 1.iii-cent blackness pages and 7.iii-cent color pages; it has no drum kit to replace and inkjet printers don't require warm-up periods when yous plough them on or wake them upwardly, thereby conserving ability.

One or the Other?

Then, what'southward the difference betwixt Blood brother's two entry-level color light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation-class printers? Put simply, the HL-L3270CDW provides significant support for mobile access, whereas the HL-L3230CDW is geared more toward traditional office settings where about print jobs are sent from calculating devices on the local network. Whichever you cull, both are fine fiddling low-volume printers that would serve well-nigh minor offices and individuals well.