Brother HL-2170W

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By Justin Yu, CNET.com
Mar 25, 2008

The Brother HL-2170W laser monochrome printer provides a viable alternative to the bottomless money pit that has become today's inkjet printer. Modern photo, tri-color, and high-capacity ink cartridges can cost anywhere between S$25 and S$125 per refill, so multiply that by your volume of prints, and try not to balk at the true cost of owning an inkjet. As an alternative, supplementing a printer set up with an inexpensive black-and-white laser printer can cut costs in home offices that tend to cycle through black cartridges with text-only documents.

Although it's not without its shortcomings, such as cripplingly poor-quality graphics prints, the Brother HL-2170W balances out with speedy text printing and 802.11b/g wireless functionality. We'd certainly recommend it as a secondary text-only printer if you already have a photo inkjet and a little extra change to throw around.

Editors' note:

This review is based on tests done by our sister site CNET.com.au. As such, please note that there may be slight differences in the testing procedure and ratings system. For more information on the actual tests conducted on the product, please inquire directly at the site where the article was originally published. References made to some other products in this review may not be available or applicable in Asia.

Design

The HL-2170W has the same overall size and design as the HL-2140 but adds 32MB of onboard memory and an 802.11b/g wireless interface. As far as laser printers go, this little guy is more David than Goliath at 17.05cm tall, 36.8cm wide, and just 6.8kg. Design-wise, it's unassuming and finished in the same matte grey found on most cubicle walls and the original Nintendo Game Boy.

The front lip folds down to reveal the toner port and, like most laser printers, the paper tray is located on the face of the unit and can be fully removed from the body for refills. If you're an average home user, you probably won't need to refill too often considering the printer can hold 250 sheets of standard A4-sized paper. Also, a manual feed paper slot handles an assortment of different paper sizes including Letter, Legal, Executive, A4, A5, A6, B5, B6, and envelopes. We printed more than 150 sheets of paper during our lab testing and never experienced a paper jam or even the slightest delay.

The control panel is just as simple as the body of the HL-2170W itself, including one large all-inclusive "Go" button (error recovery, wake-up, job cancel, wireless on/off, manual feed) and three small LEDs for toner, drum, and error status. Other than that, this printer has few other features to brag about. The Brother HL-2170W isn't the prettiest pup in the show, designed with utility, not fashion, in mind. Design nerds will probably be more satisfied with the glossy finish and atypical footprint of the Samsung ML-1630.

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