Brother HL

The Brother HL-L3230CDW ($249.99) is an entry-level color laser-class LED printer designed for use in home-based or small offices and workgroups, or as a personal printer. It's similar in many ways, including price, to our recent Editors' Choice, the Brother HL-L3270CDW. Both machines offer the same high duty cycle and paper capacity, as well as, unfortunately, the same high running costs common to entry-level printers. Choosing between them comes down to a few very small 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 choose your preferred feature set, though, either model should serve as an excellent small office companion.

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

The HL-L3230CDW measures 9.9 by 16.1 by 18.1 inches (HWD) and weighs 39.7 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 ($895.15 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) , but a little smaller and about 10 pounds lighter than the OKI C332dn, also an LED machine.

Paper input capacity consists of one 250-sheet drawer and a one-sheet override tray for whipping out one-up envelopes, a sheet of labels, a check, or anything else that would cause you to open and perhaps reconfigure the paper drawer. This is the same input configuration as the HL-L3270CDW. Canon's LBP612Cdw, on the other hand, holds only 150 sheets and one in the override tray, and the OKI C332dn ($1,382.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) supports up 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 also comes with slightly different connectivity options. While both machines support Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and connecting to a single PC via USB 2.0, for peer-to-peer mobile connections the HL-L3270CDW offers near-field communication (NFC) while the HL-L3230CDW supports the somewhat more common Wi-Fi Direct protocol. Both let you print from your smartphone or tablet without it or the printer connected to a local area network or router, but Wi-Fi Direct works similarly to standard Wi-Fi 802.11, where your smartphone "sees" the printer as a wireless interface, whereas NFC is a touch-to-connect protocol where, to print, you simply touch your mobile device to a hotspot on the printer.

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

iPrint&Scan facilitates most mobile device print jobs, such as printing from mobile versions of Microsoft Office apps or Google apps and printing from cloud sites. The HL-L3230CDW, unlike its HL-L3270CDW sibling, doesn't support Brother's Cloud apps, a collection of shortcuts (or more precisely in this case, 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 home-based office 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's duty cycle is the same as the two Brother machines, and the OKI 332dn's is 15,000 higher.

Brother rates most 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's standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional. The HL-L3230CDW printed our 12-page Microsoft Word monochrome text document at an average rate of 25ppm, the same as the HL-L3270CDW and right in line with its rating.

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The Canon LBP612Cdw came in at about 7ppm behind 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 ($615.31 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) single-function inkjet, printed the same text pages at 32.4ppm. (I'll get to why I'm using this comparison in a minute.)

Continuing my tests, I clocked the HL-L3230CDW as it printed several colorful Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents replete with complex business graphics (most of them full-page) and embedded photos. Then I combined those scores with the results from printing the 12-page Word document above. As expected, the HL-L3230CDW's score plummeted by more than 50 percent, to 10.1ppm.

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

Fast print speeds are great, but good-looking output is even better. Like its Editors' Choice sibling, the HL-L3230CDW churns out text, graphics, and photographs that you and/or your organization will be proud of. For some time now, near-typesetter-quality text has been the standard from Brother laser-class printers. This is my third HL-L3000 series LED machine this year, and so far, I've seen bright and accurate colors, precisely joined corners on borders and frames, respectable detail, and mostly streakless backgrounds, gradients, and fills in the Excel and PowerPoint test documents I've printed. Photographs, too, while not inkjet quality, were more than passable for most business applications. I wouldn't hesitate to use the HL-L3230CDW's output in most business scenarios.

Brother's highest-yield toner cartridges (3,000 black pages or 1,400 color) deliver running costs of about 2.6 cents per monochrome page and 15.6 cents per color print. It's also important to note that after every 18,000 pages, you'll have to replace the drum unit, and that adds another 0.7 cent to the cost per page, bringing the running costs to 3.3 cents for black and 16.3 cents for color.

If you print thousands of pages each month, those numbers add up quickly. Canon's LBP612Cdw, on the other hand, delivers running costs of just more than half a cent higher for both black and color pages, and the OKI C332dn, at 1.4 cents higher for monochrome prints and 2.1 cents more for color pages, are higher still.

None of these running costs are attractive—unless you plan to print under, say, 500 pages per month, that is. Surely, you've recognized the theme here that the more you print, the more a higher-priced, higher-volume model makes sense. You can find laser models that cost $1,000 or more, like Dell's Smart Printer S5830dn, that print black pages for less than a penny, but nowadays the best high-volume values come from inkjet laser alternatives, including the HP PageWide Pro 452dw mentioned earlier. Its highest-yield ink cartridges deliver 1.3-cent black pages and 7.3-cent color pages; it has no drum kit to replace and inkjet printers don't require warm-up periods when you turn them on or wake them up, thereby conserving power.

So, what's the difference between Brother's two entry-level color laser-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 most print jobs are sent from computing devices on the local network. Whichever you choose, both are fine little low-volume printers that would serve most small offices and individuals well.

The Brother HL-L3230CDW is a color laser-class LED printer that's fast and churns out quality output for low-volume small offices that don't rely on cloud printing.

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