Brother HL-4570CDW Wireless Color Laser Printer

For small businesses and workgroups looking for a heavy-duty color laser printer, the Brother HL-4570CDW offers a lot of advantages, including wireless, automatic duplex printing, and fast printing. Be warned that it will take up a lot of space, and if you print a lot you'll want to upgrade to the high-yield toner cartridges. I liked the USB slot right on the front of the machine. Built-in wireless was fairly easy to set up, though the printer's tiny LCD screen and hard-to-manage interface made setting up the wireless function something of a chore. Also, you'll need to buy a separate tray to fit 500 sheets of paper.

The Brother HL-4570CDW wireless color laser printer is aimed at small businesses and workgroups. It's a heavy-duty printer (seriously--it's about 46 lbs of printer) that offers a lot of business-friendly functions. And in the price range (close to $400), it's a decent value as well for businesses that print regularly but not in huge volumes. Those that do print a lot will probably opt to add on a high-capacity (500-sheet) paper tray, and to upgrade to the high-yield toner cartridges.

The printer was fairly easy to set up, though the tiny, yellow LCD screen was hard to read from any angle. Wireless set up was more tricky--there's no keypad and the process can't be done via the Web interface as it can with other Brother printers. Adding a wireless password was a tedious process that involved using an arrow key to scroll through special characters and numbers before coming to the upper-case alphabet; and if you need a lower-case letter, you've got a lot more scrolling to do. Still, it's a one-time deal.

Once it was up and running, it did a great job. First pages for small jobs took about 11 seconds to come out, with pages flying out at under three seconds per page afterwards. Larger jobs (such as large PDF files) took longer to get started, with first pages taking at least 18 seconds (subsequent pages still took about three seconds each).

Color and monochrome prints looked very good and there was only a minimal paper curl, so as always, I'd suggest that you use paper made specifically for laser printers.

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