Brother HL-3070CW Color Digital Printer

Brother's HL-3070CW is a very good deal--for about $250 it can compete easily with color laser printers. (An LED printer uses LEDs rather than a single laser as a light source.) I found it fast, relatively easy to set up (though wireless could've been a tad simpler), and the output (color and black) excellent. Replacement toner isn't cheap (around $70 per cartridge), but the black cartridges are estimated for 2,200 pages and the color ones for about 1,400 pages, so they should last a long time.

Brother's recent launch of several color LED printers adds a new twist to the printer market. LED printers can compete with lasers in terms of quality, and generally can beat them on price. Brother calls them "digital" printers, but no matter what terminology you use, you can think of them as close cousins to laser printers.

The HL-3070CW is a single-function printer--no fax, copier, or scanner--but it does offer built-in wireless or wired connectivity as well as a 250-sheet input tray that can accommodate up to legal-size paper. The wireless feature was, as always with Brother printers, easy to configure, though it did lose points by forcing me to set up the wireless connection by first connecting an Ethernet cable. If your home office is anything like mine, where accessing a router is a challenge, you'll know why this is a bit of a pain, and is rarely a requirement anymore.

Print speeds were very good. A four-page PDF took 25 seconds to print with first page out in about 15; that's decent for a laser--sorry, LED, I mean digital--printer. A four-page Word document in only 21 seconds, with the first page out in 11 seconds. Color graphics and black text are crisp, sharp, and laser-like, and cheap paper didn't curl as much as I've experienced with other similar printers.

This printer doesn't offer too much else. It's PictBridge compatible and can print directly from a USB drive. There's not much of an LCD screen but on the other hand, there's not much use for one either. The machine is uncluttered and easy to use, and it has a relatively small footprint.