Brother HL-L3230CDW

Brother's yellow toner starter cartridge leaked into my new machine. Brother support is non-existent – Brother's yellow toner, starter-cartridge leaked into my 5-month old machine. Brother support was; first evasive, then dismissive, and now won't even reply. This is the last reply I received and is pasted from, [Name Removed] tech support: "As for the yellow toner powder inside the machine, you can remove all the toner and drum units and clean… Read more

it with a lint free soft cloth."

I had already tried for an hour, the yellow powder went everywhere and to 'just clean it with a lint free cloth' will take many more hours, and I am worried what other damage it may have done.

Still under warranty and that's the best they can do with the very messy failure of their product. Remind me again Brother, why we should pay a premium and get your very high-priced consumables?

I currently use two other Brothers; an inkjet and a mono laser that have been flawless for years, but this abysmal response has really soured me on the brand.

nice budget printer – I got one from Officeworks - matched price from Amazon and then 5% discount applied. I had it for a couple of months, mainly used for printing coloring pages for my kids. The original toner is not bad - my estimation is about 500 pages. It is not quiet as HP printer but it works well within my budget. Printer can wake up from deep sleep instantly. For those people who is having issues, you may check your router or static IP configurations. Show details

Unreliable – Has just died for the 2nd time. Same fault. Completely unresponsive Show details

A great entry level laser printer (until it Bricks itself) – Edited on 3/8/23 owing to it dying via it refusing to recognize that it had any toner in it (not just a failure to recognize 1 toner, but all 4 toners). It simply refused to accept that there was toner. Every conceivable method to fix this was tried from a multiple of online forumns and help from the manufacturers website etc. A call to an… Read more

authorized repair center confirmed that the price of repair far outweighed the cost of getting a new printer. It was good whilst it worked, but for the 3 years I had it and the amount of use it had (had only changed 2 toners in total), IT SHOULD HAVE LASTED MUCH LONGER. Maybe I was just unlucky............

Below is my original review.

When my (reasonably) faithful Epson TX650 scanner/printer died I decided that I was I was not going to replace it with another ink based printer but go for a laser printer. This stemmed from the fact that I was having a few more problems with inks drying out and dirty heads than I cared for.

My criteria was simple enough: A) A good scan resolution (1200 x 1200 dpi min) B) A good print resolution (2400 x 600 dpi) C) Colour D) Under $300 (hopefully)

After browsing online it became apparent that these criteria were going to be hard to meet. I discovered that the cheapest colour scanner/printer was the HP M181fw which at a 600 x 600 dpi scan and print rate and priced at $337 and that was disappointing.

My next options were both Brother scanner/printers, the DCP-L351CDW at $349 (not a bad price) and the MFC-L3750CDW at $397 (going roughly 30% over my budget). Both of these printers offers the scan rate and print quality I was after with the major difference between them the print rate (pages per minute) and the number of sheets of paper that they could hold.

After a slight rethink of my criteria, I decided to ditch the scanner option (I chose to buy a 2nd hand one) and just get a colour printer.

At $198, the HP MF-154NW was certainly cheap, but it offered a fairly average scan rate (600 x 600 dpi) and a very disappointing 600 x 600 dpi print quality.

The next two options were the Brother HL-L3230CDW (at $267) and the HL-L3270CDW (at $299) which both have basically the same specs (print quality, ppm and paper capacity), with the latter offering a small flip up colour lcd screen compared to a mono single line lcd screen.

I decided to purchase the HL-L3230CDW as the fancy screen didn’t really make enough difference to me.

Out of the box, set up was remarkably easy. Various bits of tape had to be removed and plastic tabs removed from the laser printer cartridges and then it really was just a matter of connect up (I chose the cable option, and the fact that it doesn’t come with a cable would have been annoying if it weren’t for the fact that I already had one from my old printer) and turn it on.

As far as connectivity goes, there’s the as previously mentioned (not included) USB cable as well as wi-fi direct and other than just printing straight from your PC, you can also use other devices (phones/tablets) with Google’s Cloud Print and Apple’s Air Print. For my needs (simple), I’m using using via USB from my PC.

The print quality of this machine is 2400 x 1200 dpi and it looks really good on paper in so far as (unlike my previous TX650 inkjet or a lower resolution printer), the images are pretty sharp. Now I’ve only used standard paper in this printer so far, and whilst the colours are clear, I have found them to be a bit pale/flat when it came to printing pictures (particularly photos). It was nothing that couldn’t be overcome with a tiny bit of image colour enhancement via a photoshop type program. Perhaps using a higher grade paper (or photo paper if it is compatible) will make a difference.

When it comes to printing documents. The colour is certainly acceptable.

I haven’t tested the accuracy of the claimed 24 pages per minute, and to be honest, I’m not printing enough for this to ever be a concern. The speed of the printing does seem quite good though.

There is a feature on this machine (and I suspect other Brother machines) that puts the printer into a ‘deep sleep’ mode when it hasn’t been used for a while. This is to keep the machine ‘just on’ without wasting any unnecessary stand-bye power. I have noticed that when it is in this mode and you send something off to print that it can take 40-45 seconds for it start printing. Again, I’m not printing often enough for this to be an issue, and once it is no longer in this mode, the lapse between sending and printing is only a matter of seconds.

Because I don’t print a lot, I wanted a printer that could sit idle for ages (or even be completely) turned off (something that you can’t do with an inkjet printer without having the print-heads dry up) as well as not being too expensive to print from. By my calculations of the replacement toners, a colour page should cost about 25 cents to print. If this is just for yourself at home, that should be fine, but if you were relying on this for a business, it could start getting expensive. The manufacturers stated yield is 1300 per cartridge. This seems pretty reasonable.

I did see from the manufacturers specs that after 18,000 printed pages you have to replace the Drum Unit. These cost more than the printer itself, so if I ever get to this point, I’d probably just buy a replacement printer. 18,000 pages is quite a lot though. Don’t think I would have even got a quarter of that printed during my 4 year university degree.

One last thing I think I mention is the weight of this machine. It weighs 13.6Kg. That’s pretty heavy, especially compared to my previous TX650 which weighed only 8.4Kg. But comparing it to the scanner/printer option of the 17Kg DCP-L351CDW, it doesn’t seem that bad. Now I know that it’s not like I’m going to be constantly moving the printer around, but it is heavy.

All in all, the HL-L3230CDW is a great entry level laser printer that is quite affordable and offers decent printing options with long lasting yields for the cartridges. There is also the option to hand feed different papers, envelopes etc via fold out tray at the front of the printer.