Now we are all working from home some of us will doubtless have been caught out by things we didn’t expect. The first, if you have kids, is how much they actually eat out of boredom. The second is how quickly you will drain the cartridges on your inkjet printer if you try and print any quantity of things out on a daily basis.
Whatever we are using our printers for during these strange times – homework for homeschooling, paperwork for the office that is just easier to read on a print than on the screen or ant variety of other things we might need a hard copy for, we are going to run out of ink sooner or later. We can’t just pop to the shops. Amazon aren’t delivering as quickly as we are used to so we are going to come unstuck at some point over the next few weeks if we haven’t already.
A worthwhile addition could well be the investment in a cheap, home laser printer then, and if so, then this little wonder from Brother may well have you covered. Laser printers in the home are a lot rarer than inkjets, which tend to be dirt cheap but a false economy because of the cartel on cartridge prices.
Replacement toner cartridges might be expensive too, but you certainly won’t need them as often, and while you won’t be printing out snaps of the holiday you didn’t have anyway on it when it comes to documents and text-based printing in general, a printer like this has all the answers.
Brother MFC-L2717DW
- Small footprint
- Good starter price
- 3000 sheets per toner cartridge
- Replacment toner is expensive
- Old fashioned styling
- Average print quality
So the catchily-named Brother MFC-L2717DW then - well for starters it’s monochrome, like any other laser printer in this price range.
Measuring just 12.5 by 15.7 by 12.5 inches and weighing just 26 pounds, it’s not going to have a tremendous impact on your home office space.
For the kind of price we are talking for here, there are going to be some corners cut. For example, the Brother can do duplexing (ie, scanning both sides of a sheet, but it’s manual, meaning you have to flip it yourself. That in itself won’t be a deal-breaker, but it is something to be aware of.
The unit will print, copy, scan, and fax should the need arise, and it is all controlled from the monochrome LCD on the front panel that will remind you of the office photocopier from yesteryear. There are a whole host of buttons on there too which you will see either as a good or bad thing. It’s not that anything is hidden away; it just looks a little intimidating.
If the buttons are a bit over facing, you can access the internals via a web portal once it is set up and, in general, you will find sorting out the nitty-gritty of that a bit easier, and it has an onboard ethernet and WIFI connection, which nicely is Wifi Direct which means you can print from handheld devices such as your phone.
Logistics wise the tray holds 250 sheets of A4, so trips to the corner to refill it should be few and far between. Brother’s own stats say the unit will happily push out 36 pages per minute, which is a fair old rate for something this inexpensive.
So far it all sounds great, but now we get to running costs. A replacement toner cartridge is going to set you back around $75. That cartridge should print around 3000 sheets, so you are looking at 2.5c per page. Having said that inkjets are very expensive in comparison, just the outlays are less.
The text quality is fine. You probably wouldn’t want to use it for a final report, but you get a good quality draft from the Brother. If you need to print an average number of reports and the like out or even the kids’ homework, then this could be a little treat to have around over the coming months of indoor life.