You’ll be high-fiving yourself over the fact that you can just hit “command+P” on your laptop menu, have what you need in seconds, and move on with your day. You can probably find a good one on a local marketplace or resale site for cheap, but make sure you read reviews and snag one in good working condition, or you might still find yourself fuming in line at Office Depot. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. And often they review only the products that provide the most kickbacks when you buy.
Print quality was mediocre overall, and colors had a distinctly greenish hue. The HL-L2350DW works with Windows PCs, Macs, and even Linux systems. brother hl l2395dw It’s also compatible with all major mobile printing standards, including Google Cloud Print, which means it’s a solid pick for Chromebook owners.
From small businesses to home offices, you are sure to find the perfect printer. It has other features that businesses will appreciate, too, such as duplex printing and a fold-out bypass paper tray for one-off print jobs on different paper sizes. Although the slide-off scanner glass is large enough only for letter paper, the automatic document feeder can handle legal-size documents. Thanks to its USB port, this machine is capable of brother hl l2395dw printing JPEGs, PDFs, and Word files, and it can also save scans as PDFs, JPEGs, or TIFF files. We also tested the flatbed scan quality of each multifunction printer using a glossy test photo printed on our inkjet all-in-one pick, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015. We scanned at all available resolutions and looked for notable qualitative differences in each machine’s output, in everything from sharpness to color rendition to contrast.
Test graphics and photos, on the other hand, were merely mediocre at default settings, as some light banding was visible in solid-color areas, and graphics appeared a little grainy. The output is good enough for personal use or internal business documents, and you can improve it with adjustments to toner density and resolution settings if you need to hand out documents to clients. Finally, we looked for a high-end color laser all-in-one for people with more serious small-office or home-office needs. Like the mono MFP, it needed to be fast and flexible, offer great print and scan quality, and have a not completely outrageous price (none of these machines are cheap, but we set the cap at $500). For this guide to laser printers, we’ve considered 157 different printers and tested 19 of them since 2011.
The best inkjets do a good job, but even a mediocre laser printer will do a better job delivering crisp results, especially when it comes to fine lines and small font sizes. This multifunction printer adds a flatbed scanner and an automatic document feeder to the HL-L2350DW, significantly upping its home-office utility. With low operating costs, quick operation, and useful features, the HL-L2350DW is the best laser printer you can get for around $100. We slightly overstuffed printers with paper to see if they’d jam and fed them single sheets to see if they could pick each one up.
The quality of the greyscale a printer can produce is largely dependent on DPI, as well as printer memory. Help improve your productivity with print and copy speeds of up to 34ppm and produce professional output at up to 2400 x 600 dpi. When a manufacturer says that a cartridge will print 3,000 pages, it means the printer will print 3,000 pages—of a double-spaced document with no headers or footers, basically. Yes, that’s on the low side of what you usually print in the real world. But it’s an industry standard—all manufacturers use that as a reference point. We’d be willing to guess that most text-only pages have about 7 percent coverage, and graphics bump the figure up to at least 10 percent.
Unlike most other printers we tested, the M255dw also provides a full QWERTY keyboard, which made entering a complex Wi-Fi passphrase a lot less frustrating. Like the HP Color LaserJet Pro M254dw we used to recommend, the M255dw works with both 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz networks—also rare among printers. Finally, we stress-tested all of the paper-feeding parts of each printer, including not just the main paper tray but also the bypass tray and document feeder, if the printer had them. We overstuffed them with paper to see if they’d jam, and we also fed them single sheets to see if they could pick each one up. We also fed the multifunction printers a crumpled piece of paper to see if their ADFs could handle the unexpected.