Brother HL-3070CW

The HL-3070CW color printer from Brother is an economical printer for any small business environment or home and can print at decent resolutions of 600 x 2400 dpi. The product has an excellent build quality and a comparatively smaller footprint helping you save valuable space on your desk. The printer is feature-rich and can be connected via the USB, LAN or wireless interfaces. Connect it directly to your PC using a USB cable or share it with other users on your local network using the 10/100 Ethernet port or the wireless G feature. It has a 64 MB buffer memory, good enough for a small to medium office environment.

The HL-3070CW uses the LED light printing technology other than the conventional laser printers that use a laser beam. LEDs are more efficient and reliable as compared to lasers since there are fewer moving parts involved. A bar of square LEDs is placed above each toner cartridge runs across the entire width of the paper. These LEDs create pulse-flashes on the print drum to form the image for printing. The numbers of LEDs per square inch are responsible for the resolution or dots-per-inch. An LED printer can thus print faster than conventional laser printers and produce a fairly better print quality. __PAGEBREAK__

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The printer’s front panel sports a USB port which doubles up for both PictBridge as well as regular photo printing using a USB pen drive or card reader. A tiny LCD display is available for configuring the printer, but the single line dot matrix screen makes reading difficult. Setting up the printer is very simple, except for the wireless connectivity configurations which is a bit of a tedious job— blame it on the clumsy user interface and the single line dot matrix display screen.

An additional button on the control panel which features ‘Secure printing’ is a value add-on. This feature enables you to give a print command you’re your PC along with a password. The user can then securely print the document only after entering the credentials on the printer. This is an excellent security feature for any office environment where important or confidential document need to be printed on a single shared printer. 

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We tested the printer using a couple of file formats such as regular text documents, documents with text and graphics and a photograph. The printer spewed out regular text documents at 16 pages per minute while a single A4 sized photo took just 26 seconds to be printed in best quality. When we analyzed the prints carefully, we found a few pros and cons. The black text prints were excellent with crisp laser-like quality, but the qualities of photo prints were not as satisfying as compared to a laser printer quality. The prints were quite dark and dull due to insufficient contrast and details. Apart from photos, we even noticed the grayscale and color graphics were slightly grainy.

Speaking of print economy, the HL-3070CW is comparatively cheaper than conventional laser printers. The black cartridge costs around Rs 3,950 and can yield around 2,200 pages which puts the cost to just Rs 1.80 per print. A color print will cost you around Rs 2.70 per print with the color cartridges costing around Rs 3,850 each which can yield approximately 1,400 pages. Brother offers a one year warranty on the printer and the printer is priced at Rs 23,315.

Specifications: Dimensions (WxHxD): 16.1 x 9.8 x 18.3 inches; Weight: 19 Kg; Resolution: 2400 dpi; Buffer size: 64 MB; Tray capacity: 250 sheets; Interface: USB, LAN, WLAN.

Price:   Rs 23,315
Contact:  Brother International (I) Pvt. Ltd.
Phone:  1800-222-422
Email: info@brother.in
Website:  www.brother.in
Warranty:  1 year