Best Value Printer For Small Businesses?Brother HL-L2350DW Laser Printer Review

If you are running a product-based small business or home business, having a reliable printer is a must. You need to be able to print invoices, documents, and shipping labels with your packages. The Brother HL-L2350DW Laser Printer offers a great option for a laser printer for printing high-quality texts at high speeds.

In this article, we will go over what you need to know about the Brother HL-L2350DW Laser Printer. We will go through pricing, features, and what to expect. Most importantly, we will evaluate whether this printer will offer value for money for your business. We will have videos throughout the review and at the end of the post for a full list of supplemental information.

Quick Facts

Works with Mac and Windows
Prints from mobile (iPhones, iPads, android, etc)
Wireless capable
High-quality texts
Prints faster than inkjet printers
One of the best value for high volume printing

Pricing in other regions:

What Is A Laser Printer?

The Brother HL-L2350DW is a laser printer. It does not use ink, it uses toner. If you are a bit of a geek like us to wonder how laser printers work, here is a short synopsis. Laser printers have eight main components that work together to print: a wire unit called the corona wire, a laser beam, a moving mirror unit, a drum unit, a toner, and a fuser unit that contains rollers.

When you send the data to the laser printer to print, the corona wire is heated in order to create a positive charge on the drum unit. In the meantime, the laser beam is activated, reflecting from the moving mirror unit onto the drum unit. Once the beam from the laser hits the drum, the positive charge from earlier changes to a negative charge. The area on the drum where the negative charges are will be where the toner particles will stick to.

This is because the toner particles are positively charged (opposites attract!) Your paper will pass through the drums, drawing the negatively charged toner particles onto it. The paper now contains the inked contents, passing through the fuser unit with the rollers where it will physically fuse the toner “ink” or particles onto the paper.

How Much is Brother HL-L2350DW Laser Printer?

Brother HL-L2350DW sells on amazon for $119.99, which is very well priced for a laser printer. As with a lot of amazon listings, sometimes the amazon posting can sell out for a time. In which case, the availability will be with independent sellers on amazon and they could charge up to $200.

We would not recommend you purchase this printer at that price point because the value for money would not be there. If you are able to, wait it out. As another option, you can also check your local Facebook marketplace or offerup for an even cheaper price.

Pricing in other regions:

Brother HL-L2350D – USB only (Canada)
Brother HL-L2350DW (UK)

Design and Features

So what are all the designs and features of the Brother HL-L2350DW? The “D” in the model name is for duplex printing so this printer is able to print on both sides in order to save on paper. The “W” is for wireless networking so you are able to print from your mobile device. Let’s go over each feature on every side of the printer.

Back

Starting with the back, the Brother HL-L2350DW comes with the power cable attached to the printer itself. You can open up the bottom in case of a jam and pull the paper out of the rollers. They have a USB port at the right which is optional for setup because you can set this printer wirelessly. Perhaps because the USB is optional, the printer unit does not come with a USB cord.

Top

The top has a small LCD display on top of all the functional buttons. They have the standard “Back”, “OK”, up and down buttons with the “+” and “-” signs along with the “Go”, “WIFI” and power buttons. All are intuitive and easy to navigate. The tabs are for paper stops.

Front

The front has a manual feed tray where you can print index cards or letter envelopes. It has adjustable guides for size. The main paper tray is at the bottom where you can pull it out. The paper tray also has green adjustable guides.

To install the toner cartridge, you will need to pull the whole front flap down towards you. You can then slide the cartridge in or change the toner cartridge. The toner cartridge only goes in one way with the “brother” logo side up. You will gently push it and close the flap back.

Technical Capabilities

The Brother HL-L2350DW laser printer can print up to 30 pages per minute with a 250 sheets capacity on the tray. The printer does only print black and white but it is perfect for printing documents and labels. Of course, there are other laser printers that can print in color. We will review them in the future once we find one that checks all our boxes.

The Brother HL-L2350DW laser printer comes with WPS capabilities. If you have a WPS compatible router, it is very easy to connect. If you do not have a router or a router that is compatible, you can type in your network password using the LCD display. We show you how to set it up in two different ways in the video above. Additionally, we also have a full step-by-step tutorial for wifi setup and installation below.

What Could Make the Brother HL-L2350DW Laser Printer Better?

We have yet to find the absolute perfect printer among any type of printer and the Brother HL-L2350DW is no exception. There are two main quirks about this laser printer and knowing what they are and what you need to do to solve them will save you the frustration.

The first quirk is the deep sleep mode which is a feature that turns off the printer. You will have to physically press the power button in order to turn it back on. But why is this an inconvenience?

Being a mobile printer, the printer should be able to “wake” itself up when you send a document to be printed. Since it was not built this way, you will have to go and turn on the deep sleep mode in Settings so that the printer will automatically “wake up” when you tell it to print. We show you how to do this here.

The second quirk to note is the toner cartridge which is chipped to have an estimated lifespan. The chip is supposed to give the print life of the toner before replacement is needed. Once that set point is reached, the printer will turn off. A solution for this inconvenience is to remove the toner stop. Doing this accomplishes two good things. First, it will ensure that you are not without a toner while waiting for a replacement to be delivered. Secondly, it will stretch out the printing life as much as the toner is capable. We show you how to do this here.

An added point is that we would have preferred the power cord to be separate from the print and not permanently attached to the printer. If a pet chews the cord or somehow the cord got damaged, the whole printer would be useless without somehow replacing the power cord.

Does the Brother HL-L2350DW Laser Printer Offer Value For Money?

The short answer is yes, the Brother HL-L2350DW offers great value for money! We are generally huge fans of Brother printers, especially their thermal printers. We wrote about several of them on the blog here and here. Thermal printers are great options to consider for your shipping needs.

Overall, the Brother HL-L2350DW laser printer is a robust, reliable printer with a great price point. It is even more so when you remove some of the quirks that could potentially cause frustration. Moreover, it is a great option for students needing to print PowerPoint presentations or other documents.

The Brother HL-L2350DW laser printer proves that you do not have to spend hundreds (or even thousands) for a printer that is reliable and cost-effective for years to come.