Brother HL-3170CDW Pro Reviews

To its credit, Brother offers a little more than most competitors do. The warranty lasts only one year, but there's free phone support for as long as you own the product. Speed is excellent, and for text and spot colour the HL-3170CDW's print quality is fine. Toner costs are around average. At this price point, it offers a decent colour-laser experience without gouging you later. But if you want the best possible deal in this price range, a business inkjet delivers far more.

To its credit, Brother offers a little more than most competitors do. The warranty lasts only one year, but there's free phone support for as long as you own the product. Speed is excellent, and for text and spot color the HL-3170CDW's print quality is fine. Toner costs are around average. At this price point, it offers a decent color-laser experience without gouging you later. But if you want the best possible deal in this price range, a business inkjet delivers far more.

Like its monochrome counterparts, the Brother HL-6180dw and HL-5470dw, the HL-3170cdw is a no nonsense printer. If you want large displays, web connected apps or front side USB ports you are looking in the wrong place. With that said, the HL-3170cdw does offer reliable, quality color printing at a competitive price point. With black and white/color print speeds up to 23 ppm, automatic duplexing, a 250-sheet paper tray, built-in network connectivity and mobile print apps (if set up over wired or wireless network) for $279.99, you'll be hard pressed to find a better deal.

Users generally need multiple printers for multiple uses. Some printers excel at text, others at presentation graphics, and yet others at photos. The Brother HL-3170CDW is a good printer with good text and presentation graphic quality, but narrowly avoids true greatness only with its photo quality being average. The printer is fast for its class, doesn't brutally reek of ozone and aerosolized toner like some models, and won't sound like a Victorian-era factory pounding away at its assigned task while churning out a job. The duplexing capability is a great addition to keep paper waste down, boosting the printer in our eyes just a bit more.

The Brother HL-3170CDW makes quick black and color prints with decent quality and an attractive price tag to match. As long as you're not using it to jump-start

The HL-3170CDW is faster than most entry-level laser-class devices in this price range, and compared to some other low-cost LED printers we’ve tested lately, it comes with a robust set of features, such as auto-duplexing and support for a wide range of options for printing from mobile devices. However, this model’s inability to reproduce photos in acceptable quality—even images embedded in business documents—concerned us. This shortcoming limits how and where you can use this printer’s output.Again, this is one of the faster entry-level laser-class models we’ve seen recently, but, as we see it, fast document printing is important only in environments with high-volume print requirements. This model’s high cost per page precludes it from being a high-volume workhorse, but then, this is a limitation of the entire genre of low-cost laser-class printers, not just this one. We couldn’t recommend any of the printers mentioned in this review for use in small- or home-based-offices that print thousands upon thousands of pages each month. A couple hundred would be the limit.

The Brother HL-3170CDW color LED printer comes up a little short on output quality, but largely makes up for it with fast speed and good paper handling.