Brother HL-3070CW

Brother HL-3070CW review

Brother's HL-3070CW is a colour laser printer that sits above the entry-level HL-3040CN and adds support for Wi-Fi, which will be a welcome addition for many home office users. Currently you can buy it online for around £200, which is very affordable by colour laser printer standards. So how has Brother managed to keep the price so low? The cost of this model has been reduced by using an LED print engine instead of a traditional colour laser one. On normal colour laser models, a laser is used to draw the image onto the printer's drum, but this one uses a row of high-intensity LED lights instead. The upshot of this is that the print engine requires fewer parts to run than a traditional colour laser printer so it's cheaper to produce. Another advantage of the LED print engine is that it has allowed Brother to make the chassis more compact. This model is still quite deep, measuring 466mm long, but standing 250mm high, it's much shorter than most traditional laser models. It would be easily accommodated in a home office. Brother has also steered clear of the boring black or bland beige colour schemes that many other manufacturers use on their home office models. Instead it's used an appealing off-white for the side panels and a deep blue on top.