Brother HL-L8350CDW review

Brother’s HL-L8350CDW is a compact colour laser aimed at businesses on
a budget. It costs less than £300, and supports wired and wireless printing, integral duplexing and handy mobile features, with a promised 30ppm print speed for colour and mono.

It’s a decent deal, and running costs are reasonable too. Standard cartridges work out at 2.2p per mono page and 13p for colour; the 6,000-page, super-high-yield versions cut costs to 1.6p and 8.2p.

Installation is easy: a web interface provides access to key features; AirPrint is enabled out of the box; and the printer can be added to Google Cloud Print directly from the web console. You can also switch between wired or wireless modes, although you can’t have both active simultaneously.

Brother’s iPrint&Scan mobile app let us print directly from our iPad’s photo album, as well as from iTunes and web pages. The cloud option is even smarter, enabling printing from iCloud, Google Drive and Dropbox.

Output quality is mostly very good. Text was pin-sharp, down to the smallest fonts, and graphics and photos emerged with vibrant colours and smooth transitions across complex fades. Only mono photos disappointed, coming out comparatively murky, with slight banding evident in their backgrounds. Here, the A-Listed Lexmark CS510de wins out.

The big disappointment is print speed. Our 30-page Word document was delivered in precisely one minute at the Standard and Fine driver settings, with a time to first page of around ten seconds; however, our 24-page colour DTP document staggered out at just over 9ppm on both driver settings.

The HL-L8350CDW is a close competitor to Lexmark’s CS510de for quality and value. Its mobile printing features are a particular strength, but slow colour speeds count against it.