If you’re looking for a small-office or personal mono laser printer, the Brother HL-L2460DW ($159.99) belongs on your short list. It offers both a competitive list price for its mix of speed, output quality, connection options, and paper handling, along with a reasonably low running cost. The combination makes it a strong contender for the small-office mono laser printer you want sitting on, or near, your desk.Design and Setup: A Bit of a ThrowbackSetup for the HL-L2460DW is typical for a compact laser printer. Thanks to the small size and low weight, at 7.2 by 14.0 by 14.2 inches and 15.6 pounds, it’s easy to find a spot for and for one person to move into place. As was once standard, but less common today, the toner and drum ship with the printer rather than already inside it, so you need to install them. Beyond that, you’ve got little to do beyond plugging in cables, then downloading and installing the driver and utilities from Brother’s website.
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The software installation is mostly automated, stopping for you to choose which connection to use and then confirm that the software found the correct printer. I chose Ethernet for our standard tests, rather than USB or Wi-Fi. The printer also works with Brother’s mobile print app for iOS and Android devices, which can use either Wi-Fi to connect to the same network the printer is on, or connect to the printer itself via Wi-Fi Direct. In my tests, the Wi-Fi Direct connection worked without problems. Setting up the connection was a little harder than it should be, however, mostly because the control panel uses a one-line mono LCD. Any LCD is better than none, but a one-line text display is harder to navigate than a color touch screen or even a multi-line mono LCD.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Paper handing is typical for the price and suitable for the range from a personal printer to a shared printer in most small or home offices. In addition to a 250-sheet drawer for up to legal-size paper, the HL-L2460DW offers automatic duplexing (two-sided printing) and a one-page multipurpose tray so you can easily feed a sheet of a different size or type of paper than you normally keep in the drawer.
Brother’s recommended monthly duty cycle is up to 2,500 pages. But if you print mostly in simplex mode (one-sided), and you don’t want to be bothered with refilling the tray more than about once a week, 1,000 pages would be a more realistic number. Even if you print mostly in duplex, a little less than 2,000 pages (with one page for each side of each sheet) would be a better ceiling to have in mind, since some pages will still be simplex.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Note that although the toner cartridge comes mounted on the drum, the two are separate units, which means you can replace just the toner cartridge as needed, a design choice that helps keep running costs down. If you opt for Brother’s twin pack of the high-capacity cartridges, which offers a 3,000-page yield for each cartridge, the cost per page (CPP) is 2.4 cents—a more than 40% savings compared with using the standard cartridge. Adding in the cost of the drum increases the CPP by 0.9 cent, but you won’t need to buy one until you exceed its 15,000-page lifetime. Brother also offers an EZ Refresh subscription, which the company says can potentially save 50% on toner costs. However, how much you’ll actually save will depend on how close you come to printing exactly the number of pages your subscription covers. (For more on EZ Refresh, see How to Save the Most Money on Printer Ink).Testing the Brother HL-L2460DW: Suitable Speed and QualityFor our performance tests, I compared the HL-L2460DW with the Pantum P3012DW, which is similar in both capability and price; the Pantum P2502W, which is a step down on both scores; and the Canon imageClass LBP246dw, which is a step up on both. All were tested using our standard testbed PC, using a USB connection for the P2502W and Ethernet for the other three. As you might expect simply from differences in price classes, the LBP246dw was the fastest across the board, while the P2502W was either the slowest or tied for slowest in every test. The comparison between the Brother printer and the P3012DW is a little more nuanced.For simplex (one-sided) printing of our 12-page Word file, the measured speed for pages 2 through 12 was within 1 page per minute (ppm) of the ratings for all four printers, earning the HL-L2460DW second place, at 37ppm (behind the LBP246dw). However, its first-page-out (FPO) time was the slowest in the group, with both Pantum models tying for second place.
The differences in FPO time were enough to change the printers’ ordinal positions slightly for the full 12 pages. By chance, page 12 is the point where the Brother printer’s faster page-per-minute speed compared with the P3012DW makes up for its slower FPO time, so both tie for second place for the full file. If you print mostly shorter files, the Pantum printer will be the faster of the two, but never by more than its 2-second FPO advantage. If you mostly print longer files, the Brother printer will be faster, but not by enough to matter for files shorter than about 40 pages. And note that if you print primarily one- and two-page files, the HL-L2460DW’s extra two seconds for the FPO time could become an issue if you tend to be impatient.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
For our full business applications suite, which includes five files that are one to four pages each, the HL-L2460DW came in behind the P3012DW primarily because of its longer FPO time for each file.
The overall results for duplex printing of the Word file were essentially the same as for simplex printing, putting the HL-L2460DW in second place for the group and the P3012DW close behind. The P2502W couldn’t be timed because it offers manual duplexing only.
Output quality in our tests was typical for mono lasers in this price range and below, which translates to being easily good enough for almost any business or personal need, but well short of the top tier for mono lasers. For all of the fonts we test that would likely be used in business documents, the output was well formed and easily readable at 6 points and above for most, and 8 points and above for all. The 6-point samples in the one hard-to-read font were a little gray instead of dark black. At 4 and 5 points, text was hard to read in almost all of the fonts. The printer handed the two highly stylized fonts in our tests with heavy strokes well enough to be easily readable even at 8 points. Unless you need font sizes smaller than 6 or 8 points, you should consider the text output more than acceptable.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Graphics and photos showed obvious banding as well as uneven pile height in solid dark fills. However, all the photos and all but one of the graphics in our test suite were good enough to clearly convey the images without losing important details, making them easily good enough for most purposes. The exception was a line chart with five lines of varying colors (translated to shades of gray), where one line was rendered in such a dark gray that I could barely make it out against the black background.Verdict: An Impressive Little Laser ValueThe most compelling argument for the Brother HL-L2460DW is its bang for the buck. On the bang side of the ledger, it scores well enough on features to serve nicely in small and home offices with up to moderate-duty print needs. On the buck side, you don’t have to print all that many pages before its low running cost makes its total cost of ownership lower than for most printers that cost less to buy. (For details on how to compare total cost of ownership based on how much you expect to print, see How to Save Money on Your Next Printer.)If you expect to print relatively few pages, consider the P2502W and P3012DW. Both have a higher running cost than the HL-L2460DW, but a lower initial price. Between them, the P2502W is the less expensive and less capable, with lower paper capacity and slower speed, while the P3012DW offers essentially the same capability as the HL-L2460DW. Also consider the Canon printer, which is the most expensive in this group, but also scores highest for speed, quality, and paper handling. If you need its features, it’s the obvious choice. And if you print enough pages, it can have the lowest total cost in this group, as well. If you don’t need the additional capabilities, however, the HL-L2460DW will give you everything you need for a lower initial cost plus a lower per-page cost for the first 15,000 pages. And in a large proportion of cases, the Brother HL-L2460DW will deliver the most value of any of these printers.
The Bottom Line
The HL-L2460DW hits all the right notes for a small-office or personal monochrome laser printer, including speed, quality, and a reasonably low running cost.
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