Brother HL-L3290CDW Wireless Color Laser Printer

Printer is fabulous. Based upon what all it does for the price, it is marvelous. People who complain about photograph quality have absolutely no background to understand these things! It’s like buying a Toyota Avalon and complaining because it can’t haul enough gravel in it to effectively surface their driveway. Inkjet printers on glossy paper is what you need for near photographic look. I’ve had wonderful experience with that—absolutely superb prints on Canons of the day (but boy have they changed—I’ve gone from loving them to hating them!), but that was a few decades ago. I HATE inkjet printers now, because if you don’t use it for a week or two (much worse when you have a month or two gap), it keeps using up all your ink (to keep it flowing instead of stopping up the jets—and mfg’s think gold is a major ingredient of ink, I think)! You can spend over $100 on cartridges for which you are “supposed to get 1,700 pages” [this is for HP printer, which was supposed to be cheaper per copy because of large ink cartridges--HAH--better use them fast, because they waste your ink all day and all night while not in use!!!], then by using it very infrequently, be lucky if you get a few dozen prints (or so it seems—who keeps count on low volume usage!). A laser jet you can leave alone for ½ year, then come in, turn it on, and print out hundreds of fabulous quality pages, and in a real hurry! Pictures are quite good as well—IF you understand the kind of quality you can expect from a laser. Things are crisp and distinct, and color looks great on designed patterns, but certainly not photo-quality on faces, scenery, etc. That is NOT what it’s made for. If you understand that, you may be quite satisfied with printed color pictures. Compared to the frustrations of inkjets, I LOVE it!!!But I do have a list of complaints--things I wish Brother did differently on this printer, although if I had it to do over again with only the choices and prices that were available, I would HANDS DOWN buy it again--no question! That's why I give it 5 stars, despite my gripes:--I hate the way the scanner has a gap all the way around the platen! Scanning is NOT just to make copies, so do NOT limit the scanner by the printer’s edge limitation…which by the way, can’t they overcome that in 3+ decades?!--I scan checks into my bank account. I can get around this, but it's a hassle EVERY TIME I scan a check.--I've had to scan in documents that were printed into that gap area on both sides. It caused a hassle!:--I scanned it twice, once fully including the left side into the scanned area, then fully on the right.--Then I went to Microsoft Publisher, overlapped, cut, then matched images, combined, and saved as JPEG.That's a TON of work for what should have been a simple, one-pass scan!If this weren't rare for me, I'd DEFINITELY send the thing back and buy a different printer for the scanner!--I WISH it had a paper feeder for the scanner. This would:--At least solve the top-bottom gap problem.--Enable scanning longer documents.--And most obviously, allow scanning of a stack of documents, instead of one at a time.BUT I suppose this was one of those built-in limitations to force purchase of a more expensive model.Once again, while I REALLY WISH they’d make these improvements, all things considered FOR the price, I’d make the same choice all over again.

We purchased this printer to replace our Brother all-in-one inkjet printer that after several years of use has been clogging/drying out. We also have a low cost/efficient Brother B&W laser printer (no copies or scanning) as the workhorse printer. Despite my noting the dimensions and weight of the new printer when ordering, I realized how big and heavy it is when I opened the box. It was very well packed and the instructions for setting it up, activating wifi and installing the software were clear and easy.It is relatively quiet and smooth running when printing and the color toner cartridges, although expensive should last a long time for us (even the starter cartridges). Even better, they won't dry out. as someone else noted, the printer leaves a small margin of unprinted area on either side of the page but this will not impact how we will be using it. Scanning and copying work well but I did notice there is a bit of slop in how the scanner cover closes. If one is not careful, it might not line up with the front of the printer when closing. I think this is the result of the feature allowing one to fit a 1 inch or so book on the scanning glass when copying. This printer might be a bit of overkill for some but we needed a color scanner/copier and there is no longer any ink to dry out.I have had problems with H-P ( wifi connections) and Epson printers ( print head clogging). Brother is great at home printers. I will only buy Brother.

I genuinely hate this printer. It's never printed correctly, leaving streaks on pages and miscoloring everything, and some of the toner cartridges dont work on arrival because of bad sensor pins. The ink also needs super frequent replacing and every cartridge is very expensive. Recommend one of the ink tank printer instead.

Intro:I don't have to print things very often. Inkjet printers that sit tend to clog. With an inkjet I would spend 10-15 minutes unclogging the printer just to print one black and white page and in the process use a whole bunch of ink running the unclogging process and printing test pages.I bought this printer for printing black and white and color documents on occasion and for that purpose it works very well. It warms up quickly and prints out multiple sheets quickly.Document Print Quality:The documents it produces are crisp and clear whether in color or black and white. I've never had an issue with them.Photo Printing:Consumer laser printers have four colors, essentially they use CMYK, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Black). This will never produce high quality photo output. There can be no expectation that this is a photo printer and so I'm not dinging it for the photo output. To be clear the photo output is not good, you do not want this for printing photos.Toner Life:The toner cartridges it comes with are basically starter cartridges that don't even have the life of the standard cartridges they sell. You'll want to buy a black cartridge right away. If you do a lot of color document printing you will find you need the other three pretty quickly as well. After that with the regular cartridges toner life seems reasonable if not exceptional.Scanning/Copying:It has a flat bed scanner that can produce 1200dpi output. From a layman's point of view this seems exceptional to me. The scans it produces are so detailed at this high resolution that you can use it like a microscope. It has no feed though and so it's only useful for scanning a few pages at a time, which is all I ever usually need to scan. It also works fine for copying.The other limitation is that the scanner will only accept up to A4/Letter size documents.Feed Types:The printer has one paper tray that accepts up to legal size paper. If you need to print on different types of paper or sizes all the time then this might not be the printer for you.There is one manual feed option on the front that accepts one sheet at a time. It can be a bit tedious to get it to grab onto the sheet at times. I'm probably just impatient though. Overall the manual feed is fine for printing one off items on occasion. I use it for printing one off labels.Printing On Heavy Stock:The proper way to print on heavier stock is using the manual feed, but even using that method I would not use this for printing on card stock. The heat produced by the printer causes the stock to curl quite a bit.Connectivity:I use a Windows PC and use the printer wirelessly on my home network. It hasn't given me any issues with connectivity and it was relatively painless to setup. I've also been able to print things directly from my iPhone to the printer.Summary:For what I need this thing to do it does it well. If you try to get it to more things than just print black and white and/or color documents it's not going to be that great.If you need to scan lots of things, it's not for you. If you need to print on lots of different mediums it's not for you. If you want to print photos, it's not for you.