Brother HL-3075CW

Offering a combination of fast speed plus output quality that's good enough for most business use, the Brother HL-3075CW ($300 street) is a potential workhorse color printer for a small or micro office, or even a home office with relatively heavy-duty print needs. Factor in the Ethernet and Wi-Fi for easy sharing on a network, as well as paper handling suitable for most micro or small offices, and you might even consider it attractive. It's certainly a potentially good fit.

Like the similarly priced Editors' Choice Dell 1350cnw Color LED Printer ($299 direct, 4 stars), the HL-3075CW is built around an LED engine, which makes it comparable to a laser. In fact, LED printers are essentially identical to lasers, except that they use LEDs rather than lasers to draw the image of each page on a drum before printing.

Somewhat surprisingly, because LED printers tend to be smaller and lighter than lasers, the HL-3075CW weighs 41.9 pounds. That means you may want some help moving it into place. However, even at 9.8 by 16.1 by 18.3 inches (HWD) it shouldn't be hard to find room for, and thanks to the low height, you might even be willing to share a desk with it.

Very much on the plus side, it manages to hold 250 sheets of paper, which should be enough for most small offices. It also offers a 1-sheet manual feed, so you can feed a different type of paper without having to swap out the paper already in the tray. If you need a higher capacity, however, or need automatic duplexing, you'll have to look elsewhere, since Brother doesn't sell any additional paper handling options.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
Setting up the printer on a network is standard fare. For my tests, I connected it using the Ethernet port and installed the driver on a system running Windows Vista.

The HL-3075CW's speed is one of its stronger features. I timed the printer on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at an effective 5.9 pages per minute (ppm). That makes it significantly faster than the Dell 1350cnw, at 4.9 ppm, and even a bit faster than the more expensive Editors' Choice Dell 2150cdn ($399.99, 4.0 stars) at 5.5 ppm.

Unfortunately, the output quality isn't as impressive as the speed. Although it's certainly good enough for most business use, it's also a touch below par for a laser-class printer across the board?for text, graphics, and photos.

The bar for typical laser text quality is high enough so that even being a little below par doesn't hurt readability much. I wouldn't use the HL-3075CW for serious desktop publishing applications or if I needed small fonts, but for typical business documents you shouldn't have any complaints.

The printer scored as poorly on graphics quality as any color laser-class printer I've seen, with uneven results from one print run to the next for the same image, minor banding, and an overall sense of muddy colors on many of our test images. However, the output is easily good enough for any internal business use, although I'd hesitate to hand it to an important client or customer I was trying to impress with my professionalism.

Photos were relatively better, meaning that I've seen a lot worse. Here again, they were good enough for most business use, letting you print recognizable color photos from a Web page. Depending on how demanding you are, you may also consider them good enough for client newsletters or the like.

If high quality output is your main concern, this is obviously the wrong printer to get. However, if what you need is fast speed, and you're comfortable with output that's good enough for business use without being absolutely top quality, the Brother HL-3075CW is a more than reasonable choice. It's also a good fit as a color workhorse printer for a small or micro office or small workgroup.

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