Brother MFC-L2800DW All-in-one Mono Laser Printer |Print, copy, scan & fax |Automatic 2-sided print | A4|UK Plug

I've owned a HP Laserjet printer for years and as it had started to malfunction I decided to buy a new one. I'd never used Brother printers before but was aware that they had a good reputation, so I chose this one and it's absolutely brilliant.Inside the box you'll find the printer, a power cable, a toner and drum cartridge, some booklets (quick setup guide, safety and warranty information - no full user guide as is the case these days) and a lot of polystyrene. The printer is quite a large, square, boxy thing, not as tall as it is wide, and feels plasticky but solid, and isn't too heavy.Setup took a matter of minutes, and the guide was absolutely fine - take everything out of the box, remove the toner and drum cartridge from its bag, take the protective orange clip off it and insert it into the printer, put some paper into the tray, power it on, and connect to wifi with no drivers, software, or apps required (I was using Windows 11 and an Android phone, the latter able to print things like downloaded PDFs straight away without having to install anything).Connecting to wifi was easy. The printer has a single line LCD display, and I quickly found the network settings, selected wifi, chose my network, entered the password (lots of up & down and OK key presses here to select the relevant characters) and that was that, everything could connect straight away. If you don't want to use wifi the rear of the printer has a USB port (a printer USB port, so a square-ish D-shaped port, not a standard USB or USB C port) but no cable is included, and also an ethernet port if you wish to connect it to your router, but again no cable is supplied.In use, the printer is noisier than my old HP one, but the sound you can hear is like a fan, presumably the one that cools the inside of the printer while it is working. I'm delighted to find that the printer does double sided printing without having to manually reinsert the paper as my old one did, and is extremely fast, printing around 32 pages per minute. The included toner cartridge is apparently good for over 1000 pages - so far I've done maybe 60, so I've got some way to go before I can see how accurate this is. When not in use, if you leave the printer on it will enter a sleep mode so power consumption is minimised, and as soon as you send a print job it wakes up and starts straight away. Print quality is great, whether printing text or images, but as this is a mono printer it's obviously just black and white, which is exactly what I wanted as I mainly print documents.I'm absolutely delighted with this, and so far it seems that Brother's great reputation for laser printers is warranted.

I recommend this as a printer and a scanner. I found it easy to set up and easy to use. It's fast for printing and very quiet in use.I'm an occasional printer user. I might do a batch today and not do any printing for several weeks. Inkjet printing had become very costly and frustrating because of dried out cartridges due to the occasional use nature of my printing.So I've moved to LaserJet to try to reduce my overall costs. While the upfront printer cost was a little bit higher than an inkjet, at the moment it looks like my overall cost per page over time ishould be much lower.So I'm very happy with this as a printing solution for me. The printer is a little heavier and larger than the inkja that it replaced but it's still quite tidy and manageable.Paper management also seems really good. It's got a nice large paper tray.It's very fast for printing and also very quiet - a huge improvement over inkjet.Scanning capabilities also very good.I connected this and I'm using it wirelessly I found it easy to set up and I've had no connectivity issues since.

After replacing all of the ink cartridges in my admittedly excellent ink key printer I wondered if I could do something to reduce printing costs as ink prices are huge. I've dabbled with laser printers over the years and remember the early huge expensive models with few features. Researching the current market, Brother printers are rated highly and so I decided to take the plunge on this model which was also selling for just over the cost of a full set of ink cartridges...I have to say I'm absolutely blown away by how good this printer is, especially compared to my experiences of old. It was easy to set up (scan the QR code and follow the instructions on your phone or go to the Brother website on PC), it has ethernet and WiFi connectivity, it prints duplex, has high print quality and it's very fast when printing. Wow. It comes with a 1,200 page toner cartridge and you have the option of choosing higher capacity replacements when the time comes.Excellent work Brother and now I can keep the ink key for photo prints only where it truly excels.