Design

Laser printers have continually been the behemoths that expend extra space within the office or worktop, however, the MFC-L3770CDW and its sort are not true laser printers. It doesn’t use traditional laser equipment to instruct the printer where to fuse the toner onto the paper but instead uses LED arrays that are smaller and less expensive than their laser counterparts. As a result, you have smaller, lighter, and less expensive to manufacture machines.

Now, LED-based printers are commonplace, however, they behave like laser-based machines, at least from the user’s point of view. If you follow recent trends, some of the latest models run about the same size and price as their traditional laser counterparts. Measuring 14.5 by 16.1 by 18.7 inches (HWD) and weighing 47.8 pounds, the HL-L3290CDW isn’t quite as small as most of its competitors. It’s bigger and heavier than the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M180nw but in the same ballpark as the Canon Color Image Class MF634Cdw, our top pick for entry-level color laser AIOs with an automatic document feeder (ADF).

The HL-L3290CDW has an easy-to-use control panel, a handful of buttons for copying and interacting with drill-down style menus, and a small two-line monochrome display. Still, you can configure and monitor the printer via a built-in Web site, which also allows you to set users and other security parameters.

Paper Handling

The Brother HL-L3290CDW has a 250-sheet main drawer and one-sheet override tray just above the main drawer, while the MFC-L3770CDW has a 250-sheet main drawer and 30-sheet multipurpose tray. Comparison: The Canon MF42Ddw holds up to 300 sheets but is expandable to 900 sheets, while HP’s M180nw only holds up to 150 sheets.

The printer has a maximum monthly duty cycle of 30,000 pages, with a recommended monthly print volume of 1,500. It has about the same duty cycle as the competitors mentioned here.

Connectivity And Security

The HL-L3290CDW connectivity includes Wi-Fi, and you can connect to a single PC via USB 2.0 and Wi-Fi Direct. The last option allows the printer to be connected to mobile devices that are neither connected to the network nor the router. Unlike the MFC-L3770CDW, however, it does not support Ethernet, which is strange for a laser-class machine, and does not support near-field communication (NFC) for touch-to-print functionality.

In addition to Wi-Fi Direct, the printer has other mobile connectivity options including Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Morphia, and Brother’s own iPrint and Scan which supports both Android and iOS devices. With iPrint & Scan, you can scan to email, image, OCR (which converts scanned text to editable text), file, and FTP.

The security facilities here are basic. You can protect documents with a personal identification number, but Brother further enhances the convenience by allowing you to assign a PIN to the scanner as well. As such, you can limit or deny access based on username, group, or IP address with standard SNMP and other network security protocols.

Print Speed

Brother rates the HL-L3290CDW at 25 pages per minute (ppm) for both black and white pages. In testing, it prints a Microsoft Word text-based document at 23.8ppm, which is slightly slower than the MFC-L3770CDW and 9ppm quicker than HP’s M180nw, and regarding 5ppm on the Canon MF634Cdw.

If you regularly print complex color documents (Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint) that contain charts, graphs, and other professional-level graphics as well as photos, this printer will get the job done. If you combine the color printing results with the previous results, you get a final score of 10.8 ppm for printing the entire business suite. That’s a score that’s in the same range as the MFC-L3770CDW, but much better than the HP Laserjet Pro M180nw and MFC634Cdw.

Business-Quality Output

If there’s one thing that all Brother LED-array printers share in common, it’s the ability to churn out good-looking documents. Like its larger stablemate, the MFC-L3770CDW, the HL-L3290CDW’s text is well-sized and very legible up to about 6 points, which is more than acceptable for most business needs.

This printer produces charts, graphs, and other commercial graphics with solid fills and well-aligned gradients with only a few perceptible flaws. Hairlines on documents and other terms are well-illustrated, and embedded photos are accurate and have fine detail.

Running Costs

You’re spending 2.6 cents for black pages and 15.5 cents for color, making it a lot cheaper, especially compared to other laser-class printers. On the other hand, the HP M180nw’s running cost is 4.6 cents for monochrome pages and 23.5 cents for color pages, while Canon’s MF634Cdn runs at 3.2 cents for black and 16.4 cents for color.

For those who will be printing 100 or 200 pages each month, the HL-L3290CDW is an ultimate cost saver, but if you push it to the recommended 1,500 pages each month, or its siblings and competitors, the running costs will increase over time. Can get expensive together. If you’re printing hundreds of pages per month, it’s economical to look at an inkjet model with a bulk-ink system like the Epson WF-C5790, our editors’ top pick, which has the highest-yield ink bags, and black copy-page cost. The cost of 1.7 cents and the coloring page is 7.7 cents.