A Good Printer At A Nice Price

TidBITS — the best Apple news site with a 90’s design — has an article on the Brother HL-2270DW, a printer I happen to own and love.

For now, then I can recommend the Brother HL-2270DW monochrome laser printer for many people. Like every printer, it has its problems, but it’s wireless, fast, solidly built, and inexpensive to purchase and operate.

He has some good points, it’s not AirPrint compatible and maybe it’s noisy (I never really noticed) but it’s a darn good printer. When the wife asked me to buy a printer, I knew we wouldn’t be using it enough to justify the cost of an Inkjet. The longevity and initial cost of a laser printer makes a lot of sense if you don’t need to print photos, color, or if you don’t print very often.

At the time, I owned an Epson Stylus R200 which I had purchased years earlier to print photos but it uses 5 different ink cartridges which cost a mild fortune. I worried that any money I spent on new ink cartridges would be wasted once they dried out from lack of use. I may have been wrong about this, Marco Arment wrote about printers this week and he says the Epsons don’t use ink if turned off which is something I wasn’t aware of. Regardless, we don’t need a printer with 5 cartridges, we need something to occasionally churn out a standard black and white page or two. I should mention the R200 won’t even try to print a black and white page without every color cartridge being within operating levels. I’m not sure why I need a full cyan cartridge to print a black and white page but the R200 insists on it.

And so, I decided a laser printer would be the answer to our problems. Several internet searches later, I settled on the Brother HL-2270DW laser printer. It’s wireless, can print duplex, and isn’t a huge beast which met every requirement I had. Sure, I wish it could AirPrint but I’ve found Google Cloud Print to be sufficient when I need it. The starter toner will last roughly 700 pages which in my house should equal at least 3 years of printing which makes it a bargain. Even if you print a lot, the cost of toner doesn’t compare with the cost of an Inkjet.

Long story short, this printer has served my household very well and I highly recommend it.