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.

The Brother HL-L3290CDW is my first LED printer. LED printers are basically laser printers where the laser beam has been replaced by an LED array. But they use toner, look like laser printers and behave like laser printers, so you are forgiven if you thought this was a laser printer. I have no complaints about the hardware, other than it's big. My previous printer, a Lexmark that was an actual laser printer was slightly smaller, though both are just as heavy. Setting up this Brother printer was relatively easy. It will connect to 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi only. If you do not want to type your Wi-Fi password by smashing the printer buttons and looking at that tiny screen, you may want to set your home Wi-Fi to broadcast the same SSID for 2.4GHz and for 5GHz, This will make things much easier when using the Brother software on your phone or your computer to set up the printer. Printing speed and quality are really good, as long as you are not expecting this printer to print photos. If you use images to complement a document with text and charts, you will get nice results. But if the photo is the focus of the attention, you are not going to be satisfied, and should look into an ink tank or inkjet printer instead. My only real gripe is with Brother's software for PC. Too much bloatware! The printer itself is heavy. I don't need to feel the weight on my computer too. To make matters worse, Brother does not make it easy to completely uninstall its software once you have set up the printer, if you'd rather use the Windows plug and play driver. Brother has an uninstaller on its website but it does the opposite - it removes the Windows plug and play driver so you can use the bloated one from Brother. Anyway, you can't use Apps and Features to uninstall most of the Brother software. You need to launch Brother Utilities, press the Tools button, and then you will find an Uninstall option.

I have been an HP fanatic for thirty years. I have loved and used their products through several generations. I picked up an old brother black and white laser a few years ago though, and learned to like it for what it was. A good, cheap, reliable printer. The time came to upgrade my HP inkjet that was feeling its age, and I looked for color lasers. This was the one that best fit my budget, and so I chose to take the leap from HP to Brother. I love it. I am a sporadic printer, so my printers will often spend weeks between print jobs. This Brother spools up in seconds and prints it perfectly. Text. Pictures. Anything I send it with no streaking or anything. The pictures look great, even on standard paper. I love that it does double-sided printing automatically to save paper. I love that it has a good flatbed scanner. Every part of this printer does exactly what I want it to do, and I am completely happy with this purchase. One of my best Christmas Presents. :)

Here is why it gets one star, it is a great printer outside of this one area. Message finally popped up saying black toner is low, replace soon. That's fine I'll get to it. I just submit a print job that is 4 pages and unfortunately, the default setting was to print both sides but they are shipping labels so I can't have that. "ok", I think "I'll just print two more pages with the labels that are on the backside of the page" - WRONG - even though the four page print was crisp, deep, rich black, the device will not allow a single page more to ever be printed until I replace the black toner. The quality of the print I did 5 SECONDS AGO tells me that there is plenty of toner left so I know you are lying to me about a replacement being necessary and are not fully utilizing the toner cartridge. I wish I had found this out earlier so I could return this and get a refund. EDIT TIME: Its even worse than I thought. Not only does the toner lie, it also, like every Brother I've had, will just stop working. The queue won't print and restarting the device does nothing. It will say "Receiving Data" for hours and not print and then when it does, it will print partial pages and then a bunch of blanks and then finally maybe print what you wanted. You will waste 10-15 pages for a 1 page print. I am looking for a different printer and will NEVER buy another Brother. This company is a complete and utter scam Update: trash brand. Just prints whatever it thinks is best. Wasted roughly 50 sheets of paper today for a 3 page print because it took it upon itself to start over several times

This was purchased to replace an Oki C5500n color laser printer that had been a serious and reliable workhorse. Setup was somewhat painless. Once it was discovered on the network, things went well. It has good print quality and the color palette was reasonable. We hope this will be as solid as our Oki. Time will tell - so far - so good Edit January 23: I can, for the first time, print from mobile devices. Duplex printing is easy and consistent. Document print quality is very good as is color images. I have no complaints to date. It is well worth the price. The only function not tried is scanning. Brother includes scanning software that I'm certain will produce excellent results. Hamrick also will scan with this printer. I started utilizing Hamrick with an Epson scanner. The change from Win 95 forced the purchase of Hamrick software. It has been a solid workhorse. Stand by for future updates.

I had been using Ink printers for many years. Price and quality are good in general but the ink is always a pain to me. If I don't use it for few weeks or months, it's very easy to dry out. Also the ink is so pricy which leads me to think that's the reason why they can sell the printer in such cheap price. So, this time I decided to try laser printer to get rid of the headache about the ink issue. Also the Brother laser printer is cheap comparing to other expensive brands like HP, Epson. I was trying to just give a try but it turns out the performance is way better than I imagined before purchasing- 1. Printing speed is very quick! of course it's because of this laser type. 2. Printing sound is so low - finally i don't need to hear those crazy noise from ink printer! 3. App is fairly good. Not too fancy but it can get everything you need! Scan/Print/Check status. 4. Size wise is a little big but still acceptable. 5. Quality is very good. Both color and black-white prints are in a good quality The only downside is the firmware upgrade feature, it's not that straightforward to log on to their GUI for this upgrade. Using app still leads you to the page can couldn't help you on the FW upgrade. Hope Brother can improve their app design in the future. Overall it's definitely a 5 star product! Thanks!

I have had this printer for 4 years. I am very pleased with it. For me setup was very easy and straight forward. I use the machine for work and personal but do not print high volume. As a result the toner has lasted a long time. I have swapped out the Black toner twice and color once in four years. Moving to a laser printer has been wonderful. Ink Jet's do a nice job but they dry up and run out far too often. As noted it is rather bulky and heavy but I knew that going into the purchase. The print quality is great and I look forward to many more years of use. No regrets!

Shipping came in 1 day before the expected date for delivery interval. Great. Printing quality is awesome. When in sleeping mode I do not need to manually switch it on in order to start printing my job... It's always on stand by. That's exactly what I expect. Even though it's on a pricier side in my opinion it's totally worth it. Did my due diligence and for several weeks I searched for the best all in one colour printer that has Automatic Sheet Feeder, Ethernet option (not just Wi-fi), NFC (you can print straight from your phone without connecting to the Wi-fi network) and overall customer reviews. This printer beats all the competitors. On top of it it's cartridges are not that expensive compared to other brands. I use it for my small home office and my kids online homework assignments (tired of drawing them picuters daily). Definitely recommend this printer.

Bought this Brother Printer to replace an old Brother printer I had for over 12 years. This was so easy to setup. I now have all my devices including iPhones and our iPads connected and it was a breeze! You can never go wrong with Brother Printer. Highly recommend.

I had a few issues with this laser printer - more specifically the setup 1) With most new laptops we do not have a dvd/cd port and what does Brother ship for setup? a dvd. In 2023 you would think companies would know this and ship a USB card instead. 2) Since I could not use the DVD for setup had to go through internet. Printer would not recognize WIFI 3) Since printer would not connect thru WIFI I needed to use USB cable - WHICH DID NOT come with printer - good thing I had a cable from old printer 4) When installing from internet, the installation stalled at 90% - reboot and restart 5) After 3 hours of playing with printer, it suddenly connected to WIFI If I did not have a bit of computer know-how, this would have been a huge headache for my wife to setup. However, once printer was setup we tested printing from laptop, android 7 pro, and apple cell phones with great success. If it once for tough installation I would have given 5 stars.

Heavy but it works well. Takes a load of paper and does auto-duplex in quantities. Quiet

the brother HLL3290CDW worked flawlessly out of the box. easy to set up and print quality is excellent.