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.

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

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.

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.

Brand new printer prints a base yellow tint on black and white pages, and strong yellow, cyan and magenta streaks. Brother support was long winded and frustrating, but after an hour of online help chat and following numerous cleaning and reset procedures the problem seemed to be solved. But a few days later it has reoccured worse than before. Brother online chat is not working and there is no number to call, or any other way to get support. So far, I have printed less than 100 pages out of this brand new printer, and less than 20 of them have been useable. I have now spent 3 hours trying to get help and fix the issue, and it is still not working. Terrible product, worse customer service. I have resorted to messaging Brother on Facebook to ask for a replacement. No reply. Money down the drain!

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