Brother HL-3070CW

Small offices and workgroups are the focus of Brother's HL-3070CW LED-based colour printer.

As small offices and workgroups will likely be run out of homes or - obviously - small office spaces, Brother designed the HL-3070CW so it won't occupy too much space. Measuring just 408 x 465 x 249mm (WxDxH) this colour laser printer is one of the smallest we've tested.

The HL-3070CW is fully loaded with Brother claiming monochrome and colour print speeds of 17ppm each. The printer features a 300MHz CPU and 64MB of buffer memory as standard but the latter can be upgraded to 512MB. This is useful if your organisation's print needs grow over time. The Brother is also flexible on the connectivity front, it packs USB, WiFi and Ethernet support and if you want to print photos and images directly from a digital camera, there's a PictBridge port too.

When we put the printer to the test it performed very well; it spat out our 20-page monochrome and colour print test documents in normal quality at speeds of 14.6ppm and 14.2ppm respectively. These are very respectable figures that aren't too far off Brother's claimed figures. Moving to our more complex monochrome and colour text and image PDF documents, the HL-3070CW impressed us again with its speed of 13.3ppm and 12ppm. The first page appeared in the output tray in 10-seconds flat. A swift printer.