Brother HL-L9200CDWT colour laser printer review

While there are plenty of options on the market when buying colour laser printers for the home office or small business, a larger and more demanding office needs a machine that can take a serious pounding and still produce consistent quality at rapid speed. It’s for just these circumstances that Brother has released the HL-L9200CDWT. (See also: Best printers of 2014.)

You know when a printer is sturdily built when it takes two of you to manoeuvre it into position comfortably. The HL-L9200CDWT weighs a hefty 28.3 kg and measures 410 x 495 x 445 mm out of the box. Part of that weight is due to the extra 500-sheet paper tray which is boxed separately and slides comfortably and easily under the base unit.

A 250-sheet paper tray already comes fully attached and the drop-down panel at the front reveals a further 50-sheet multi-purpose tray that can be used for feeding thicker paper and envelopes. To make this transition even easier, a back panel can be lowered to enable the paper to glide smoothly out without having to bend.

The HL-L9200CDWT is all about smoothness and economy of space. For example, there’s a tilting 4.5 cm colour touchscreen on the top surface that is discreetly placed on the far left and folds down to lie level with the output area.

Likewise, the front cover release button fits seamlessly into the front edge and the USB port for flash drives is tucked neatly and discreetly into the top left of the front panel, directly in line with the control panel.

Output volume is a key factor here, with a 800-sheet total capacity; but connectivity is equally prominent. Ethernet and USB 2.0 connectors provide links to single or multiple PCs and wireless networking is quick and easy to establish. Printing via mobiles and tablets is of course available too, making use of Brother apps, AirPrint and Google cloud.

Brother claims speeds of up to 30 ppm for both mono and colour single-page documents and we found this to be pretty accurate overall, with duplex documents (which is on by default) on average appearing in 12 ppm.

Colour contrast and authenticity in mixed text and graphics documents and PDFs is very impressive and photo reproduction on plain paper showed plenty of detail.

The HL-L9200CDWT comes with 128 MB memory and this can be expanded to 384 MB for more efficient operation with larger print queues.

As you’d expect, you can buy high-yield ink cartridges for black, cyan, magenta and yellow which are specified to produce 6000 pages each, for 0.96p per page for black and 5.94p per page for the three colours [www.cartridgesave.co.uk 2014-07-24] which is great value for money. (See also: best colour laser printers.)