Brother HL-L8260CDW Colour Laser Printer | Wireless, PC Connected & Network | Print & 2 Sided Printing | A4

Started a PGCE so lots of prep for classes needed and having this has been a game changer. It connects to WiFi wirelessly which means I can print from both my phone and laptop without a cable, I just downloaded the brother printer app on my phone. I’ve been using it for 4 months and I haven’t had to replace the cartridges yet. The print quality is excellent and it love that it lets me print on both sides without having to reload. It prints quietly and has a deep tray for paper which means that you don’t have to keep adding paper. I had researched a lot of printers before purchasing and I’m delighted to say that I haven’t had any issues, it’s very easy to use.

This is a large printer, so it is probably best to double check that it will fit in the space available. This is NOT one of the small desktop laser printers. Out of the box, you remove some plastic clips and some tape with excellent instructions and then you can turn it on. Now the fun begins. The instruction for setting up WiFi in no way relate to the process. I was able to find a YouTube video, and then setup was a breeze. Why these steps were not in the instruction only the Head of Customer Confusion at Brother would know. Once set up on your WiFi network away you go. The print quality is exceptional, with strong, solid colours, and a very fast print speed. Would I buy it again? Yes, without hesitation. For the quality of print, and speed of print the price is exceptional value. This review is based on the single function (print) version of the HL-L8260CDW. Talking of which, why do printer manufacturers give their printers such stupidly long code names. But that is another rant, for another time. Hope this was helpful.

My first double sided colour laser was a Samsung (think it had tie in with Kyrocera?). It was big. It was fien for text but less good with photos. I used to print a third to a half of documents which were hard copies of PowerPoint workshop presentation for classroom candidates. It accepted non-Samsung toners but photos were even worse; the gradations were blotchy. Nevermind, got a Canon A3 photoprinter to print the certificates for candidates so as to avoid them feeling cheated of their course fees. Years later moved onto an all-in-one printer scanner by Canon. The photos and certificates output were fine especially once laminated but of course nowhere near the A3 photo printer quality. after 12 years the Canon won't print more than one sheet at a time. It served longer than its useful life and was not worth a service & repair cost. This was 2021 / 2022 and I was going to buy a HP colour laser as replacement, not cecessarily all-in-one. Had in mind a HP because of all the 40 or so my work assignments sent me to during the previous decades, one by one, brands stopped producing PC's etc. One by one, Sony VAIO, Toshiba, they disappeared. However HP brand remains the consistent brand one could find in countries few have heard of. But then in computer magazines I came across articles reporting HP (among others) have started putting recognition micro-chip onto inkjet cartridges. So a year later upon reading reviews by others here they kindly reminded me situation is same on laser toners. Thus no rush, spent a few months on and off reading as many reviews as possible to select replacement. It was thanks to other reviews that I chose this Brother for I would not have given Brother another thought. All I knew before this printer was Brother made sewinng machines, well in Asia where Singer didn't have as big a presence. Some good points of this Brother HL-L8260CDW. Partly due to it being just a printer rather than all-in-one, I could manually handle it to the first floor office by myself. However, the footprint size is still the same. It is also fortunate that the ventilation slots is on the right hand side because its placement is right angles on top of a filing cabinet (but unfortunately the button are therefore on the inside (butt against a wall)). No worries - saved by the fact that the machine sleeps and wakes very quickly. The Canon multifunction printer used to take couple minutes to wake up, warm up before able to print. This Brother can do it is about 15 seconds, not sure, but certainly far faster than booting up the laptop. So switch it on at the start of day and forget and it won't use much energy. The best aspect of this printer ? Yes indeed, it can use non-Brother toners. Amazon cookies popped Cool Toner. It even tempted me to buy it at a discount price of about £60 for a set of 4 colours. When setting up the printer, took out (almost tempted to bin the original Brother toners but didn't because that would not be responsible); anyway put the 3rd party toner cartridges instead. No complaints. Works fine but of course can't tell you now how good compared to original Brother toner. This was going too good to be true.Always wanted to get rid of the cable and cable protector around the office. So let's try wireless connection for printing. Not being a computer geek, here was the first hurdle. Owing tom company security policies and therefore the privacy settings used with FireFox browser, most things are disabled so as to prevent data leak of clients' data. Thus could not get onto the website support page indicated by the Brother documention which came with the printer. Nevermind. With different search engines and different browsers eventually found U-Tube tutorials. However, not quite enough tuturials to lead me by the hand to set it up. What is SSID and what is router? Is it any different with was supplied by the ISP? No mention. So using logic and thought it backwards, the laptops, all out laptops, could only connect wirelssly to one connection at a time. So deduced the wirelss printing facility must use this same "circuit". Thus what the tutorials referred to were what the ISP supplied (as I had not changed them). Hurray it worked. One after another got each laptop connected. They were Win7-64 Home, Win7-64 Pro, Win8.1, Win10, and Win11 operating systems. All connected 5 hours after unpacking the Brother printer. Would I recommend it ? Yes with one reservation. When taking old Canon to local municipal tip for disposal, they would not accept it - told me to take it to a waste business machine disposal company. But the local tip would have taken a smaller inkjet printer for disposal. This Brother would be the same but nevermind, the £ saved on ink by using laser toner would go towards proper disposal come ??? 10+ years time.

My old Epson stopped working with a weird internal error message that I couldn't fix. That put me off Epson so I went for this boy. Print quality is far better than my old printer in that the colours are much more vivid and true. Loved the duplex facility too (save a tree !) which was easy to set up. I haven't had to change toners yet so don't know how fiddly that is. One small gripe is that it seemed to have stopped working until I found a tiny piece of plastic had fallen into the edge of the paper tray and it would not close flush (you couldn't see this with the naked eye). Also; when the printer goes into standby mode it will NOT power up when you send something to it, I have to get up walk over and press the power button to start printing. However; my big gripe is when you want to use A5 paper or envelopes. It is ridiculously fiddly involving front and rear panels to be opened. I gave up and use my inkjet when I need to print this stuff, hence minus one star.

Good printer and works well

I've had this for a couple of weeks now and it's working just as expected. OK, so i'm not a heavy print user and have done some basic testing and printed some of my regular documents all without issue. I have setup Google Cloud print and can now print from my Android phone almost anywhere - especially useful for printing tickets etc without having to use the computer connected to the printer. It is quite a big unit in terms of height (i think to accommodate the colour toner cartridges) and a slightly larger footprint compared to the B&W laser printer it has replaced. Speed of printing is good and not too noisy either. Print quality is good and the colours are also good. I'm not expecting to print photos, just documents and flyers etc with a bit of colour. The printer setup was surprisingly easy - connected to PC with USB cable then ran the supplied CD to install drivers and configure with my home wifi. I was expecting to have to search and enter an IP address but none of that. A big bonus was the Brother promotion where I received £50 cashback and a free label printer.