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Dark grey and black in colour it is 356mm wide x 283mm deep even though a reasonable amount of clearance is needed to right hand side so as not to block the hot air from the cooling fan. It is 183mm high but because of the design with the paper output lying flat on top of the machine it does not need much in the way of clear headroom except when one needs to view the single line LCD display. Therefore, overall, it will not take up much space in the home or office.

The A4 paper tray, which has a 250 sheet capacity, fits neatly inside the machine and there is also a pull-down flap at the front of the machine to access the single sheet feeder. Both the tray and the single sheet feeder have adjustable paper guides. The specification states that paper of up to 160gsm can be used in the tray and up to 230gsm via the single sheet feeder which is also used for envelopes.

When inserting paper or envelopes into the single sheet feeder care must be taken to ensure that they go in “square”. With a larger flap lowered at the rear of the machine opened there is a straight through paper path which minimises paper curl.

See also: Laser printers

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Following the instructions on the single A3 instruction leaflet, the Installation of the toner cartridge and setting up the machine is straightforward. The supplied CD gives one a choice of connectivity: USB, WiFi or Ethernet. The mains cable was the only one provided. It appears that the assumption being that as WiFi is increasingly the connection means there is no real need to provide a USB or network cable.

In fact, although setting up a WiFi connection was straightforward inputting the wireless password is a somewhat laborious process as it is carried out via the single line LCD status display in conjunction with the Up/Down, Back and OK buttons. When connected via WiFi,  the display can also indicate signal strength. If I needed to re-install the machine, I think that I would take the easy way out and use Ethernet despite the fact that WiFi is more convenient if one wants to move the printer around the office or from room to room.

Although the printer will generally be used for documents where the majority of the content is text and so either 300 or 600 dpi is satisfactory 1200 dpi is also an option when required for graphic applications.

Even though Brother claims speeds of up to 34 pages per minute, in a real-life test I found that a 20-page document took roughly 50 seconds to print one sided and 80 seconds when double sided. This equates to 24 and 15 ppm respectively. The reason for the speed difference is that, for duplex, each page has to be “re-loaded” before the second side can be printed. This, by the way, is appreciably faster than duplex printing with an inkjet where there has to be an additional delay to allow the ink to dry before each page is pulled back into the printer. Hence there is a major speed benefit from using the HL-L2375DW instead of an inkjet when carrying duplex printing.

For those who want to make hard copies of images on their mobile phones the HL-L2375DW is compatible with Google Cloud Print, Apple’s AirPrint and the Mopria Print Service for Android. They do, however, require downloading and installation of the appropriate app.

There are both standard (TN-2410) and high capacity (TN-2420) toner cartridges available for this machine with the latter offering better value for money. This is because the claimed page capacity of higher capacity cartridge is 3,000 pages vs. 1,200 for the other and yet it only costs about double.

With a list price of £166.80 Inc. VAT, but available on Amazon for £99.07 the HL-L2375DW is a reasonably priced versatile printer for the smaller office. It is quick and easy to set up and is simple to use so enabling users to concentrate on what is important to them. However, in view of the fact that laser printers tend to be used by those who need to print a larger number of pages, I was slightly disappointed to find that it was only supplied with a 700 page “starter” toner cartridge. This really means that to be on the safer side it would be sensible to purchase a spare cartridge at the same time as buying the printer.