The Brother HL-2700CN is an attractive, compact color laser printer, with a reasonable base price. Upgrades are costly, however, and the unit could be expensive to run.
The HL-2700CN has only a single paper drawer, holding a modest 250 sheets, and no auxiliary bypass tray. You can feed nonstandard paper sizes from the main drawer using a special manual mode, which you select from the control panel or in the software driver. To print on legal-size paper, you'll need to buy a $150 replacement tray for the main drawer. Even with this alternative drawer, we can't recommend this printer for environments that use a lot of paper: You can tack on one additional drawer holding 530 sheets, but it will set you back a whopping $549--and it doesn't accept legal-size paper. The output bin on top of the printer holds up to 250 sheets. For double-sided output you can add a duplexer, but its $1000 price tag is outrageous.
The HL-2700CN looks almost identical to the Lexmark C510n, which we also tested for the February 2005 issue. They share the same features and shortcomings, but the Brother is $300 cheaper. However, Lexmark offers similar upgrade options, including a 530-sheet paper drawer and a duplexer, at more reasonable prices.
Brother's consumables are also pricier than comparable items for the Lexmark. A black toner cartridge rated for 10,000 pages costs $170, and the color toner cartridge, rated for 6600 pages, costs $165. Brother says its printer drum needs replacing after 60,000 pages, an added $480 cost, higher than that of most drums we've seen.
The HL-2700CN's text printing speed was remarkably good. We clocked it at 18.7 pages per minute, which placed it fourth-fastest among our current crop of color lasers, which averaged 13.5 ppm in our tests. Most surprisingly, it's nearly one-third quicker at text than the Lexmark C510n, which has a faster processor. Its color print speed (3.1 ppm) was close to the 3.3-ppm average.
In our print-quality tests, text appeared fuzzy with lots of jagged edges, and the smallest fonts came out blotchy. Line art looked better, with only slight banding, although closely spaced parallel lines almost merged. Our grayscale image seemed fuzzy and too dark, obscuring detail in the densest areas; it also showed a greenish cast. Color printing appeared too dark and oversaturated, and exhibited marked dithering.
The printed quick-setup guide isn't very colorful, but an easy-to-read chart on the front leads you through the various installation options, referring you to pages within for the details. A thorough user guide is included on the software CD-ROM in a PDF file. Screen shots of the driver software and two color line drawings illustrate all the features.
We easily hooked up the printer to our network at the PC World Test Center, using its built-in ethernet port. The control panel's menu system let us enter an IP address quickly enough, though the two-line LCD lacks backlighting. The built-in Web server is convenient for managing the printer; Brother also includes its own administration software, and IT departments in larger companies can use their existing SNMP applications. You can connect the printer directly to your PC through its parallel or USB 2.0 ports, as well.
The Brother HL-2700N has a neat design and fast text printing, but its mediocre print quality disappoints. Its paper-handling options are unusually expensive, too.
Paul Jasper
