The Brother HL-2700CN is a colour laser printer that is aimed at the office, rather than personal use. You can tell that from the ports on the back, as it has everything that you could wish for, with both parallel and USB 2.0 as well as 10/100TX networking. Although the list price is £629 inc. VAT you can find the HL-2700CN on sale with a discount of the best part of £200.

The specification is suited to office duties, with a mono speed of 31ppm and a colour speed of 8ppm, no doubt thanks to the 300MHz processor and 64MB of RAM. And if that's not enough you can add up to 512MB more RAM to give a total of 576MB.

The 250-page input tray and 250-page output tray are also large enough for office use, and provided you print on A4 paper you'll be fine. But if you need to use legal paper then you have to pay just over £100 for another input tray. On the subject of accessories, there is a duplex unit for the HL-2700CN which costs £269.

As for running costs, the Brother is supplied with starter toner cartridges that have a life of 5,000 pages for the black and 3,000 pages for the three colours. Replacement cartridges will cost you around the £100 mark each, with the black lasting for 10,000 pages while the colour cartridges last for 6,600 pages. This gives you a combined cost per page of less than 6p.

When you're calculating the Total Cost of Ownership you also need to consider the service parts that you'll require as your printer ages. At 60,000 pages it requires a fusing unit at £275 and also a belt unit at £293, which together is more than the original cost of the printer. If you should make it to 120,000 pages then you'll need a 120K kit which contains a transfer belt, transfer belt cleaner, paper pick-up roller and separator pad, costing £675. You can do the maths on that one for yourself.

Print speed is good but print quality is a mixed bag. For one thing the pages are curled at the edges when we'd much rather that they were flat, and for another thing the quality of colour printing was unimpressive as the colours lacked brightness and strength. We engaged the highest quality CAPT (Colour Advanced Photoscale Technology) setting to see if it would help matters but it made no visible difference to our eyes, although it slowed print times by a factor of three.

Verdict
Although we were happy with the speed and quality of text output from the Brother HL-2700CN we feel that it is let down by its colour printing abilities. Added to that, you need to print plenty of pages with the Brother to get the most from its relatively low consumables costs but you will want to avoid hitting 60,000 pages, when you'd have to rebuild the thing at considerable expense.

Company: Brother

Contact: 0845 544 3032

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