I focus on printer and scanner technology and reviews. I have been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. I have authored or co-authored 20 books—including titles in the popular Bible, Secrets, and For Dummies series—on digital design and desktop publishing software applications. My published expertise in those areas includes Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, as well as prepress imaging technology. (Over my long career, though, I have covered many aspects of IT.)
The Brother HL-L3290CDW is a fast color LED printer that produces excellent output for low-volume small offices.
The Brother HL-L3290CDW ($299.99) is a color laser-class multifunction printer designed for light-duty use in small and home-based offices and work groups. It's very similar to its sibling, the MFC-L3770CDW, in that it's fast and produces quality output. But unlike that Editors' Choice model, it lacks an automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning multipage documents. If you're only copying or scanning a couple pages at a time, though, you could save $100 by choosing the HL-L3290CDW over its higher-priced stablemate.
Like the MFC-L3770CDW , the HL-L3290CDW is not a true laser printer. Instead of deploying a traditional laser apparatus to tell the printer where to fuse toner to the paper, the HL-L3290CDW and its ilk use LED arrays, which are traditionally smaller and less costly than their laser counterparts, allowing for smaller, lighter, and less-expensive-to-manufacture machines.
Lately, though, that hasn't been the case. Not only do LED-based printers, at least from a user-perspective, behave like laser-based machines, but recent models tend to run about the same size and price as their laser counterparts. At 14.5 by 16.1 by 18.7 inches (HWD) and 47.8 pounds, the HL-L3290CDW isn't exactly petite. It's significantly larger and heavier than HP's Color LaserJet Pro MFP M180nw, but about the same size and weight as the Canon Color imageClass MF634Cdw ($574.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) , an Editors' Choice entry-level color laser AIO that has an ADF.
The HL-L3290CDW's control panel, shown in the image below, is somewhat bare-bones. It consists of just a handful of buttons for making copies and navigating the drill-down style menus and a small two-line monochrome display. You can also configure and monitor the printer, as well as set up users and security features, from the HL-L3290CDW's built-in web site.
Paper handling consists of a 250-sheet main drawer, shown below.
And, as shown in the image below, there's a one-sheet override tray just above the main drawer.
The MFC-L3770CDW comes with a 250-sheet main drawer and a 30-sheet multipurpose tray. The Canon MF424dw ($809.30 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) , on the other hand, holds up to 300 sheets and is expandable to 900 sheets, while HP's M180nw holds only 150 sheets.
The maximum monthly duty cycle for the HL-L3290CDW is 30,000 pages, with a recommended monthly print volume of 1,500. That's the same duty cycle as its competition mentioned here.
Connectivity on the HL-L3290CDW consists of Wi-Fi, connecting to a single PC via USB 2.0, and Wi-Fi Direct. That last one allows the printer to connect to mobile devices without either it or them being connected to a network or router. Unlike its MFC-L3770CDW sibling, though, it does not support Ethernet (which is somewhat odd for a laser-class machine) and near-field communication (NFC) for touch-to-print functionality.
Aside from Wi-Fi Direct, other mobile connectivity consists of Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Mopria, and Brother's own iPrint&Scan for both Android and iOS devices. iPrint&Scan, among other things, allows you to scan to email, image, OCR (for converting scanned text to editable text), file, and FTP.
The HL-L3290CDW's security features are basic. You get the ability to secure documents with personal identification numbers, but Brother takes this feature a bit further by allowing you to assign PINs to the scanner as well. You can restrict or deny use based on username, groups, or IP addresses, and, of course, you get the standard SNMP and other network security protocols.
Brother rates the HL-L3290CDW at 25 pages per minute (ppm) for both black and color pages. I tested it over USB from PC Labs' standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional. It printed our standard 12-page Microsoft Word text test document at 23.6ppm, which is ever-so-slightly slower than its sibling and about 8ppm faster than the HP M180nw, and about 4.3ppm ahead of the Canon MF634Cdw.
See How We Test Printers
Next, I printed our suite of complex color Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing charts, graphs, and other business graphics, as well as photos. Then, I combined these results with those from printing the 12-page text document in the previous test, to come up with a final score of 10.3ppm for printing our entire suite of business documents. This score tied with the MFC-L3770CDW and beat both the M180nw and the MF634Cdw.
The constant among Brother's group of LED-array printers is that they consistently churn out good-looking documents. As with the MFC-L3770CDW, the HL-L3290CDW's text is well-shaped and highly legible down to about 6 points, which is more than adequate for most business documents.
The charts, graphs, and other business graphics I printed contained solid fills and evenly flowing gradients with only barely perceptible flaws. Hairlines and other rules were well-delineated, and embedded photos were accurately colored and well detailed.
At 2.6 cents for black pages and 15.5 cents for color, the HL-L3290CDW is relatively inexpensive to use compared with similar laser-class printers. The HP M180nw's running costs are, for example, 4.6 cents for monochrome pages and 23.5 cents for color pages, and the Canon MF634Cdn runs at 3.2 cents black and 16.4 cents color.
If you're printing and copying 100 or 200 pages each month, these costs aren't that bad, but if indeed you push the HL-L3290CDW, its siblings, or its competitors to its recommended print volume of 1,500 pages each month, using any of these color lasers becomes an expensive proposition over time. If you're priting hundreds of pages per month, it's worth looking into an inkjet model with a bulk-ink system like the Editors' Choice Epson WF-C5790. When using that printer's highest-yield ink bags, the black per-page cost is 1.7 cents, and each color page costs 7.7 cents.
The HL-L3290CDW is a fine printer, though the lack of an ADF and Ethernet make it a bit of an odd duck among color laser machines. It's certainly fast enough and prints well, but if you need to scan or copy multipage documents or require robust connectivity, the Editors' Choice MFC-L3770CDW provides greater versatility in those areas. Just keep in mind those perks are going to cost you $100 more. Otherwise, the HL-L3290CDW is a perfectly respectable alternative.
The Brother HL-L3290CDW is a fast color LED printer that produces excellent output for low-volume small offices.
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I focus on printer and scanner technology and reviews. I have been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. I have authored or co-authored 20 books—including titles in the popular Bible, Secrets, and For Dummies series—on digital design and desktop publishing software applications. My published expertise in those areas includes Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, as well as prepress imaging technology. (Over my long career, though, I have covered many aspects of IT.)
In addition to writing hundreds of articles for PCMag, over the years I have also written for many other computer and business publications, among them Computer Shopper, Digital Trends, MacUser, PC World, The Wirecutter, and Windows Magazine. I also served as the Printers and Scanners Expert at About.com (now Lifewire).
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