Brother HLL2305W Compact Mono Laser Single Function Printer with Wireless and Mobile Device Printing, White

I've had my share of frustrations with other printer brands, and this Brother HLL2305W has been a breath of fresh air. As far as I'm concerned, laser printers are the only way to go, and this one proves it. The setup was incredibly easy, and the wireless and mobile printing features work flawlessly. It's so convenient to print from my phone or laptop without any hassle.What I love most is the crisp, clean text it produces and the sheer speed of printing. I no longer have to worry about expensive ink cartridges drying out or poor print quality. This printer is a workhorse, and the toner lasts for ages, making it incredibly cost-effective. The compact size is perfect for my small office space. If you're tired of the frustrations of other printers—especially those from brands like HP—this Brother laser printer is a fantastic choice and a true "bang for your buck." It's reliable, fast, and gives me perfect prints every time.

I made the leap from inkjet to laser with this purchase. This is my first laser printer and I can't for the life of me figure out why I didn't switch sooner. I asked my friends on social media what a good inexpensive printer would be for someone like me who doesn't print much. That's when a friend said if I don't print much I should get a laser printer instead because it's powder instead of liquid ink. I somehow made it halfway through life without ever knowing that! Then I read about how much longer the ink lasts vs inkjet cartridges AND how much more environmentally friendly they are, and I was sold.I was happy to find this Brother for a very reasonable price. My last two printers were Brother and I was always very happy with them, so I was partial to this brand already. I decided to save some much-needed cash and get this monochrome model because I realized that 98% of what I print is black & white text documents anyway. And it's that much less to buy for refills.It's actually a pretty small size for a laser printer compared to some models. The footprint is actually slightly smaller than my inkjet printer and only slightly taller. I like the clean, square shape. The unboxing and physical setup went very smoothly, just pop in the included starter ink and it's ready to go. BUT, I did run into trouble with the wifi setup: It wouldn't detect/connect to my wifi no matter what I tried. I tried several things and was just getting frustrated when I remembered seeing that someone posted their own instructions in a review that I read. So I went back and found the review and Voila! It was connected and ready in 5 minutes. So I STRONGLY recommend ignoring the installation instructions and ignoring the CD and look for a review here by "Jennifer" who posted a photo of typed step-by-step instructions that pull up the menu and let you prompt the unit to scan for your wifi router, then enter your password and boom: done. I did see one reviewer complain that they had to enter their password the old-school way by cycling through the letters of the alphabet. That is true, but who cares? Not me! Not for this price. Sure, you can get a better menu with more buttons if you spend more, but I am more than happy with this simple model.The print quality is excellent! SO much better than inkjet, I had no idea what I was missing. It just zips out a printout in like one second, it's amazing. No loud racket of it printing, it's nice and quiet, the thing is a dream by my standards at least. I will say it's a little slower to RECEIVE the printing command (from my PC to the point to when it lights up to print) but to be honest, I think that's my wifi and the position of the printer. My old printer was connected to my PC by a cable, and this new one is wireless and I also have it in a different room from the wifi router unlike the old printer, so I don't even think it's an issue with this model, just the result of it being wireless and in a different room from the router.I'm so happy with this printer, especially at this price point. I don't miss color at all. It's so quiet and prints such nice fine lines. I wish I realized the difference between inkjet and laser sooner because I should have done this long ago.

The print quality is fine when you actually get it to print.The controls are about 40 years outdated. You have a tiny little digital slit that you have to use to configure the wifi, which takes about 10 minutes longer than it should because you have to use up and down errors to scroll through all the possible characters and enter them one by one. It's awful.There's a apparently a "deep sleep" mode, that basically just disables your printer for some reason. You can't switch it out of this mode, the only thing you can do is turn the printer off and on again. I have no idea what the point of "deep sleep" mode is. It would be better if they just automatically shut the printer off, just so that you know, when you look at the printer, you know to turn the thing on before you print, instead of trying to print a few times.Once you look up a youtube video to learn how to turn off "deep sleep" mode, and scroll through every menu item with the awful controls, there is still a "sleep" mode. Which the printer will sometimes wake itself, other times it wont, and you will have to turn the printer off and on again. But even then, sometimes the printer wont respond to the power button, so you will have to unplug the printer.Once you finally persuade the printer to do its job, it's incredibly slow transferring data over wifi to print. I have my printer about 3 feet away from my wifi router, so this isn't a bad visibility issue. This printer does not work well with iphones at all, you should probably always print from a desktop/laptop.It feels as if this printer was designed to delibrately frustrate customers, as if Brother has a vendetta against us. Very bizarre.

The Brother HL-L2305W Laser printer works well, has good print quality, etc. Where it falls down is it only connects to a slow 2.4Ghz network and will not connect to a faster 5GHz network. This means network printing is slow. It also prints single sided. Both problems can be corrected with more money.For the price it is a good value (IMHO.)A way to work around the slow network problem is to use a print server as well as a network printer. The print server is a PC connected to the HL-L2305W via a USB cable. This is a high speed connection. Then declare the printer as shared. On other PC's connect using both the Wireless connection and the shared printer on the server. Physically this is the same printer, but the shared printer uses a peer to peer network connection (usually high speed) and the wireless is the 2.4 GHz connection (slow.)When the server is on, use the high speed network connection, when it is off, use the 2.4 GHz connection. Now you have the best of both worlds.

It's lasted a year with infrequent printing and no issues so no complaints so far. Setting up is kind of a pain because of how you have to enter the password key by key running through the entire alphabet