Brother HL-L6300DWT review - a mono laser printer built for text

If you just want to print lots of plain black text, nothing beats a mono laser. Brother's HL-L6300DWT is built to chuck out a lot of text: it comes with 8,000 pages' worth of toner, has three paper inputs totalling 1,090 sheets, and can spew out a claimed 46 pages per minute (ppm). It's clearly overkill for a typical home office, but it could be perfect for a small company or workgroup.

The boxy, grey HL-L6300DWT comprises the main HL-L6300DW printer with its 520-sheet paper cassette and 50-page multipurpose feed, and a second 520-sheet cassette onto which you simply drop the printer. On top there's a 250-page output bin, and a fold-down tray at the rear that can hold up to 10 sheets exiting the straight paper path.

Brother's got connectivity covered on the HL-L6300DWT. The printer has wired USB and Gigabit Ethernet connections and supports Wi-Fi with NFC pairing. Unfortunately there's no USB host port for walk up printing, despite the presence of a small but useful colour touchscreen. The print driver does support password-protected secure printing, however, addressing one reason why people might want a direct print option.

Fast laser printers are never quiet, but the HL-L6300DWT isn't bad at all. It's also incredibly quick, as it took just 41 seconds to print 25 copies of our mono letter test, including the 10-second delay between me sending the job and the first page dropping into the output tray. That's an impressive rate of 36.6ppm. Tested again over 100 pages, the HL-L6300DWT reached 44.1ppm - again, including the spooling time - suggesting that Brother's 46ppm speed claim is accurate.

As with many fast printers, the HL-L6300DWT hesitated before some of the more taxing pages in our mixed graphics test, but it still delivered the 24-page job at an impressive 29.4ppm. Even at the maximum 1,200dpi resolution, it spat out our two-page 10x8" photo test in 11 seconds, and needed only 14 seconds for our three-page 6x4" photo test. Duplex (double-sided) printing was also fast. I printed 10 sides of mono graphics onto five sheets in just 35 seconds.

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We expect impeccable text quality from laser printers, and the HL-L6300DWT delivered: characters were black and crisp. In some ways, graphical prints were impressive too. In most cases, shade progressions were smooth with no obvious half-toning patterns, and some of our lighter test photos had impressive levels of detail.

Darker graphics printed with a degree of horizontal banding, however, and our darkest presentation slide appeared to have lost its gradated background altogether. Graphics are rarely a mono laser printer's forte, however, and overall the HL-L6300DWT was more than adequate.

This printer uses a separate 50,000-page drum, with toner available in a 12,000-page package. Calculated for both, running costs are just over 1.1p per A4 page, which is competitive if not the lowest you'll find. If you need a good general-purpose business printer I'd still recommend an inkjet multifunction peripheral, specifically HP's PageWide Pro 477dw, but if you just need to print lots of text, Brother's HL-L93000DWT will do just fine.

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