Brother HL-L2480DW Multifunction Monochrome Laser Printer

I received the Brother HL-L2480DW Monochrome laser printer and was glad because my 8 year old Brother laser printer had started having issues. After unpacking I plugged it in and also set up the phone line for faxes. I have an extra landline I never use so it was perfect for this purpose.

After that I connected to the Brother Mobile Connect, although you can do most everything right from the 2.7″ touchscreen. So no problem if you don’t have a cell phone to use. I like that. They want you to change the default password which is noted on the back of the printer. It’s optional however. Next I set up the wireless which found my router flawlessly and worked well. However for me personally I use a wired printer cable that plus directly into the back of my iMac.

It came with a cartridge of course and that was simple to install. The print looks great right out of the box but you can adjust it lighter or darker according to your personal needs. You can print on both sides of the paper, a feature my old Brother didn’t have and one I really like.

You can Scan, Copy or Fax with this printer. You can also scan an image to your PC. On the touchscreen you’ll have Choices of Service, Tools and Online Functions. The Tools is handy as you have Toner, Tray Setting, Eco Mode, Network, Wifi Direct and All Settings. Also Ethernet Auto. There is a Choices of Service link that includes Google Drive, Dropbox, Sharepoint Online, One Drive, One Note, Box, Evernote, Connect Device To Brother Online and Information. And in the online functions you have Email Print, Easy Scan to Email, Scan to Mobile, Cloud Secure Print, Scan to Searchable PDF, Scan to Word, Scan to Excel, Scan to Powerpoint and Information.

So far this printer has been so easy to use and I’ve had no issues. It’s not a loud printer and fast too. No disappointments whatsoever and I definitely recommend its purchase. Laser printers are always my favorite and this one is no exception. A great value and priced right as well.

***Setup:*** Setting up the Brother HL-L2480DW is easy. Unbox, install the cartridge, connect it, turn it on, and download the app. Wi-Fi connection can be established through the app, and after a quick firmware update, it’s ready to use. You can also use Ethernet and USB-B. The process is quick, taking about 10 minutes from unboxing to printing.

***Build Quality:*** The Brother HL-L2480DW is sturdy and well-built, fitting well into home or small office environments and only taking up a moderate amount of space. You will need some room on each side to access the different panels, paper tray and scanner lid. Its sturdy and lets you know, coming in at over 22 lbs.

***Ease of Use:*** The Brother is actually pretty intuitive. Navigation is simple enough, thanks to its color touchscreen and reasonable menu layout. The onscreen keyboard is a bit frustrating if you have a more complicated WiFi password, though.

***Mobile Compatibility:*** The Brother integrates with various devices through Wi-Fi direct, Google Print, and AirPrint. Printing can be achieved from either PCs or mobile devices (phones, tablets) with very little delay. Mobile printing and scanning are supported through the Brother Mobile Connect smartphone app. The printer can also link to cloud storage services and offers secure print job capability.

***Print Quality and Speed:*** With over 30 page per minute printing speed, the Brother HL-L2480DW outperforms many inkjet printers. Its laser technology delivers sharp, professional-looking prints, perfect for business documents and reports. It’s notably faster and more efficient than inkjet, saving time – especially with multi-page documents. This isn’t the one to get for photo quality prints, however. You will notice banding.

***Scan Quality:*** The scanner works well for converting documents and photos to digital format, producing clear, legible scans. The Brother lacks an automatic document feeder, however, making it somewhat time-consuming for larger projects. This may work in a pinch, but for regular scanning of multiple pages, a dedicated document scanner with a feed tray would quickly pay for itself in time consumed/saved. One reason for this is the lack of automatic duplex scanning: you have to flip things over yourself. I personally will be using the scanner to place things on and save vertical space, as I already have an auto-feeding scanner.

***Conclusion:*** Overall, the Brother HL-L2480DW is an excellent choice for those in need of a fast, reliable, and affordable black and white laser printer for home or small office use. While it lacks color printing and an automatic document feeder, it offers fast printing speeds, decent scan and copy quality, and versatile connectivity options.

The HL L2480DW Printer by Brother is compact yet it is useful for home as well as a small business.

First it arrives well packaged and it is ready to print right away, the setup was easy, it comes with instructions, power cable and a starter black toner, safety guide and other reading material as well as the QR Code for very easy to setup the printer as well as ordering more toner by subscription.

I like that the printer can do many things, print, copy and scan. And I really like that it has a touchscreen in front to do almost everything, including making a copy, scan, and the scan can be sent to the computer or the cloud.

Toner: Brother offers plenty of Plans for toner subscription and the plans are from the Basic to print about 25 pages a month, Ocassional about 100 pages a month, Moderate 300 pages a month, High 700 pages a month, Power 1500 pages a month, and in all the plans there are pages you can carry over to the following month.

The print quality is excellent, it prints fast at up to 36ppm and they look great and something else to really like is the duplex printing, saving paper and space.
Wireless, I can print from my phone, my laptop and my computer wirelessly and with a holder of up to 250 papers I can print all day.

Something else I really like from the Brother printer is the scan function to OCR so it scans and makes the document an editable text page, I really like it because I no longer have to retype a document, it does it for me.

The printer is compatible with Windows Mac, Linux and Chrome OS and mobile using AirPrint, Brother Mobile Connect, Mopria, WiFi Direct, so plenty of options.

I like how quiet, fast and efficient my new printer is, it has toner so I do not have to worry about the ink to dry, toner is dry already and last longer, and there are plenty of options on buying toner from either subscription or different yields.

Inexpensive laser with good value. On-line set up instructions were easy to follow. Use PC to go to Brother set up site. Then you get wireless printer connection, auto download of printer drivers along with firmware update. Print quality is much nicer and quicker than ink-jet, for sure.

This model, the HL-L2480DW, is a newer model recently available. So new in fact that when I went to download the printer driver from the Brother website, this model is not even listed with its own driver. I downloaded the closest one from the list matching the 2480 and have had no issues. The printer is loud as someone else had mentioned but it doesn’t bother me. Set up was very easy, my connection to my router is via ethernet. Print quality is good and speed is fairly fast.

I’ve used several Brother printers in the past and this is my third monochrome, or black and white only, printer from this brand. The HL-L2480DW is an all-in-one printer that can copy, scan, and print on a variety of media including envelopes, labels, letter and legal sized paper. It cannot, however, print in color nor send or receive faxes. It takes up a decent amount of desk space, and you’ll need to leave some clearance in front, behind, and above it to open the paper tray, rear panels, and scanner lid. That said, I found it surprisingly light at just over 22 lbs.

The machine is pretty simple to setup. After plugging it in and turning it on, I connected it to my home’s WiFi network from the touch display control panel, though you can also use an Ethernet cable for a wired connection or connect directly to your computer using a USB-B cable, if you prefer keeping the machine offline (cables not included). Using the color LCD’s menus is intuitive and user-friendly, however, I found the screen’s keyboard for entering my WiFi password very tiny and difficult to tap the right keys. If you don’t want to share the printer on your LAN, you can use a direct WiFi connection to another device that supports it.

Drivers and software for the printer can be downloaded from Brother’s website, and installation takes about 5 minutes. I was able to get started printing within about 10 minutes from unboxing. The paper tray on the bottom can be fully removed and holds up to 250 sheets of paper from A6 to A4 sizes. The back of the tray can even be extended to accommodate legal size paper (11×14 inches), though note that it will stick out of the back of the machine several inches when closed. Envelopes, labels, and other custom media can be fed into the manual feed tray that folds out from the front of the machine and is ejected from the rear return tray.

Sending print jobs to the printer wirelessly was fast, and printing started within a few seconds of hitting print. In terms of print quality, I found that text-only documents came out quite nicely. Lettering is crisp and clear, and print/copy speed was fast at 36 pages per minutes (ppm). The printer can handle 2-sided duplex printing sequentially and retracts sheets to print on the reverse side. The paper return tray can hold up to 100 sheets and has a flip out support flap for high volume printing.

Large graphics and photos, however, printed with less than “photo” quality. I found that across large images, there were very noticeable horizontal bands (light and dark) across the page. These persisted after multiple attempts at cleaning the toner cartridge, rollers, corona wire, and drum. Images also appeared much darker on paper (with default settings) than on screen, losing contrast, textures, and fine details in the print. I did not see a huge difference in print quality when setting the output DPI to 1200 versus the default 600, though contrast improved marginally. Fortunately, the banding isn’t apparent at all with text-only printing.

For scanning, you’ll choose upfront where to save the file from the menu, for example, to your computer, in an email, or to your linked cloud storage (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint). Scanning a page of text produced clear, legible copies in about 10 seconds at the default 200 DPI; scanned text was easily recognized by the OCR software and the file contents could be copied and edited in word processing applications. There was little, if any, bleed-through when scanning a page with text on both sides. However, this machine cannot scan both sides of a page simultaneously or automatically, and you must manually flip the sheet in order to scan the other side. After each scan, the control panel will ask you if there are more pages so you can save them as a single PDF file.

Scanning photographs at 200 DPI, on the other hand, produced results that were a little lighter than their physical originals, with a warmer tint and softer focus. When zooming in on a 200 DPI image scan, there was a bit of a grid effect due to data compression/loss, though the scans managed to capture most of a photo’s details with accuracy and good color and saturation. When scanning at the max resolution of 600 DPI, each scan took longer, about 30 seconds, and individual pixels were less noticeable with smoother edges and little noticeable grid effect. However, there was a slight rainbowing of grayscale colors. With photocopies, it was much the same results as with scanning, and I noticed text in photocopies appeared slightly darker and thicker, so regular font appeared slightly “bold” faced.

You can print from a mobile device using the Brother Mobile Connect smartphone app. This app requires you to login or create an account to link your printer. Once linked, “Scan to Mobile App” will also appear in the Scan options on the printer’s control panel. Just make sure your phone and printer are connected to the same network. In the app you can print documents and photos or initiate a scan that saves directly to your phone. You can also manage or sign up for Brother’s Refresh EZ Print Subscription, an automatic toner refill program; a 4-month free trial is included with this printer.

A feature that may be useful for folks using the printer in a shared office environment is the ability to send a secure print job to this printer’s queue; this will require a user to enter a password/PIN entered on the machine’s LCD in order to complete the print. Toner cartridges for this machine are the Brother TN830; a standard version yields up to 1200 pages while the high-yield XL prints up to 3000 pages for a lower cost per print. The starter cartridge included with the printer, however, will only last about 700 pages.

I like that you can add shortcuts for functions that you use often to the control panel’s menu, like Scan to Google Drive or Mobile App. One thing to consider though is that there is no automatic document feeder tray for scanning and copying a lot of pages. As these functions are single-sided, you’d have to do one sheet at a time, one side at a time.

Overall, the printer is great if you don’t need color printing and mostly print text, as it prints quickly both single-sided and duplex. Graphics will print fine but larger images won’t be “photo” quality. It also functions well as a scanner and copier with decent reproduction quality, though isn’t as fast or convenient with a large number of pages or at its highest resolution. The printer is easy to setup and share on a network with multiple ways to connect, and has a number of useful Internet capabilities like linking to cloud storage, scan to email, and secure remote printing.

Summary
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Another excellent printer, scanner and copier from Brother which has crisp printing at 36 pages per minute. It also has a 250 page tray so that you don’t have constantly feed in paper. The setup was easy with the app or the 2.7 inch screen.

Must buy

Pros
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1. Excellent and fast printing
2. Very capable scanner
3. Supports dual band Wifi
4. An excellent mobile app.
5. Refresh EZ Print subscription
6. Works with generic toner.

Cons
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1. Not color
2. A bit pricey

Details-
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The setup is very easy, Install the toner and then, you can use the brother app from the app store OR use the 2.7 inch touchscreen to setup the printer. I was able to recognize the printer from all my mobile devices and Macbook as well as windows machine.

The Printer supports 250 pages in the tray for copying and printing. This way you don’t have to feed in the paper few at a time.

The scanner is also great, works really well with mobile devices. It can
Scan to Searchable PDF, Scan to Mobile, Scan to Word, Scan To PowerPoint, Scan To Excel, Easy Scan to E-mail

The scanner can also connect directly to cloud services like google drive and save documents.

Overall the 3-in-one is a great printer, scanner and copier. And since it supports generic cartridges, makes it a must have

Just bought this printer. Print quality seems OK, and speed once it is running is good, but WOW it takes about 16 or more seconds to begin printing. That seems like a loooooooonnnnnnnggggg time. My old Canon printer which was about 7 or 8 years old, only took less than half that. I am not pleased about the time.

This is a very easy review for me because I really like this printer.

The HL-L2480DW is new for 2024 replacing the HL-2380DW with a newer more modern casing, faster innards, higher resolution, and faster engine. It’s also lighter and better looking!

I have had experience with it’s older brother and it was a solid printer, so I was happy to get this new version to try out. If you’re upgrading from the older model, you won’t be able to bring your carts with you because it uses the newer TN830 regular and extra capacity variants.

Taking it out of the box is easy because this printer is really, really light. I can imagine using this printer as a travel printer. The setup is super easy as well with the newer, more responsive touchscreen. A weird thing is that this printer has a super loud speaker. If you like that, like I do, great! I do like to hear when I’m out of paper and I’m in another room. That can be a big time saver for me.

Setup is super easy. When you turn on the printer it asks for your wifi information and immediately updates itself if a firmware is available. I like being able to do that without an app. Once that’s done, you can either install the computer drivers on your Win/Mac or use your iOS/Android app or Chromebook. My primary computers are Win, ChromeOS, and Android tablets. Normally it’s painful to set up but this printer was easy with no issues connecting at all. Windows was fairly straightforward, just install the driver then go to Printers and choose it. ChromeOS was easy as well, I was able to see it because the printer supports Zero Config/Bonjour and printed right away from the ChromeOS print dialog. Android was even easier through the Brother app from the Play Store. I could fiddle with all the important settings through the app.

The scanner is fast and easy to use. There’s not much to say about it except that it reliably scanned a photo for me to my Windows laptop but also to my Android devices, which really made me happy. That’s a timesaver! You’ll see that this printer uses some of the same parts as the higher end versions so its glass has a section supporting a sheet feeder (this model does not have the feeder). I wonder if you could upgrade this printer if you had the right parts?

Printing was fast and easy. Warmup from sleep was comparable to other printers I’ve used at less than 10 seconds. A 30 page document I printed with about 30% coverage of text was done in less than a minute. Text was easy for it in my testing of forms, shipping labels, and documents. Text is super sharp, and should be at this point in printing.

Now for the photo capability… check out my photos. This is NOT a photo printer. The halftoning capabilities are fairly good, but you will get banding on solids.

I can highly recommend this printer. It’s got a basic printer price but has some great features that punch a lot higher than the price would suggest. A great buy!

I’ve always had a printer around to print up random things from a mail in rebate, order form, or instructions for a customer. I’ve owned several different printers and brands over the years, finding one reason or another to switch every time a printer needed to be replaced. In recent years, I’ve been using Brother Printers, and recommending them because of their simplicity and reliability. For what it’s worth, a printer just needs to work when it’s needed, and so far, Brother Printers have not let me down. I decided to upgrade my aging Brother USB connected printer to something the whole house could connect to and get some more features, so I selected the Brother HL-L2480DW Wireless Black and White 3 in 1 Laser Printer.

Pros:
– 3 in 1 – Printing, Copying, and Scanning.
– Easy to Setup.
– Mobile printing even away from home.

Cons:
– Included instructions are for printer setup, does not include steps for adding printer after setup.

As printer setups go, Brother has gotten it down to a hassle-free experience. Follow the 2-side quick start guide included to get the printer ready to use, final steps include using the Brother App on either a computer (Mac or PC) or mobile device, and you’ll be up and running quickly. The only hiccup I encountered was having to run the Wi-Fi finder twice, this was because of my device settings over the printer’s fault so no knock off on the score. The touch screen makes navigating the printer options easy and intuitive. Additionally, the display informs you of any issues or updates that are needed with clear details on what to do to resolve the issue.

The Brother HL-L2480DW has a print speed of 34 pages per min, which is perfect for my needs as I usually need to print 4-5 pages multiple times per day. This is a Black and White Laser printer, so it uses a toner cartridge, which will last depending on your use but tend to not dry out like ink cartridges do. Tested a few print pages without any issues. Have printed out a few scripts and order forms without a single issue so far. Double sided printing is an option with this printer, you can select to have it print double sided by default or single sided during setup.

The Brother HL-L2480DW does go a bit further with the ability to copy and scan, which are great additions to an office setup. The Scanner can do color scans, but you will want to setup the printer on each device and enable scanning to be able to use the feature. The connectivity options are also amazing, including Wireless 2.4 or 5.0 Ghz, Wi-Fi Direct printing, Ethernet, and USB 2.0. This ensures that regardless of source, there should be a way to print to the device. Additionally, if you need to print when you’re away from home, the Mobile Connect Brother app allows you to print from your mobile even when not connected to the network. This is a handy feature for those on the go who are not always working out of a standard office setup.

The only negative part of the setup was the lack of instructions to add the printer on another device once it has been setup, the included instructions repeated the initial setup process. To add the printer to other devices on the network you will either need to download the mobile app for phones/tablets or search for Brother Print Management Tool and navigate to the support page to download just the printer drivers. This might be because of how new the printer is, as it is not listed on the Brothers main product pages, but after installing the support software for the printer on each PC on the network, there were no issues accessing the printer. The added PaperPort software also allows each PC to receive and organize the scans from the printer, which is nice instead of having to use the default tools included with windows.

Overall, I’m very happy with the Brother HL-L2480DW Wireless Black and White 3 in 1 Laser Printer, I’d recommend this for any home or small business office that doesn’t need a color printer but needs a printer that can connect to multiple devices for general use. Printers are best when they are easy to use, easy to connect to, and low maintenance, all of which the Brother HL L2480DW has been so far.