Editor's Note: today launches our "Living With" series, where periodically we'll revisit products that we've been privileged to live with for a while, and see how they've held up over time.Printers are funny -- they generally have a much longer lifespan than the computers that they connect to, and a popular model may stick around for a decade or more: we still see Apple LaserWriters on active duty now and again. One of the complaints that was levied against us at the time of our
original review of this printer was that we didn't have any significant cost-per-page metrics, or any comment on the longevity of the printer itself. In the limited time we generally spend with a product to assess, reviews don't (and can't) often address this.
Electronista has been living with the Brother HL-3170CDW color laser printer for nearly two years now, though, so now we can comment on this.
Technically, the printer is intended for workgroups, with speeds of up to 23 pages per minute in color and black and white. The unit's resolution maxes out at 600x2400 DPI in both color and black and white. Duplex paper handling is managed with a 250-sheet input tray, with a fold-down one-sheet multipurpose tray. The network printer uses 802.11n Wi-Fi, or a USB direct connection, Ethernet 10/100 base-T, and is an AirPrint-compatible printer. Drivers exist for Windows XP and up, OS X 10.5 and up, some varieties of Linux, Google Cloud Print, and the aforementioned AirPrint capability. The printer had a native OS X 10.10 Yosemite driver from day one of availability.
Our review in 2012 was pretty positive. Easy setup. Good print speeds, comparing fairly to other printers in the class with a similar speed rating. We found it better for spot business color than photo printing, but this is the case with nearly all color laser printers.
Over the last two years, we've replaced every toner at least twice. A set of all four cartridges, rated for 1400 pages runs about $140 online for the official Brother cartridges, with the color cartridges selling for a bit more than the black ones seperately. Figure sub-$100 for refills or third-party cartridges. At these prices, it makes no sense to get the off brand. There is a higher-capacity version of the cartridge, but the street price is significantly higher per page, so we don't recommend it. The drum is also a routinely replaceable part, and we're not even close to hitting wear-out after 20,000 pages printed.
We've metered what we've paid for toner over time. On the average, an eight percent print density all-black page costs about two cents a page. Color prints are running more, as expected -- print densities are generally higher, at 18 percent or more. So, a color spot print, with the higher density, is hitting about eight cents a page for us. We don't recommend photo printing with this model, or nearly any color laser, but prints from this run about 52 cents per 5x7 print.
Acoustically and mechanically, we aren't seeing any problems. Fan noise is still low, and the inevitable laser printer hot metal and ozone smell has never been terrible, nor getting any worse. Paper feed is as reliable as it always was, but the printer doesn't care much for glossy 8.5x11 pages, since we saw a slightly higher incidence of jams when in use with that kind of paper -- this was true out of the box as well. Text is still as fine as it always was, and text with spot color is the reason to buy this printer in the first place, so two years on, the printer is still performing admirably.
Our recommendation for this printer still stands, as do the conditions around its purchase. We still like the speed, even having used some newer models. The duplexer is great for the price, and cuts down on paper waste. Still, this is not for archiving pictures of the kids -- inkjets rule the roost for picture printing, and will for some time.
Street price of this printer has plummeted from $280 originally, and is now generally below $200 -- at the time of this writing, the printer is
available for $160 at Amazon. The new price point boosts it that much in our eyes, solidifying it as a great home or small office laser printer.
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