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Brother HL-L2360DW

M. David Stone
 & M. David Stone Contributing Editor

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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Brother HL-L2360DW - Brother HL-L2360DW
3.0 Average

The Bottom Line

The Brother HL-L2360DW monochrome laser printer delivers speed and paper handling that's best suited for a micro office, but its output quality could be better.
Best Deal£149

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£149

Pros & Cons

    • Small size.
    • Duplexer.
    • Wired and Wi-Fi network support.
    • Wi-Fi Direct for printing directly from mobile devices.
    • Text and graphics are below par.

Brother HL-L2360DW Specs

Color or Monochrome Monochrome
Connection Type Ethernet
Connection Type USB
Connection Type Wireless
Maximum Standard Paper Size Legal
Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) 10,000 pages per month
Number of Ink Colors 1
Print Duplexing
Rated Speed at Default Settings (Mono) 32 ppm
Type Printer Only
All Specs

Despite being small enough to fit comfortably on your desk, the Brother HL-L2360DW monochrome laser printer ($149.99) offers speed and paper handling suitable for most micro offices. Its output quality was somewhat below par in our tests, but it's still good enough for most business use. The combination makes it a reasonable choice as either a heavy-duty personal printer or as a light- to moderate-duty shared printer in a micro or small office.

Paper handling is one of the HL-L2360DW's ( at Amazon) strengths, and a key area where the printer offers a point-for-point match with the Samsung Xpress M2825DW ($297.08 at Amazon) , our Editors' Choice for low-cost personal or micro-office mono lasers. Both printers offer a 250-sheet input tray, a one-sheet manual feed, a duplexer (for two-sided printing). If you need a higher paper capacity, you'll have to look elsewhere, but, with either printer, this should be enough for most micro offices.

Brother HL-L2360DW

Connection options for the HL-L2360DW include Ethernet and Wi-Fi, which makes it easy to share the printer in a micro office, plus Wi-Fi Direct, which lets you connect directly to the printer from a mobile device, even if you connect the printer to a single PC by USB cable. Brother's free mobile print app lets you print from iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, and Windows mobile devices either directly, using Wi-Fi Direct, or through your Wi-Fi access point. If the network is connected to the Internet, you can print through the cloud.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
At 7.2 by 14.0 by 14.2 inches (HWD), the HL-L2360DW takes up less desktop space than most inkjets, and at only 15 pounds, it's light enough for one person to move into place easily. Setting it up on a network is standard fare. For my tests I connected it by Ethernet and installed the drivers on a Windows Vista system.

Brother HL-L2360DW

On our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) I clocked the printer at 9.6 pages per minute (ppm). That qualifies as a reasonable speed for both the price and the 32-ppm rating. It's also essentially tied with the Samsung M2825DW. However, it's well short of impressive. By comparison, the Brother HL-2270DW ($356.00 at Amazon) , which the Samsung printer replaced as our Editors' Choice, came in at 11.7ppm. The Canon imageClass LBP6200d clocked in at 11.1ppm in its default duplex mode and at 14.5ppm in simplex (one-sided) mode.

Brother HL-L2360DW

Unfortunately, the HL-L2360DW's output quality doesn't hold up against the competition. Text quality is good enough for most business use, but it's below par for a monochrome laser. The saving grace is that even subpar text for a laser is better than you'll get from most inkjets. I wouldn't consider this printer for high-quality desktop publishing, but for typical business use, unless you have an unusual need for small fonts, it should work for you.

Graphics output is at the low end of a fairly tight range that includes virtually all monochrome lasers. It's good enough for any internal business need, but not for something you'll want to hand out to a client or customer when you're trying to make a good impression. Photo quality is typical for its ilk. That translates to being good enough to print recognizable images from photos in Web pages, or roughly equivalent to newspaper quality.

Related Story See How We Test Printers

If you want speed, the Canon LBP6200d can be an attractive choice, but its only connection option is USB, which limits it to personal, rather than shared, use. If you need better output quality than the Brother HL-L2360DW offers, take a close look at the Samsung M2825DW, which delivers higher-quality text and graphics as part of a balance of features that makes it our preferred pick. If you don't need particularly high-quality output, however, the HL-L2360DW matches the Samsung printer for speed, paper handling, connection options, and mobile printing support, making it a reasonable, though not particularly compelling, choice.

Best Printer Picks

Further Reading

Final Thoughts

Brother HL-L2360DW - Brother HL-L2360DW

Brother HL-L2360DW Review

3.0 Average

The Brother HL-L2360DW monochrome laser printer delivers speed and paper handling that's best suited for a micro office, but its output quality could be better.

Get It Now
Best Deal£149

Buy It Now

£149

About Our Expert

M. David Stone

M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

My Experience

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I've covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I've written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who worked on every "Project Printer" blockbuster PCMag ever produced, often writing 15 or more reviews for the year's big printer blowout. (I snuck in a single review one year when I was writing a book, strictly so I could keep that claim alive.)

I've always worked for PCMag as a freelancer, which has freed me to take time away to write nine books, be a major contributor to four others, and write for other publications, including Wired, Computer Shopper, Projector Central, and Science Digest, where I was Computers Editor. I also wrote a computer column at one point for The Newark Star-Ledger.

Although I started my career primarily as a science (mostly physics and astronomy) and science-fiction writer (published in Analog), my non-computer-related work runs the gamut from the Project Data Book for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (written for GE's Astro-Space Division) to the script for a video overview of a top company in the gaming industry (that would be gambling, not video games). My books include The Underground Guide to Color Printers (Addison-Wesley), Troubleshooting Your PC (Microsoft Press), and Faster, Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press).

Having covered a wide range of subjects, I've developed a serial expertise in many of them. The ones most relevant to my current work at PCMag.com are all imaging technologies.

The Technology I Use

I buy new PCs for my writing desk infrequently, because it takes a week or more to customize the settings the way I want them. At the moment, I have an HP Envy tower running Windows 10, but it's old enough to have a Windows 7 sticker on it. Its latest lease on a longer life is courtesy of a newly installed 500GB Samsung SSD 870 EVO.

Elsewhere in my house is an assortment of older and newer PCs. The older ones are dedicated to specific tasks, like the one I've been using to slowly digitize all the paper stored in my filing cabinets, while the newer ones are testbeds for printer and projector reviews.

For writing, I use Microsoft Word 2003, because I find it too annoying to take my hands off the keyboard to give mouse commands using the Ribbon. My workhorse printers are a Xerox Phaser 6280 color laser and a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo for labels and stamps. I also have a Canon Pixma iP8720 for printing photos, and a Canon ImageFormula DR-C225 for scanning.

My first computer was bought to replace my IBM Selectric for writing. After rejecting both the IBM PC (which had just been introduced) and the Apple II because of the keyboards, I chose a Vector Graphics Vector 3 CP/M machine with dual floppies. The first MS-DOS machine I was willing to use for writing was the IBM AT, with its much-improved keyboard compared with the original PC and its gargantuan 20MB hard drive.

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