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Brother HL-L8250CDN

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-L8250CDN - Laser Printers
3.5 Good

The Bottom Line

The Brother HL-L8250CDN color laser printer offers excellent speed and paper handling for a micro or small office.
Best Deal£600

Buy It Now

£600

Pros & Cons

    • Fast.
    • Excellent paper handling for a micro or small office.
    • Ethernet port.
    • Graphics and photos are both subpar for a color laser, although still suitable for most business use.

Brother HL-L8250CDN Specs

Color or Monochrome 1-pass color
Connection Type Ethernet
Connection Type USB
Cost Per Page (Color) 13.7 cents
Maximum Standard Paper Size Legal
Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) 40,000 pages per month
Number of Ink Colors 4
Print Duplexing
Rated Speed at Default Settings (Color) 30 ppm
Rated Speed at Default Settings (Mono) 30 ppm
Type Printer Only
All Specs

While the Brother HL-L8250CDN ($349.99) matched the Editors' Choice Xerox Phaser 6500/DN($385.07 at Amazon) in our speed tests, and it offers better paper handling, its output quality can't match the 6500/DN. But if you're looking for a color laser printer for a micro or small office or workgroup, its speed and paper handling are enough to make it worth considering as your office workhorse.

Like the Xerox 6500/DN, the HL-L8250CDN($322.31 at Amazon) offers a 250-sheet paper tray and a duplexer (for two-sided printing) standard. Instead of a single-sheet manual feed, however, it includes a 50-sheet multipurpose tray. And if you need more capacity, you can add a 500-sheet second tray ($249.99) for a total of 800 sheets. The Xerox printer's maximum capacity is only 500 sheets. Although both printers offer suitable paper handling for moderate- to heavy-duty printing for a small office, you won't have to refill the trays as often with the HL-L8250CDN.

Brother HL-L8250CDN

Setup and Speed

The HL-L8250CDN is a little too big to share a desk with comfortably. It measures 12.3 by 16.1 by 19.1-inches (HWD), and it weighs enough, at 47.5 pounds, that you might need some help moving it into place.

Setup is typical for color lasers. I connected the printer to a wired network for my tests and installed the driver on a system running Windows Vista. One key difference between it and the Xerox 6500/DN is that the HL-L8250CDN installs to print in simplex (one-sided) mode rather than duplex by default. That gives it a faster speed than the Xerox printer on our official tests, but only because printing in duplex takes longer.

Brother HL-L8250CDN

Brother rates the printer at 30 pages per minute (ppm), which is the speed you should see when printing a text document or other file that needs little to no processing. On our business applications suite, (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) I clocked it at 6.6ppm, making it significantly faster than the Xerox 6500/DN's official speed of 5.4ppm. However there's a metaphorical asterisk that goes next to the Xerox printer's speed.

In my unofficial tests with the Xerox printer in simplex mode, it came in at 6.5ppm, which means the two printers are actually tied for speed. (A 0.1ppm difference in our tests isn't significant.) As another point of reference, both printers are a bit faster than the Samsung CLP-415NW, at 6ppm.

Output Quality

The HL-L8250CDN's output quality overall is best described as good enough for most business use, but far short of impressive. Text quality is typical for a color laser, although it's at the bottom of a very tight range where most color lasers fall. It's not quite suitable for high-quality desktop publishing, but you shouldn't have a problem with it for anything else, including printing with smaller fonts than most business documents use.

Graphics quality is a touch below what's typical for a color laser, which still makes it easily good enough for any internal business use. Most people would consider it good enough for PowerPoint handouts and the like as well.

Photo quality is good enough to print recognizable photos from Web pages and such, but most photos in my tests had obvious quality issues, including banding, posterization (shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually), and visible dithering in the form of both graininess and dithering patterns.

Also worth nothing: If you connect the printer to a network, you can print through the cloud and from mobile devices over a Wi-Fi access point on your network.

If you need good quality for photos and graphics as well as for text, you're better off with either the Editors' Choice Samsung CLP-415 for light to moderate use, or the Editors' Choice Xerox 6500/DN for more heavy-duty printing complete with duplexing. That said, if what you need is a medium- to heavy-duty workhorse color laser, but graphics and photo quality aren't crucial, the Brother HL-L8250CDN's speed and capable paper handling make it worth considering.

Best Printer Picks

Further Reading

Final Thoughts

Brother HL-L8250CDN - Laser Printers

Brother HL-L8250CDN Review

3.5 Good

The Brother HL-L8250CDN color laser printer offers excellent speed and paper handling for a micro or small office.

Get It Now
Best Deal£600

Buy It Now

£600

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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