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Brother HL-L2300D

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-L2300D - Brother HL-L2300D
4.0 Excellent

The Bottom Line

The Brother HL-L2300D's small size and excellent paper handling—with a 250-sheet tray, manual feed, and duplexer—should be at the top of your list for a personal monochrome laser printer.
Best Deal£337.67

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£337.67

Pros & Cons

    • Small size.
    • Excellent paper handling for personal use.
    • Duplexer (for two-sided printing).
    • No Ethernet or Wi-Fi.

Brother HL-L2300D Specs

Color or Monochrome Monochrome
Connection Type USB
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) 27 ppm
Type Printer Only
All Specs

The Brother HL-L2300D monochrome laser printer ($119.99) is small enough to sit on your desk without taking up a lot of space and is limited to connecting via USB cable. The combination defines it as a personal printer for any size office. Despite the small form, however, it delivers a level of paper handling that would be suitable for sharing. Add in its fast speed and more-than-acceptable output quality, and it's an easy pick as our Editors' Choice low-cost, personal monochrome laser printer.

When it comes to paper handling, the HL-L2300D ($79.99 at Amazon) delivers a point-for-point match with the Samsung Xpress M2625D ($490.00 at Amazon) , another top pick. Both models offer a 250-sheet tray, a one-sheet manual feed, and a built-in duplexer (for two-sided printing). This should easily be enough for even heavy-duty use by personal printer standards.

Brother HL-L2300D

Almost as important as the paper handling is the small size. The HL-L2300D weighs just 15 pounds, making it easy for one person to move into place, and it measures 7.2 by 14 by 14.2 inches (HWD). That gives it a slightly lower weight and size than the Samsung model, which is always a plus for anything that you plan to share your desk with.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality

Setup is standard for a USB-connected monochrome laser. For my tests, I connected it to a system running Windows Vista. The printer's engine rating is 27 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. I clocked it on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), at 9.3ppm, which is a respectable speed for the price and engine rating, and just a touch slower than the Samsung M2625D's 9.9pm. The HL-L2300D is essentially tied with the Brother HL-L2340DW ($133.60 at Amazon) , which is a similar model with Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct added.

Brother HL-L2300D

Output quality for the HL-L2300D is just a touch below par overall, with text and graphics both a step below the ranges that include the vast majority of monochrome lasers. For text, that still translates to being good enough for virtually any business use, as long as you don't have an unusual need for small fonts. For graphics, it makes the output easily good enough for any internal business needs, but not good enough for most people to consider it suitable for PowerPoint handouts or the like.

Related Story See How We Test Printers

Photo quality is typical for a monochrome laser. You can certainly print recognizable images from photos on webpages, for example, but don't plan on using the printer for anything more demanding than that.

If you want the convenience of being able to print wirelessly from your phone or tablet using a printer that's connected to a single PC, you should take a look at somewhat more expensive models that support Wi-Fi Direct, like the Brother HL-L2340DW and the Samsung Xpress M2835DW ($292.95 at Amazon) . If you simply want to print from a PC connected via USB cable, however, the HL-L2300D delivers a balance of speed, paper handling, output quality, size, and price that makes it an excellent candidate for a personal monochrome laser printer and our Editors' Choice in the category.

Best Printer Picks

Further Reading

Final Thoughts

Brother HL-L2300D - Brother HL-L2300D

Brother HL-L2300D Review

4.0 Excellent

The Brother HL-L2300D's small size and excellent paper handling—with a 250-sheet tray, manual feed, and duplexer—should be at the top of your list for a personal monochrome laser printer.

Get It Now
Best Deal£337.67

Buy It Now

£337.67

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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