Brother HL-2035 mono laser printer

Brother’s HL-2035 is very easy to set up.

It’s small and light, so you won’t need any help unpacking it and, if you follow the animated instructions on the supplied CD-Rom, you’ll have no problems at all getting it going.

All you have to do is remove the packaging and strips of securing sticky tape, then load the toner unit into a slot at the front.

All access to paper and consumables is from the front of the HL-2035, so you can place it wherever you like, even close to a wall. Up to 250 A4 pages can be loaded into its fully covered main paper tray.

The printer driver software is simple and clearly laid out yet covers all the main functions, including N-up (multiple document pages printed on one sheet), booklet printing, watermarks and manual duplex.

The HL-2035 lacks an LCD readout and illuminates various combinations of four LEDs to communicate its status. A small interactive help application explains what each combination means and how to rectify problems. Linux users are also well catered for.

Budget printers often incur much higher running costs than their more expensive counterparts, but this is not the case with the HL-2035: each page costs approximately 2p to print. However, you should expect the printer to last for around 12,000 pages only, because at this point the drum unit must be replaced – and that will cost around £10 more than a new printer. Factoring in the cost of a new printer raises the per page cost to 3p.

In our performance tests, the HL-2035 consistently managed to hit its claimed print speed of 18 pages per minute when printing a variety of content. And with a time of around 10 seconds before the first page in a print job appears, this printer is fast enough for single users or even for sharing over a small network. It also carries a one-year on-site warranty.