Labs

With a slightly different take on the rectangular box of many personal mono lasers, Brother folds the dark-grey plastic of the HL-2150N's top surface down the left-hand front edge and for effect tops it with a big blue-lit button.

Its paper tray holds 250 sheets and just above it there's a flip-down cover to take a single page of special media. There are three indicator lights on top for toner, drum and error conditions; at the back are sockets for USB and Ethernet, both standard.

The drum cartridge has a different service life compared to the toner cartridges, which piggyback on top of it. The idea of this two-piece approach is that

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you get better economy by having to buy a replacement drum only after every six to eight toner cartridges. Whether this works out cheaper is dependent on the costs of these two consumables relative to the competition. In fact, the cost per page on the HL-2150N comes out at 2.2p, which is a touch high in comparison with the others tested here.

Brother claims a top speed of 22ppm for the HL-2150N, but printing a 10-page text and graphics document in normal mode took 37 seconds. This gives a real-world print speed of 16.2ppm - less than three quarters of the specified figure but still well up the field in this group. The first page was out in a commendable 12 seconds too.

Print quality is very good with crisp, sharp, black text and particularly smooth tints. There's very little of the banding we often see in areas of grey-scale tone, though against that there's less difference in tone between what should be light and dark greys. Reversed-out text looks clean, even when the white characters are small.

Our photo test piece at the highest resolution of 2400 x 600dpi again showed little banding, though quite a bit of detail was lost in the image's darker areas. Mono lasers aren't notable for their photo reproduction.