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Top Rated Product

Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Model number: HL-2170w | SKU: 8661806

This small, compact printer features both Ethernet and wireless connectivity options, as well as a fast print speed of up to 23 ppm*, making it an ideal choice for home or office printing. Learn more about the Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer. (Flash demo)

Average Customer Rating:

4.4 out of 5

39 of 43 (91%) customers would recommend this product to a friend.

Customer Reviews for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Review 1 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

1.0 5

Very Poor Printer--drinks printer cartridges! 01/05/2009
By FEP1

Value for Price

1.0 5

Print quality

3.0 5

Features

2.0 5

Speed

3.0 5

What's great about it: Pretty good print quality
What's not so great: Only about 300-400 copies before you need to replace printer cartridge at about $45.00 a pop.

"Would not recommend this printer. It touts about 3000 copies per cartridge when in reality it only produces about 300 (max.) copies per cartridge (even when set on economy mode). You'll spend a fortune in printer cartridges within the first month or two. I don't print that much and this thing has gone through 3 cartridges in the first two months at $45.00 a pop. It won't warn you when it is running low on toner, it will just stop printing in mid job. Then you have to run out and purchase another cartridge.

I have never written a product review but felt it was necessary to warn others about this product. I'm ready to toss this printer out and purchase something else that won't run me broke. It will not be something made by Brother."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: No
Is this product used primarily for business?: No

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Review 2 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Las 01/04/2009
By ReyF from Cicero

What's great about it: Bought it on sale for 99.99, wifi setup is a soo easy, prints fast.
What's not so great: none

"I decided to get this printer since I have 2 Vista laptops, and 2 Win XP desktops, all running on wireless adapters. I followed the instructions carefully, and temporarily plugged an ethernet cable from the router to the printer before the CD setup. The whole process took me about 10 minutes. Now we all have wireless printing capability, very cool. No need to buy or use a USB cable for this printer! Output quality is very good. I am extremely satisfied with this purchase."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes
Is this product used primarily for business?: No

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Review 3 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

1.0 5

Problem Child 12/19/2008
By Anonymous Reviewer from Washington DC

Value for Price

1.0 5

Print quality

3.0 5

Features

1.0 5

Speed

3.0 5

What's great about it: I'm still trying to figure that out
What's not so great: Corona wire problem

"I've owned this printer less than 3 months and barely used it. No one, including an in-house "pro" could set this up wirelessly in a manner that would work for more than a day, and the printer has a "corona wire" problem that results in early disposal of toner cartridge. I'm so disappointed, I'm not even going to try to fix it anymore."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: No
Is this product used primarily for business?: No

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Review 4 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Effortless wireless setup; Cheap 12/06/2008
By Protistic from Chester Co, PA

Value for Price

5.0 5

Print quality

5.0 5

Features

4.0 5

Speed

4.0 5

What's great about it: Easy setup; remak=rkably cheap
What's not so great: Nothing so far

"Wrieless printing has been a real PITA for me - I have tried three different Wi-Fi print servers, and all three have been returned as "useless". So, it was with some trepidation that I read the reviews, good and bad, of the Brother laser with wireless network support built-in.

When I saw it at BB a few days ago at the remarkable price of $89.99 (the stables two doors down has it at $149.99), I decided to tempt fate and give wireless printing another go.

The installation was fast and flawless, on both of my Windows machines (one XP and one Vista), and on my MacBook as well. I couldn't be happier )or more surprised)."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes
Is this product used primarily for business?: No

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Review 5 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

1.0 5

What a Pain 12/05/2008
By sd12

Value for Price

2.0 5

Print quality

3.0 5

Features

3.0 5

Speed

2.0 5

What's great about it: works fine if connected directly to the computer
What's not so great: very difficult to set up wireless; useless user manual; no help available unless you pay the geek squad

"Looked good on paper but was extremely difficult to set up. User manual was of no use ....would be a good, reasonably priced printer if set up procedures were easier. Purchase it if you are tech savvy ....stay away or hire someone if you are not."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: No
Is this product used primarily for business?: No

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Review 6 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Great features, good design for the price! 12/02/2008
By PeteGeek from Bristol, CT

Value for Price

5.0 5

Print quality

4.0 5

Features

4.0 5

Speed

5.0 5

What's great about it: Fast printing, reasonably quiet, easy to install, network-ready
What's not so great: cost-per-page a tad high

"The HL 2170W is easy to set up and install, whether as a USB stand alone, or a networked wired or wireless printer. Although not a "business-class" printer, it is built solidly enough for it's intended market, home/small business users. This is about the lowest cost laser out there, and yet it has excellent print speed and print quality. It is reasonably quiet, not particularly better or worse than many other laser printers.. Maybe not "elegant", but not ugly either, it blends into my home-office well.

I use this in combination with a quality photo ink jet (networked), as ink jets are still too slow, and too costly at printing out pages of text, but color lasers are not yet truly "prime-time:,An ink jet combined with a good B&W laser is a great printing solution for many folks, and the Brother 2170W fits that niche well!

BTW, the toner-saving setting is just perfect!! Plenty enough print quality at a setting that keeps toner costs down!"

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes
Is this product used primarily for business?: No

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Review 7 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Great Printer 11/01/2008
By blueeagle74 from IL

Value for Price

5.0 5

Print quality

5.0 5

Features

5.0 5

Speed

5.0 5

What's great about it: Ease of use and wireless!
What's not so great: Document online is required for wireless hookup.

"toner that came with it is a trial. it will give about 1000 copies where a new toner will give 1500 or more. Wired worked great. Need to know a little about networking to get the wireless working. The online document walked me step by step with no problems. There is no delay in printing any document and my printer is 100 feet away from my wireless linksys router. I think the price was great."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes
Is this product used primarily for business?: No

1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Review 8 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

4.0 5

Brother Laser Printer 10/23/2008
By IctLady from Wichita, KS

Value for Price

5.0 5

Print quality

5.0 5

Features

4.0 5

Speed

5.0 5

What's great about it: Good value for the price
What's not so great: Toner life on original cartridge did not last long

"I've had this printer for about 2 months and it works great. It did run out of toner after only 500 pages and I had to get another cartridge, but since then I've figured out how to change the settings to use less toner, especially on documents that don't need to be of the best quality. And those documents still look great, so you can't tell a lot of difference. It prints very fast as well, which is great, since I print a lot of large documents, 50+ pages."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

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Review 9 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Great printer 10/20/2008
By N8Howell from Monmouth, OR

Value for Price

5.0 5

Print quality

5.0 5

Features

4.0 5

Speed

4.0 5

What's great about it: Fast, easy set up if you plug printer into router temporarily, cheap price
What's not so great: No double side printing

"I bought this printer for my wife and I to use for graduate school and it works great. The wireless set-up was simple and allowed us to put the printer where it benefits us the most, with no wires or cables attached. The toner is reasonably priced and so was the printer at $99. If you need a monochrome laser printer I think this is an excellent choice for the cost."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

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Review 10 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

4.0 5

Great printer - wireless setup tricky 09/19/2008
By amerasian from Seattle, WA

Value for Price

5.0 5

Print quality

5.0 5

Features

5.0 5

Speed

5.0 5

What's great about it: Great speed, value, print quality
What's not so great: Wireless setup is difficult with FIOS

"I bought this printer after reading reviews that it was difficult to install wirelessly. Being relatively computer savvy and comparing those reviews with others, I was confident I could handle it. It was WAY more difficult than I expected - simply because neither the provided documentation or online instructions covered what I needed to do to get the printer to communicate with my FIOS router. Brother DEFINITELY needs to update their instructions.

IF YOU ARE USING FIOS, HERE ARE SOME TIPS:

If you have FIOS, don't even bother reading the woefully insufficient enclosed instructions. Go straight to the online documentation at the Brother Solutions Center (google search) and read all the way and follow all the instructions in those 36 pages. You'll need every step.

Disable ALL firewalls INCLUDING the one within the FIOS router. Actually the router just allows you to "minimize" the firewall but that is enough to get the installation done. I disabled windows and Norton firewalls and didn't realize FIOS had one, too.

One piece of info I simply couldn't find in the FIOS documentation is that the authentication mode is "Open system" vs. "Shared Key." I had to learn that by trial and error. In the last step before physically installing the drivers, you will probably still not get the IP addresses of the printer and computer to be similar (i.e. 1st 6 numbers the same), and aftewards will need to go into the FIOS router network to manually assign the IP address to the brother printer. Then, when you are installing the drivers and are prompted to select the printer name, don't bother. Select the "IP Address" option and manually input the IP address.

Hope this review helps FIOS users save some time."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Review 11 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Feature-rich printer at Best price 09/15/2008
By Redma from Tucson

Value for Price

5.0 5

Print quality

5.0 5

Features

5.0 5

Speed

5.0 5

What's great about it: Very good graphics detail, Excellent print quality, Manual Duplex
What's not so great: None

"If you are a student or business and print lots of B/W text this printer is perfect. And what a relief to be untethered from the printer! Although I wasn't planning to, I have gradually pared my home office down to one tall file cabinet in guest room closet. Goodbye clutter, hello space! Also, long stretches of time on the computer are less tedious & claustrophobic if you can move anywhere.
SETUP/USAGE: Clear, easy instructions. Great tech support, if needed. Simple to use.
GOOD DESIGN: Printer and drum are only parts consumer needs to access. Even paper jams are direct access and easy to fix.
STRONG SIGNAL: Router is in hall closet, printer is in a living room cabinet with audio/video equipment, yet I can sit in the same room (or outside on patio) with my laptop and printouts are done by the time I walk across the room. Fast and quiet!
PRINT QUALITY/VOLUME: As an online student, I can print out a textbook chapter without worrying about running out of ink. Extrafine print (like warrenties) prints clear. You can use a highlighter immediately without smudging. Easy instructions for manual duplex printing in CD manual. Also has toner save mode.
SUPPLIES: The replacement toner cartridge cost is the same as an inkjet cartridge but lasts much longer (1,500 pages). Drum is inexpensive also, good for 12,000 pages.
PRICE: I shopped the price online, and BestBuy had the best price. It seems to go on sale regularly, but even at regular price it’s feature rich."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Review 12 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

4.0 5

GREAT printer 09/15/2008
By missstella

Value for Price

5.0 5

Print quality

4.0 5

Features

4.0 5

Speed

5.0 5

What's great about it: quick printing, cheap, good quality
What's not so great: hard to set up wirelessly

"This is a great printer. I bought this printer at $99.00 when it was on sale. I might not have bought it at the regular price but at the sale price, I couldn't resist. If you are hesitant, you might want to wait until it goes on sale because this printer went on sale twice at $99 while I was waiting to purchase it. This printer is great, fast printing, quiet and generally a good printer. I needed a laser printer because i'm in law school and I needed to print lots of documents and have the ability to highlight without the ink smudging. I didn't need any frills, and the printer provides that. just a basic black and white laser printer at an affordable price. However, setting the printer to work wirelessly with a macbook was a pain. My friend set up hers rather quickly with the help of a friend (who works in IT) for her pc, but for the macbook it took hours to figure out. The instructions provided with the printer do not help at all. But, if you want to use it with an usb cable, it's quick to set up. Printer does not come with a usb cable by the way."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Review 13 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

1.0 5

Absolutely horrible! 08/19/2008
By Anonymous Reviewer

What's great about it: none
What's not so great: can't install

"this printer is horrible to install and get it working wireless. Don't put yourself thru the misery. This is the worst pain in the you-know--what I've ever dealt with. Absolutely the worst!!!!!!!!!!! Don't buy it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: No

0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

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Review 14 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Top 250 Contributor

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Great Performance, Wireless easy to setup 08/09/2008
By kalipada

"This printer was the best value in small desktop lasers, when I conducted a recent search. I was somewhat hesitant by some other comments on wireless setup, but found that reading the directions carefully, it was very easy to setup, and working within about 10 minutes. No problems whatsoever. My network is NOT a "one button" setup network - we have a hidden SSID, use WPA2 with AES encryption, so I went with the "network cable" initial setup, then once configured, use it wireless. Installing the print drivers on the various machines in our house went great - each machine was printing within 3 minutes of putting in the installation CD.

So far, this is one of the easiest wireless products to add to the network, and print quality is great. I am impressed with Brother's documentation and software. Nice work.

I had ordered an extra toner cartridge with the printer - in hindsight, I would probably order the TN-360 cartridge (large capacity) instead of the TN-330 cartridge, but it's just a cost-saving - no functional difference."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Review 15 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

4.0 5

Great little printer! 08/08/2008
By simplycee

What's great about it: Compact size, fast, easy setup
What's not so great: Price

"I really needed a wireless printer and I am glad I got this one. Set up was easy and my 15 year old had me up and running in 10 minutes. It took up very little space on my desk. I was impressed with the print speed and quality.
Even though I got this at a sale price (even the regular price was lower than the competitors) I think the pice was a little high. It works great so I am happy.
I highly recommend!"

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

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Review 16 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

5.0 5

A Purchase You Won't Regret 08/06/2008
By 2kool4u

What's great about it: Affordable, easy to use, easy to move, space efficient, prints wonderfully
What's not so great: none

"I just ordered this printer a few days ago for my office. I love it!! This printer compliments the CPU that I own as well as my work necessities. It's a good deal."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

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Review 17 for Brother Network-Ready Wireless Black-and-White Laser Printer

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Great Value 08/02/2008
By SteveNC from NC

What's great about it: Speed, memory, wireless, straight-through print option
What's not so great: None yet

"Setup is a breeze in both USB and wireless modes, as long as you follow the directions. Prints beautifully and quickly locally and on the network. Couldn't believe the features for the price!"

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

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