Brother DCP-L2500D Review

Sections

Verdict

Pros

Cons

Key Specifications

What is the Brother DCP-L2500D?

The Brother DCP-L2500D is an entry-level mono laser all-in-one printer aimed at the small office and home office (SOHO) crowd, with a price that will be very attractive to anybody on a tight budget. Andit’s a very useful machine, with print, scan and copy facilities and theability to print duplex pages. This category of printers continues to drop in price as a response to the faster, more flexible inkjets being launched by all printer makers…including Brother.

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Brother DCP-L2500D – Design and Features

Decked out in dark grey and black, it has a small desktop footprint, but tapers out from bottom to top and is quite deep when you get to the scanner cover. This cover is for a Contact Image Scan (CIS) flatbed, which does a reasonable job on text and photos, but is not so good on greyscale originals.

In front of the scanner is a full-width control panel, based around a rather skimpy two-line, 16-character LCD display, without a back-light. Given the cost of an LED, it’s hard to see why all display panels can’t be fitted with one.

Below the control panel is a slot for paper output and this has a small, flip-over paper stop to catch printed pages. Below that is a flip-down cover which becomes a single-sheet paper feed for special media. At the bottom is a 250-sheet paper tray for A4 sheets.

Brother DCP-L2500D – Connection and Cartridge

The only data connection is a USB socket at the back – there’s no wireless or network connection, though these are available on other machines in the range. Software includes Brother’s own MFL-Pro suite and, surprisingly with such a low-cost machine, a copy of Nuance PaperPort 12SE, the document management and OCR software, which is a useful application to have.

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The two-part drum and toner cartridge slides in easily from the front, once you’ve folded down the front cover. It’s a bit fiddly to install the toner cartridge into the drum section, which acts as holder, without touching either the toner-coated feed roller or the photoconductor drum, so you need to take care.

Brother DCP-L2500D – Print Speed

Brother rates the DCP-L2500D at26ppm, which would be pretty impressive if we could reproduce it.However, measuring from clicking Print, in Word, to the final pageappearing in the output tray gives a maximum speed of 18.8ppm, on the20-page document. The more typical 5-page test produced 11.1ppm, lessthan half the rated speed.

Even so, in real terms, this is a goodturn of speed for a low-cost printer. In duplex mode the machine stillmanages 10.6 sides per minute and a single-page copy comes through in animpressive 10 seconds. A 15 x 10cm photo on A4 takes 13s.

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Brotherhas set the sleep time on this machine quite low, so it’s only 40sbefore it goes to sleep and a further 20s before slipping into deepsleep. Having the printer asleep increases the time to first page out.It’s possible to change the sleep times, but they seem a bit tight asdefaults.

The printer is unusually quiet, peaking at 61dBA, making it a very agreeable tool to have beside you on the desk.

Brother DCP-L2500D – Print Quality and Costs

The600dpi default resolution ensures text print quality is good, withsharp, precise characters and no sign of toner spatter. Greyscale fillsare a little banded, but nothing too noticeable. Even photo reproductionis fair, though details in darker, shadowed areas have a tendency todisappear. Photocopies of greyscale fills are pretty ropey, looking verybanded and monotone.

Using the high capacity toner cartridge,which is good for 2,600 pages, gives a cost per page of 3.0p, including0.7p for paper. This is good when compared with other laser printers atsimilar price, and even with some inkjets.

Should I buy a Brother DCP-L2500D?

Thereisn’t a lot of competition in the field at this price point. TheSamsung Xpress M2070 is perhaps the best match, at around £80 and itoffers a similar specification. It can’t print duplex, though, and has amore makeshift paper feed system.

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Verdict

TheBrother DCP-L2500D is a very good, basic laser all-in-one, offeringfast printing, including duplex output, at relatively low cost. While itdoesn’t have many of the bells and whistles of more expensive machines,including wireless connection, if all you need is a SOHO print, copyand scan tool, you can’t go far wrong with this machine.