Hands on: I tried out the Brother HL-L9430CDN – see what I thought of this laser printer
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This comment first appeared in issue 353 PC Pro.
It’s hard to make one Laser printerbut brothers’ HL-L9430CDN may just be jumping in one step of the office manager. This is a big beast designed for Small Business and working groups, with appropriate specifications. There is a completely enclosed 520-sheet carton on the base, while the large flaps on the front hide 50 monotonous multi-purpose feeds. Printed pages appear in the 250 page tray at the top.
So far this is standard, but the HL-L9430CDN provides direct control through a large 8.8 cm color touch screen. Although many business printers run tightly and the brother’s menu is simple, it provides quick access to features and settings. It is enhanced with web features, allowing you to access and print cloud Services like Dropbox, Google Drive and share. A USB host port is hidden near the left image for walking printing.
The final front panel feature is an NFC reader that is used to control access if you need to lock the user or feature. Using the printer’s web interface, you can use a USB port or access the web feature to block people from printing, or you can limit the number of pages an individual can print.
It comes with USB and Gigabit Ethernet port. Strangely, you can’t buy it from the shelf using the wireless interface, but the fraternity will use you as an option. There is also a rear USB port for secure printing. Brother offers an additional range of paper trays and staple trim so the printer can grow to meet your business needs.
Load it and you will see the usual symbols about setting the correct paper type. HL-L9430CDN asks if you want to see this question again – if, like us, you rarely change the paper type and it just makes you nervous, then it’s an excellent time. We were also pleased to see clear orientation markings on the front of the main pallet and in the center of the multi-function feed. Too many lasers force you to unload paper just to see how the stack is positioned; it’s painful if you reuse a previously printed page or use a one-sided media.
Start printing, it’s obviously a very fast device. However, if it is idle for any time, the warm-up period can be long. After an hour of rest, we timed the first black text page within 25 seconds, but the first color page of the day took nearly a minute and a half.
In addition, HL-L9430CDN agile to our tests. When printing 25 text pages it reached 30.6ppm and managed 34.9ppm on our 50-page document. Both are much less than the 44ppm engine speed, but our tests include the time it takes to start and send the job. Discounts, that’s almost the goal.
Like everyone printerthe HL-L9430CDN is slower when printing our challenging color graphics tests. Here, it hit 21.8ppm, the fastest color result in this test and not far behind Kyocera’s P2235DN record of 27.7ppm Mono results. It sent out two 10 x 8in photos on A4 paper in just 22 seconds with the best quality and 6 10 x 15cm on three A4 paper in 21 seconds. It leverages ten side duplexes at 14ifm.
Therefore, generally promising color lasers will be torpedoed with high operating costs, but happy that is not the case here. The HL-L9430CDN is complex and requires four toners, a drum, a garbage bottle and transfer belt, but even in all of these aspects, the color of 0.9p per black page or 6.1p is taken into account. The printer arrives in spacious 9,000 pages of black and 6,500 pages of color inbox toner. Since the largest alternative is suitable for 12,000 black or 9,000 color pages, maintenance intervals should not be too frequent.
While not providing perfect color replication, the HL-L9430CDN still does a great job in our test photos and prints excellent color graphics with a pleasant gloss.
Black text is also as good as you would expect. Overall, we can hardly call this clumsy laser exciting, but it offers everything you need in a busy business printer. And with brother Winning our Best Printer Manufacturer Award for ten consecutive years, you can also expect great reliability and support.
