Setting up the Brother HL-L2350DW isn’t the smoothest experience on the connectivity front, but thankfully you shouldn’t have to bother with it more than once unless you’re moving the printer around often.

Even a basic number pad would be a nice touch (with T9 text entry as an option), but thankfully interacting with the printer itself is fairly rare after the initial setup. You can only see one line of text at a time and the only options you have for navigating through the menu system is an up, down, and enter button. The display on the top of the printer is a nice touch, but its primitive input makes it a bit of a doozy to navigate through the menu and enter any information required (such as your W i-Fi password, as I’ll address below). The location of the paper tray and the output tray incredibly beneficial, as it meant I didn’t have to account for extra clearance required by many other printers whose paper sticks out the top or output requires an extra foot in front of the printer. When prints are complete, they’re fed out of the top of the printer, nearly flat with the top surface. Small guides on either side can be adjusted to ensure the paper is straight and aligned for when it goes through the printer and/or built-in duplexer, which affords you the ability to print on both sides of the paper.

The paper tray, which holds up to 250 sheets of letter paper, is at the bottom of the printer and is easily refilled by pulling out the tray and sliding in the new sheets. If anything, the squared-off shape and thoughtful input and output locations make it easier to place on nearly any shelf or on top of any dresser.

The Brother HL-L2350DW is about as bland as printers come, but so long as you’re not looking for a statement piece in your dorm room or home office, its neutral, unassuming design isn’t going to be an issue. Lifewire / Gannon Burgett Design: Simply squared

Test brother printer