Brother

Brother MFC-L2820DW

Mono laserTonerBrother Refresh EZ Print

Brother's small-office workhorse, and the machine most home offices actually end up with: 34 pages a minute, automatic duplex, a 50-sheet feeder, fax, Ethernet, dual-band Wi-Fi and a 2.7-inch colour touchscreen. Compared with the DCP-L2640DW beneath it, the extra sixty dollars buys the fax modem and the touchscreen and costs two pages a minute. The touchscreen is the part that changes daily use — copying a double-sided stack or scanning to a network folder is a couple of taps rather than a menu crawl on a monochrome strip. Everything about the print engine is the range's usual story: instant from cold, sharp 1200 dpi text, permanent output, and toner at about 3.3 cents a page on genuine cartridges.

Approx. price: ~$269
Cost per mono page: 3.3¢
Cost to own, 5,000 pages: ~$433
Print speed, mono: 34 ISO ppm

Best for

Black-and-white paperwork printed, copied, scanned and faxed every working day.

marks an estimate. Computed from the consumable's ISO page yield and its list price. An estimate. Purchase price plus ink or toner over the pages shown, assuming four mono pages for every colour page. Price is an approximate snapshot from our last catalogue update.

What it costs to own

Black consumable: Brother TN830XL high-yield toner · 3,000 ISO pages · ~$98.29
Cost per mono page: 3.3¢
Cost to own, 5,000 pages: ~$433
Cost to own, 200 pages/month for 3 years: ~$505 (7,200 pages)

Computed from the consumable's ISO page yield and its list price. An estimate. How this is worked out

Cost to own · 5,000 pages

Brother MFC-L2820DW~$433
~$269 printer + ~$164 supplies
Brother DCP-L2640DW~$373
~$209 printer + ~$164 supplies
Brother HL-L2460DW~$343
~$179 printer + ~$164 supplies

purchase priceink or toner. An estimate: purchase price plus 5,000 pages at each printer’s computed cost per page, assuming 4 mono pages for every colour page. Printers whose consumable price we could not source are left out.

Specifications

Manufacturer-published figures. Cost lines are computed from the consumable figures above and are estimates.

Approx. price: ~$269
Cost per mono page: 3.3¢
Cost to own, 5,000 pages: ~$433
Cost to own, 3 years: ~$505
Technology: Laser
Ink system: Toner
Inks: 1
Black consumable: Brother TN830XL high-yield toner · 3,000 pages
Ink in the box: 700 pages
Third-party ink lock: No
Ink subscription: Brother Refresh EZ Print
Print speed, mono: 34 ISO ppm
First page out: 8.5 s
Functions: Print · Copy · Scan · Fax
Two-sided printing: Auto
Document feeder: 50 sheets
Two-sided scanning: No
Paper capacity: 250 sheets
Max paper size: Legal
Borderless photo: No
Resolution: 1200 × 1200 dpi
Connectivity: Wi-Fi · Ethernet
Mobile printing: AirPrint · Mopria
Display: 2.7" colour touchscreen
Dimensions: 16.1 × 15.7 × 12.5 in
Weight: 25.5 lb
Released: 2023

Features

50-sheet feeder with a fax modem
34 ppm printing with automatic duplex
2.7-inch colour touchscreen
Wired Ethernet and dual-band Wi-Fi
Scan to network folder, email and cloud services

Document feeder Auto duplex No ink lock Ethernet Fax

In its favour

The most complete mono laser here: ADF, fax, duplex, Ethernet and a colour touchscreen
34 ppm and an 8.5-second first page
Touchscreen makes multi-step copy and scan jobs quick
Scans straight to a network folder or cloud service
Laser reliability with no clogging risk

Against it

About 3.3¢ a page on genuine TN830XL toner
The feeder scans one side only
25.5 lb and a foot tall — a desk machine, not a shelf one
700-page starter cartridge

What owners say

Distilled from owner discussions and long-term published reviews

This is where Brother's small-laser range stops feeling like a household appliance and starts feeling like office equipment. A 50-sheet feeder, fax, duplex printing, Ethernet and a 2.7-inch colour touchscreen — and owners consistently single out the touchscreen as the thing that changes daily use, because scanning to a folder or emailing a document stops being a menu crawl.

The caveats are the range's usual ones and they are all about consumables and paper handling rather than the machine. Genuine toner is expensive relative to the printer, the feeder scans one side, and it is big. None of that stops it being the mono laser most often recommended for an actual working home office.

What owners like

The colour touchscreen is what owners mention first — scan-to-folder and multi-step copies become a couple of taps
50-sheet feeder, fax, duplex, Ethernet and Wi-Fi in one box, which covers nearly everything a home office asks of a mono machine
Reliable after long idle periods, like the rest of the small Brother lasers
Owners report the scan-to-network-folder and scan-to-email features working without fuss once configured
Fast enough that the feeder is never waiting on the printer

Common complaints

Same toner economics as the rest of the range — genuine cartridges are the real cost of ownership
Single-sided document feeder
Large and heavy enough to need a dedicated surface
Owners report the usual Brother wireless frustrations, though Ethernet avoids them

Questions that keep coming up

Is the touchscreen worth the upgrade from the DCP-L2640DW?

Owners who scan to network folders, scan to email, or run multi-step copy jobs say yes without much hesitation. Owners who press 'copy' and walk away say the cheaper model does the same thing. The print engine is two pages a minute slower here; everything else that matters is shared.

Does the fax still work on a modern phone line?

It needs an analogue line or a VoIP adapter that supports fax, and the people who buy it generally already know whether theirs does. Owners who bought it for the fax are mostly dealing with medical offices, schools or county agencies that still require one.

What does it cost to run?

About 3.3¢ a page on a genuine TN830XL at Brother's own price of $98.29 for 3,000 pages, with a 700-page starter cartridge in the box. That is far cheaper than a cartridge inkjet and considerably more than a refillable tank printer. If you need colour at all, a tank all-in-one is worth pricing against it.

Computed from the consumable's ISO page yield and its list price. An estimate. Owner notes are a summary of what people who own the machine report, not a test result — there is no lab behind this site.