Everything below comes from Brother’s own product and cartridge pages, read on the dates recorded in our registry, plus arithmetic on those published figures and one range we attribute to somebody else. We have no unit in hand and no lab, and nothing here should be read as though we had printed a single page on it.
What it costs to run
The HL-L3220CDW takes the Brother TN229 cartridge family: one black and three colors, bought separately. A brother tn229xl black high-yield toner cartridge was listed at $96.29 and is rated at 3,000 pages, which is about 3.2¢ for a black page.
That is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is not what people expect. A black page on this color laser costs about the same as a black page on Brother’s cheap mono laser — roughly 3.3 cents on the TN830XL. The color machine does not punish you for printing text. It punishes you in three other ways: the sticker price, the speed, and the three extra cartridges.
| If you print | Black toner over 3 years | Total with the printer |
|---|---|---|
| 25 pages a month | $29 | $314 |
| 75 pages a month | $87 | $372 |
| 200 pages a month | $231 | $516 |
Supplies only in the middle column; sticker price plus supplies in the right one. Mono pages at the manufacturer’s rated yield and the supply price we read on 27 September 2026. Real cost runs higher because rated yields assume 5% page coverage. The full method.
These figures cover black pages only. Add color pages and the right-hand column rises faster than any table on this site, for the reason set out next.
The color page we are not going to put a number on
Our method is fixed: supply price divided by the manufacturer’s rated page yield, with both inputs read from a source we can cite and date. An ISO color page needs four of those inputs, because it draws from black, cyan, magenta and yellow. We have a confirmed price and yield for the black TN229XL and we do not have confirmed prices for all three color cartridges, so this page publishes no color cost per page rather than an estimated one.
What we can tell you is the published range from somebody who does publish one. Toner Buzz puts color laser printing at between 12 and 15 cents a page, read on 27 September 2026 — their figure, not ours. For comparison, our own arithmetic puts an ISO color page on the Epson EcoTank ET-2800 at about 1.1 cents and on the Canon MegaTank G3270 at about 0.8 cents.
Four cartridges instead of one
Brother supplies this printer with starter black, cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges rated at 1,000 pages each. There is a real advantage in how it is built: they are four separate cartridges rather than one combined unit, so an exhausted magenta costs you a magenta, not a set. Combined color cartridges are one of the quieter ways a printer takes money off you.
The disadvantage is unavoidable arithmetic. Four supplies means four prices to track, four things to run out at inconvenient moments, and four purchases across the printer’s life that a mono laser simply never asks you to make. If the appeal of a laser to you is “one cartridge, no thinking”, a color laser is the version of a laser that takes that away.
What it does not do
It does not scan, copy or fax
This is a print-only machine. No flatbed, no document feeder. If scanning is part of why you are shopping, you want an all-in-one — our laser all-in-one picks cover the mono options, and the Brother DCP-L2640DW is the obvious one if your scanning is paperwork rather than color.
It is slow, in black as well as color
Brother publishes up to 19 pages a minute in black and in color. The cheaper mono HL-L2460DW publishes up to 36. That is the part of the trade-off nobody mentions: you pay roughly a hundred dollars more and print your ordinary black documents at about half the rate, because a four-color engine has four times as much to coordinate.
Wireless, with no Ethernet on the specification we read
The connectivity line we recorded from Brother’s page for this model is wireless. The mono HL-L2460DW, at a hundred dollars less, lists dual-band wireless and Ethernet and USB. If a wired connection matters — a shared office printer, a flaky Wi-Fi corner of the house — see our networked laser picks instead.
Does it need a subscription?
No. Brother sells an optional supply subscription and this printer prints normally without it. There is no plan to join, no page allowance, and no account requirement in order to make the machine work — which is the baseline this whole site is organized around, and which a surprising number of printers no longer meet.
Brother also has the strongest public position of the major brands on third-party supplies, and in 2025 that position was tested in a way worth reading before you buy any Brother machine: what Brother actually said about third-party toner.
When this is the right buy
All three of these need to be true at once, and if one of them is false the case collapses:
- You need color sometimes, not often. A presentation, a chart, a flyer, a color-coded schedule. Not photographs and not weekly color volume.
- The printer will go unused for weeks at a time. This is the one advantage no inkjet can answer. Toner is a dry powder; it does not dry out, because it was never wet. Why that is.
- The color has to be crisp, not photographic. Laser color is sharp, smudge-proof and fused to the page. It is not a photo print and it will not pretend to be.
Who should buy something else
- You want cheap color. Buy a tank printer. The Epson EcoTank ET-2850 costs less at list price and prints an ISO color page for a small fraction of any color laser. This is the single most common mistake in this category.
- You print documents and almost never color. Buy the Brother HL-L2460DW: a hundred dollars less, twice the speed, one cartridge. One color job a year at a print shop costs less than the difference.
- You need to scan. This machine prints only. See the Brother lineup chart for which letters in the model name mean a scanner.
- Photographs are the point. No laser is the answer, and this one least of all. Our photo printing picks explain why.
Where it lands
We keep this printer on the site because the buyer it suits is real and badly served: somebody who needs a bit of color from a machine that is ignored for months and still works on demand. For that person, the HL-L3220CDW is the right tool and the four cartridges are a price worth paying. For anyone optimizing cost per color page — which is most people who search for a color printer — it is the wrong machine, and the honest recommendation is a bottle-fed tank printer instead.