Brother HL-L2460DW review

Who it’s for

The Brother HL-L2460DW is a print-only black-and-white laser for homes and small offices that mostly print text: forms, tickets, schoolwork, invoices. It doesn’t scan or print color. What it does well is the thing inkjets struggle with: sitting unused for weeks and then printing a clean page the moment you need one. RTINGS calls it the best budget laser and the best budget black-and-white printer, and that’s a fair summary.

Design and setup

It’s a compact box, about 14 inches wide and deep and 7 inches tall, light enough for one person to move at 15.6 pounds. Paper loads into a 250-sheet front tray, with a single-sheet manual slot for envelopes and card stock.

Connectivity is the best in Brother’s HL-L24xx print-only range: dual-band Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, Ethernet and USB, plus AirPrint and Mopria for phones. You install the toner and drum yourself, then run Brother’s mostly automatic driver installer. PCMag’s one complaint here is the one-line display, which makes typing a Wi-Fi password more fiddly than a touchscreen would. The Brother Mobile Connect app is the easier route.

Print quality

This is where the HL-L2460DW is merely fine. PCMag found business text good enough for nearly any document, readable from 6 point in most fonts, but short of the best mono lasers. Graphics showed visible banding and uneven dark fills, and in one chart a dark gray line nearly disappeared against black.

RTINGS says out-of-the-box quality is below what it expects from Brother, and that changing a few print settings improves it. If your pages look a little light or blotchy, check the print density and resolution settings in the driver before blaming the toner. If crisp text is your priority, HP’s LaserJet M209dw printed better in PCMag’s tests, with toner lock-in as the trade-off.

Speed

Once it gets going, it’s quick: PCMag measured 37 pages per minute after the first page, a touch above Brother’s 36 ppm rating, and its two-sided printing was also near the top of its group. The first page is the slow part. It was the slowest of the four printers in PCMag’s comparison to get the first page out, and RTINGS notes it takes a little while to warm up.

Running costs

The HL-L2460DW uses two separate supplies: TN830 toner and a DR830 drum. At Brother’s own prices in October 2026, here’s what a page costs:

Toner	Toner per page	With drum
TN830 standard (1,200 pages, $60.99)	5.1¢	6.1¢
TN830XL (3,000 pages, $98.29)	3.3¢	4.3¢
TN830XL twin pack (6,000 pages, $176.49)	2.9¢	4.0¢

The drum ($157.99, about 15,000 pages) adds about 1¢ per page over its life. That’s a real cost on paper, but at 100 pages a month a drum lasts more than a decade, so light users may never buy one. The printer ships with a 700-page starter cartridge, so plan on buying an XL cartridge early.

Toner prices have risen since PCMag measured 2.4¢ plus 0.9¢ for the drum in 2024. Retailers often sell the XL cartridge for less than Brother’s list price, so shop around. Brother’s Refresh EZ Print subscription is optional and only saves money if your plan matches how much you actually print.

Reliability and toner

Lasers don’t have printheads to clog, and RTINGS rates the HL-L2460DW outstanding for set-and-forget use. It needs no account and no subscription to print.

In 2025, Brother faced claims that firmware updates degraded third-party toner. Brother said publicly that its updates don’t block third-party supplies, and we found no documented block on this model. That’s a meaningful difference from HP, which designs its LaserJets to reject cartridges without an HP chip.

How it compares

• Brother HL-L2405W: about $40 less, but drops automatic two-sided printing and Ethernet, and prints at 30 ppm.
• Brother MFC-L2820DW: the same engine and supplies with a scanner, copier, fax and document feeder. RTINGS’ pick for the best black-and-white printer overall.
• HP LaserJet M209dw: sharper text in PCMag’s tests and a drum built into the cartridge, but HP-only toner and a smaller tray.

See all our picks in the best laser printers, or weigh it against an ink-tank printer in ink tank or laser.

Should you buy it?

Yes, if you print black text and want a printer that just works. It’s well connected, fast once warmed up, and doesn’t clog or lock you into one brand of toner. Change the print settings out of the box, buy XL toner, and it’ll quietly handle years of pages. Skip it if you need to scan or copy (get the MFC-L2820DW) or want the sharpest text in a small laser (consider the HP M209dw).