The Brother HL-2170W laser printer is a tiny laser printer compared to ones we've seen in the past, but differentiates itself by having wireless functionality. The theory is that you don't have to have it wired up to a network hub of switch, just tell it what your wireless network is plus any WEP security codes and you are good to go. Although setting up wireless printing was a traumatic experience.

We set this up in our test lab and tried to follow the instructions, but after various attempts at trying to follow the set-up manual, we drew a blank. Initially we gave up and installed the printer drivers and a normal USB connection just to look at the print quality (more on that later).

Like we said following the instructions didn't seem to get us anywhere, whether we tried to set up wireless or wired printing. No matter what we did, the printer would not print for us. Five hours in and we did what any journalist would do and called the PR company.

We have to admit that the average customer would not have this kind of access, so we hope that anyone having a tough time with setting this up would get a reasonable helping hand with making this printer work. Anyway, back to setting this printer up the easy way, using your contacts to get help quicker. As quick as a flash, the PR company managed to get hold of someone from Brother to show us what to do. After talking with this man we were up and running with wireless printing - although it has to be said what this person said bore little resemblance to what is printed on the instruction manual, but at least he made perfect sense and more importantly sorted out our wireless printing problems.

With that little incident out of the way, we could look at the printer properly. The machine is quite a small thing - a Kylie among laser printers - 17.05cm tall, 36.8cm wide, weighing 6.8kg. It can hold around 250 sheets of paper, enough for the average home user. It also sports a manual feed paper slot to handle an range of different paper sizes including Letter, Legal, Executive, A4, A5, A6, B5, B6, and envelopes. It also boasts 32MB of internal memory and a print speed of 22 pages per minute.

We loaded it with quite posh paper. While it managed to print out black and white documents most of the time we did get one paper jam quite quickly. Otherwise when you press print on your computer, it still managed to print quite quickly over the wireless network. Proper laser printer paper fared a lot better. The quality of printed documents is about what you'd expect from a  monochrome printer.

The control panel very simple indeed. It features one great big blue "Go" button and three small LEDs for toner, drum, and error status. Other than that, not much else. It's styling probably won't win many awards either. But for day to day printing with the right laser printer paper, the price (around £150)  makes this a bargain. Just needs the writer of manual to be given a swift talking to.

Rating: 7/10