60252 Rimfire Rd. Bend, OR, 97702 USA
I've got a new printer, and boy is it spiffy! This is a review of the Brother HL-1650 duplexing laser printer. If you want the guts without having to read the review, here's the upshot: when I bought it, it was $540 new and was the only laser printer under $1000 with Postscript and auto-duplex, and it is worth every penny. It is fast and makes beautiful print-outs, and it works flawlessly with Linux Mandrake (8.0) and Cups via USB. Could you ask for more?
Table of Contents
I just received my Brother HL-1650 printer, and boy, is it nice.
Ok, so it just arrived. I haven't had a chance to really put it through its paces, but here's my initial impression. I'll update this review as I become more familiar with this printer.
This is a $550 laser printer with full duplexing, and true 600x600, pseudo 1200dpi, quality. It prints "up to" 16 pages per minute, a claim the CNet reviews says is a bit optimistic, as all manufacturer-reported print speeds are. It certainly is a snappy printer. You can get the rest of the specs from numerous sources on the web.
Note: CNet claimed to have gotten terrible print speeds via the USB cable; I haven't experienced this problem, but then again, I'm not using Windoze.
First off, the packaging is beautiful. What makes it so nice are the little things; there isn't anything earth-shattering, but by the time you've unpacked, you realize that nothing about unpacking the printer has annoyed you. When you open the box, you're greeted with a standard warning sheet telling you that you should save the packaging material in case you ever need to transport the printer. I do this by default, but I imagine that there are people out there that this advice would really help. Brother didn't over-use twist-ties or bags, and all of the tape actually peels off of whatever it is taped to, rather than ripping (plastic bags) or leaving a sticky residue. There is a minimum of printed documentation, with the now-obligatory butcher-paper-sized, picture-enhanced, even-an-illiterate-person-could-follow-this instruction sheet. The only downside is that Brother doesn't supply a cable with the printer, and if I hadn't had an extra USB cable, I wouldn't have been able to use my printer until I got to the store to buy one.
I actually followed the instructions this time, and had the printer plugged in and ready to go in a couple of minutes. The first thing I noticed is that from power-on to ready-to-print barely took 10 seconds, if that. Being used to an HP 4+ at my office, I was expecting a similar minute-long warm-up, but the Brother came right up. The second thing I noticed was how loud the printer wasn't. Again, I can hear the HP warming up from my office, which is next to the room that has the printer in it. The Brother is much more quiet.
I printed the build-in test pages, and they are gorgeous. I don't know what resolution the demo prints are printed at, but they are truely impressive. They printed extremely fast, as well, again easily trouncing the HP in print speed.
Next was the big test: getting the printer to work with Linux. Now, Linux is great once you have it installed, but sometimes it can be a trial to get hardware properly working with the OS. I'm running a frankenstein machine based on the Mandrake distribution (my own kernel), and at the time of this writing I'm using KDE 2.2b2, which is, for lack of a better adjective, sweet. To further complicate matters, I connected the printer via USB, and am running cups. For those of you who don't know, this is new-ish software (cups) via beta software (kde) on fairly new software (kernel 2.4), driving a new printer over relatively new technology (usb). It isn't as rickety as it could be, but is much more risky than it normally is.
I run Kups, the KDE interface to Cups, which didn't detect the printer, but told me that if I might have to restart Cups to get it to see the printer. I did, and it did. Not only that, but Cups correctly identified and selected the proper printer driver for the printer! I was especially happy to see that Cups understood the duplexing feature of the printer, and allows me to toggle it via software. The last laser printer I had was an Okidata 810E/PS, and it was a pain to get Linux to let me toggle the input tray, much less any other features. Linux has come a long way. In any case, the printer was installed on my system (and available to all applications without rebooting or restarting the applications, thank you) within minutes. This was one of the simplest and smoothest installs I've ever performed.
The printer goes into sleep mode, and comes out of it, pretty quickly.
All of the manuals are on PDF. This is great for saving paper, but it makes it difficult to browse the manuals while on the toilet. 'Course, I could just print them out, in glorious duplex, myself...