I'm so glad this brother aint related to me! (Brother HL 1450)

Member Name: anonymili

Product:	Brother HL 1450
Date:	03/03/06 (277 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can't actually think of any right now

Disadvantages: Constant paper jams and print spool errors are really irritating

~*~ INTRODUCING MY BROTHER ~*~

I have used this printer both at home and at work - when I used it at work, I was between offices, so didn't get the full brunt of just how useless this printer can be at times - had I known I wouldn't have bothered to get one for home use as it's almost worse than having no laser printer at all. The latest (and cheapest) price I could find online for one of these was £237 which is way too expensive as far as I'm concerned (I've had mine for several years and think it was about £160 when I first got it).


~*~ DIMENSIONS AND OTHER IMPORTANT-ISH STUFF ~*~

It's just over a foot in length and width and less than a foot in height. As laser printers go it's a smallish footprint but HP do offer similar sized laser printers. It isn't too heavy in itself but the paper tray is pretty annoying - you almost have to lift the printer to pull the paper tray out to refill it or to clear jams (and believe me, it jams QUITE OFTEN).

Holding about 250 A4 sheets, I'd say I was satisfied with the amount of paper this printer holds, but don't expect anything exciting for the manual feeder. You have to hold the paper at the manual feed slot and send your document to print at the same time as there is no flap to hold the paper - some people might find this acceptable, personally I find it annoying.

The print quality is pretty good when you're printing standard text documents but add graphics or pictures to your document or try to print black and white photos and your print quality deteriorates. I wouldn't recommend it for printing graphics heavy documents and the memory doesn't like an A4 photo. If you try to print a large picture at 1200 dpi it makes no difference to the quality so don't waste your toner. It comes with 8Mb standard memory which I understand can be expanded to 36Mb.

I haven't been able to pinpoint why the Brother jams so often, but apparently I'm not the only one who finds this, I've spoken to various ex-colleagues who used this printer regularly and they had nothing nice to say about it either.

Cheap and cheerful? Well cheap it might be but cheerful it certainly aint! I can be using the printer to print off documents in Word or Excel then suddenly out of nowhere I get a print spooler error, I never had this problem with any other printer I had connected to my PC.

It's advertised as being able to print 15ppm, I've not actually checked - but like I say, it jams so often I doubt it would actually print 15 pages in a minute without jamming or flashing some sort of error message at me. That leads me onto the lovely little LED display relating to printer problems. As they've obviously done this to save money by not displaying actual error message for you to work on, you have to refer to the manual to find out what the errors are, so more time wasted. More often than not, it's a paper jam!


~*~ CARTRIDGES~*~

You can pick up an original toner cartridge for your Brother for just over £40 and a remanufactured one for about £35 if you shop around.



~*~ CONCLUSION ~*~

All in all, having used this Brother for well over 2 years now I wouldn't consider buying one again. Don't think I'll be recommending this particular "relative" to anyone anytime soon...


NB: I think I've been quite generous with rating the features of this little beast!

Summary: This brother should be given up for adoption!

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