Excellent Value for money (Brother HL-820)

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Product:	Brother HL-820
Date:	08/08/03 (27 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Relieable, Cheap To Buy, Cheap To Run

Disadvantages: Not super fast, A bit chunky

I bought my Brother Laser printer about 3 or so years ago. I wasn't sure if it was worth bothering getting a laser printer in the first place, but my wife was doing her Phd and would have to print out her thesis and about 10 trees worth of other stuff.

Initial Cost:

The initial cost of the printer was excellent. At the time it was pretty new to the market and about the cheapest you could get.

Refills:

Having heard of people getting stung before for very high toner and ink cartridges on cheap printers I had a look at the costs before I bought the printer. I was amazed that the toner was actually very reasonably priced. Having bought another toner quite recently, the good news it that they are still very reasonable.

Replacement Frequency:

I can't say how many pages I've printed out for each cartridge (Not been paying much attention). But in the time that I've had it I'm only on the third toner refill. So just under 1 a year, I haven't had any problems with them drying out, and the printer has been in reasonable use, but not to print anything like images (I've got a seperate colour printer for that), normally its just word documents.

Installation & Instructions:

Getting the printer to work is a doddle, windows pretty much does it for you with plug-and-play. I've had it running on both Windows 98 and Windows 2000 - and not a single problem. The only thing now is that it doesn't have a USB connector, but the parrellel connecter works fine. As for the instructions, pretty basic, but it's a printer, so its all you need.

Speed of printing:

On the average page that I print on it (basic word documents) it takes about 3 seconds per page.

Paper & Ink Saving:

The printer has the ability to print multiple pages onto one side of paper. A great feature if you just want to proof read something, saving ink and paper along the way.
r>Fitting in:

The printer itself is a little bulky, so you need a reasonable amout of space for it, hiding it away and plugging it in when you want to use it really isn't an option. But it isn't ugly (not pretty either) so if you don't mind, it's easy just to leave it on (or under) a desk.

Paper Storage:

You can feed a fair bit of paper into the printer, enough for most jobs I'd say. However the paper isn't in a draw, it is exposed and feeds in from the top.

Reliability:

As far as reliability goes, I'm very happy. Not a single problem or glitch, not even a toner cartridge dumping blothes of ink on the paper.

Web Site:

The Brother web site appears to currently be keeping up to date with drivers to support this printer for all Windows Operating systems, although in my experience it isn't really needed as Windows will automatically recognise it for you.

Summary:

This is a great budget laser printer, if you print out a load of text documents (of basic diagrams) and you want to do it cheaply, then seriously concider this printer.