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Brother HL-1650 Laser Printer

Brother HL-1650 Laser Printer

List Price: $499.99
Your Price: $499.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Works great for first year
Review: The printer works fine for the first year or two. I had no complaints until the third toner cartridge. At that point, I needed to replace the magnetic drum as well. The symptom is that the printouts become gradually darker. This symtptom is common to several other users as well.

Anyways, I replaced the drum ($100) and the toner cartridge ($60?) and the printouts are now darker than ever.

I am just going to buy another printer.

My advice: Buy it knowing it will work fine for a couple of years, and don't bother getting a new drum. Just throw it away.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: An excellent bang for the buck 1200 dpi laser printer
Review: This Brother HL-1650 is a surprising great workhorse. Its as solid as the HP 5MP it replaced and prints a realistic 14 ppm. Since I use the printer mostly with accounting software, I gave it 4 stars and not 5. Reason being that I use pre-printed checks with this printer. So the checks don't offset (ghost), the printer must be set in "transparency" mode, which allows it to print slower (at approx 10ppm) so the fuser can apply more heat to the toner. All in all a great printer that I highly recommend...

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: An excellent bang for the buck 1200 dpi laser printer
Review: This Brother HL-1650 is a surprising great workhorse. Its as solid as the HP 5MP it replaced and prints a realistic 14 ppm. Since I use the printer mostly with accounting software, I gave it 4 stars and not 5. Reason being that I use pre-printed checks with this printer. So the checks don't offset (ghost), the printer must be set in "transparency" mode, which allows it to print slower (at approx 10ppm) so the fuser can apply more heat to the toner. All in all a great printer that I highly recommend...

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: not bad
Review: This is a pretty good printer. Its about the cheapest duplexing laser available, and is feature packed and pretty sturdy too There is a new brother 18?? out that is the same thing only slightly faster with more standard memory. But the 1650 is fast enough.

Im at about 3000 pages on my first toner, so I can't comment on toner life. Out of those 3000 I have had only one jam (my fault) and only a few cases where it would take 2 sheets instead of one. Having a real duplexer has the advantage that if it feeds 2 sheets at once, you only waste 2 sheets, and not a whole stack of paper (using the flip over the stack manual duplex method)

The controls on the printer are nice. There is an option for print density ranging from -6 to +6. Setting this to -1 should improve toner life in addition to the tonersave feature, and is uaually still dark enough for most purposes.

Having both postscript and PCL is convienent, but it can get pretty slow with large postscript graphics. It seems to handle complex and large PCL jobs without any speed penalty.

It doesn't seem able to deal with long parallel cables (as in out-of-spec long) But USB is better anyway so it doesn't really matter.

By default the 1200dpi mode is a little too dark, and it doesn't have tonersave. I usually use the printer's menu to lower the density when printing at 1200. In general the graphics output is less than stellar, but it is good enough for most things.

The booklet printing mode is flawed. It puts 4 pages on a sheet, and you have to fold the stack in half. But for big books one can't very well fold a stack of 100pages. A solution is to prent in 16 page sets, but it would be nice if it could be done automatically (it should be possible to add this feature via a driver update). A book printed in this manner can be bound using a small drill, a clamp, and some cord, and feels a lot like a real book.

Now I just wish I could find a source for extra thin A5 sized paper.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent Printer for it's price
Review: This is certainly the best valued printer you can get. I have been user later printer for a long time. They have mostly been HP which I have always believe to have the best quality and value with it's reputable name in the market. However, I have been doing a research on the brother HL-1650 and found that it's feature with the price tag are just too good to be true. But with the 5 star rating it has, i decided to give it a try. I can tell you that I haven't regretted since. It's got professional printing quality with excellent function. Automatic Duplex-Printing is one of my favorite. Now I don't think i will go back to HP now more considering the price and the function that you can get between brother and hp.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: BROTHER PRINTER
Review: WE HAVE A VERY SIMILAR PRINTER THE 1470N FOR OUR OFFICE. WE ALSO HAVE A HP LASERJET 5M. THE HP PRINTER COST ABOUT 2K MORE THAN THE BROTHER (AND IT PRINTS COLOR) BUT IT IS SLOW WHERE AS THE BROTHER PRINTS LIKE THE WIND. THE ONLY NEGATIVE I HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE BROTHER PRINTER IS THAT IT SEEMS TO USE A LOT OF TONER, BUT IF YOU CAN DEAL WITH THAT, THE SPEED OF THE PRINTER MORE THAN MAKES UP FOR IT.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: BROTHER PRINTER
Review: WE HAVE A VERY SIMILAR PRINTER THE 1470N FOR OUR OFFICE. WE ALSO HAVE A HP LASERJET 5M. THE HP PRINTER COST ABOUT 2K MORE THAN THE BROTHER (AND IT PRINTS COLOR) BUT IT IS SLOW WHERE AS THE BROTHER PRINTS LIKE THE WIND. THE ONLY NEGATIVE I HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE BROTHER PRINTER IS THAT IT SEEMS TO USE A LOT OF TONER, BUT IF YOU CAN DEAL WITH THAT, THE SPEED OF THE PRINTER MORE THAN MAKES UP FOR IT.


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