Brother HL-1250 Laser Printer

Rating:
Summary: The best.
Review: I bought this printer about half year and never had a problem with it. Print quality is very high and it starts very fast and prints fast. It's a very quiet printer with a low price per page (a suggestion: go with a high-yield replacement toner cartridge). It may be true that output is a bit fine, but for 99.9% of users it will be perfect in my opinion. Overall, very happy with it.

Rating:
Summary: Printer is designed wrong and cannot be fixed
Review: I purchased the Brother HL1250 laser printer for use in my home office connected to a Dell pc operating Windows 98 and Office 2000. I only print 25 pages a day average but want top quality. With most typefaces I use, the printer will not print in normal "black" ink--it comes out either medium gray or dark gray. This is true with the typefaces: Courier, Times New Roman and A Garamond. I immediately called the Brother Service Representative (per instructions on the box) and was told that this is not fixable but most people don't object and that I should try Arial typeface that prints a little bolder normally, and it did. It will print "black" when you select to make your typeface "bold," so it's clear the printer is capable of proper black intensity--simply not designed to do so all the time. I don't know how it will do with graphics or other normal needs and can't take a chance. It only gets a low one star rating because it simply is incapable of normal printing needs outlined above, which is acknowledged by Brother. With considerable disappointment and aggravation it was returned to Amazon (cheers for Amazon) and the whole selection process starts again.

Rating:
Summary: HL does not equal HP
Review: Our office got one of these since it was hundreds cheaper than a similar Hewlett Packard (HP) LaserJet. While I was a huge fan of HP LaserJets because in my years of experience with them they never, ever, ever complained, rarely jammed, and never died, I was willing to give the Brother (HB) a fair trial.

What a mistake! Over a year's use in a small office (7 users) with fairly simple print jons, this Brother printer would regularly hang and require a power cycle and random opening and closing of doors to make it reset.

I never saw this sort of behavior with HPs

The moral? Laser printers have a lot of moving parts in a harsh environment (high internal temperatures and toner dust). You can get away with a cheap monitors, motherboards, and almost anything else electronic, but with printers a cheap design will absolutely cost you downtime and frustration.

My advice - if you value your time and rely on your printer, look at something more solidly designed. I recommend HP LaserJets.

--Pat / [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: faulty carriage return
Review: The Brother HL-1250 monochrome laser printer works great up to one point. The carriage in the laser printer is susceptible to breaking if the paper gets jammed or is too thick like in card stock. It can break. It broke once under warranty; it broke a second time outside of warranty.