Brother HL 1230

...in the magazine was the Brother HL-1230. It wasn't the one with the most bells and whistles and it wasn't the fastest printer or the most dpi (dot per square inch), but overall when you compared them it was very, very efficient and excellent value.

We decided to do price searches on the internet. The prices were coming in at around £170 to £150 pounds. We have a Staples store quite nearby on one of those giant retail parks. We went ...
...pieces.

The Brother HL-1230 Laser Printer is just about 14" square and 9" high and sits quite neatly on the corner of our desk. In fact considering the space that you had to leave for the paper to feed out of on our old Lexmark Inkjet printer, then space wise they occupy about the same area of desk. Admittedly it's looks a lot bulkier that the Lexmark.

It's a nice light grey/cream colour, the usual shade for ... more

Having just started out in a new career, I was advised by one of my tutors to think about investing in a Laser printer. I have to print a lot of CVs and Letter to try and get myself work. Colour is very tacky in my industry. Black and white is where it's at. So a Laser printer is what I was hoping to get. I discussed it with Tigger and we decided that we should be able to afford it. Having been running two households for the last year on only one income while I was a student in London has hit our bank balances quite hard.

I mentioned the thought of buying a Laser printer to my father and a few days later he gave me a call and told me that Computer Active, the magazine, were doing Laser Printers on a price/performance comparison in the latest edition. I popped over to his house to have a look at the magazine. There were about 5 printers listed, but the one that made the biggest impression on the panel in the magazine was the Brother HL-1230. It wasn't the one with the most bells and whistles and it wasn't the fastest printer or the most dpi (dot per square inch), but overall when you compared them it was very, very efficient and excellent value.

We decided to do price searches on the internet. The prices were coming in at around £170 to £150 pounds. We have a Staples store quite nearby on one of those giant retail parks. We went online to try to find if they were selling it there. The Staples website was being revamped and they weren't offering a product list or mail order service at the time, their new website would be operational in about 7 days time. Well, we didn't really want to have to wait around and realised we should leave the house and have a look. Leaving the house. Whatever next? Off we trotted to Staples. Lo and behold they had the very printer we wanted. It was £149.99, just the bottom of the prices we'd seen online which was great. So we bought it and also a lovely new office chair too, because the old one had fallen to pieces.

The Brother HL-1230 Laser Printer is just about 14" square and 9" high and sits quite neatly on the corner of our desk. In fact considering the space that you had to leave for the paper to feed out of on our old Lexmark Inkjet printer, then space wise they occupy about the same area of desk. Admittedly it's looks a lot bulkier that the Lexmark.

It's a nice light grey/cream colour, the usual shade for office hardware and peripherals. At the bottom of the unit is the paper tray. This cassette hold 250 pages of paper and keeps it all in pristine condition. No more worries about smudging the paper or it getting dusty like in your old ink-jet printer, the paper is neatly hidden away. There is an indicator on the side of the paper cartridge drawer that shows you how full it is, but like a car fuel gauge it's not that accurate.

Above the cartridge is a manual feed slot. This is where you can put other things into the printer. Like envelopes, labels, pre-scored card for business cards or transparencies for overhead projectors. There are any number of applications and an adjustable guide to make sure you feed the paper or whatever through squarely.

Then you come to one of only two buttons on the machine. I love the fact that this printer is so simple, you just print and it prints, you don't have to press innumerable buttons on the printer to get it to work. The button is only really used if there is an interruption of some sort and you need to resume printing. The other button on the machine is the power switch.

There are various lights to signify things above the button. Drum - Ready - Paper - Alarm - Toner - Data. Only the Paper and Alarm ones are the ones you are likely to see. You might get the Alarm light if some paper has got jammed inside and needs to be manually removed. This has only happened once in the 3 months we've had the machine. The Paper light is obviously telling you that it needs more paper in the cassette. ***See Update Below***

The whole front panel actually pulls forward and is a flap revealing the toner cartridge inside. The basic toner cartridge (TN6300) prints about 3000 sheets before it needs changing. A replacement cartridge will cost £35.00 RRP. There is another high yield cartridge that you can buy which would print 6000 pages. This TN6600 will set you back £50.00 RRP. Inside the front panel is a little cartoon diagram of how to change the cartridge and also if you need to clean the drum.

On the top of the machine is the tray where the documents collect after they have been printed. This is a great improvement over our ink-jet printer. The ink-jet would push the documents out onto the desk and very often push the previously printed ones further up the desk, like that silly coin game thing at the fun-fair where the coins push each other over the edge end up spilling down, except that's fun when coins drop, it's rather less fun when the novel you've just written is cascading all over your home office.

The printer makes a fair bit of noise when printing, but it's mainly the fan keeping the unit cool that makes the noise. Again I'm going to compare my old printer to the lovely new one, but the ink-jet used to make a heck of a racket with the ink cartridge slamming back and forth inside it.

It comes with a power saving setting, so if it hasn't printed anything for a while it just sits dormant and waits for it's next job if you haven't switched it off. There is also the option to print things using less toner, which you do through the print menus on whichever software you are using. You can also put multiple pages on one side of A4. I find this very handy when printing off web pages, as you often get loads of advertising that you don't really need and it saves paper and ink.

What I am printing mostly is my CV, which has text and my photograph (the same one on my profile page here) and it handles both perfectly. It's not quite photo-realistic, but I don't really need it to be. This printer is more of a document workhorse. Tigger needs to use it for printing many assignments for the OPen University Degree he is taking, which include diagrams and the printer is very good with that sort of thing.

What I really like about a laser printer is the peace of mind you have when your documents are in the hands of your prospective employer. If he's drinking a cup of coffee and accidentally spills it onto you CV, you can rest assured that your words are not all going to drip off the page. The images are fixed onto the page as soon as they drop into the tray, so no more smudged documents or pictures if your thumb was a bit sweaty.

Overall I have to agree with the panel in Computer Active, this is an absolute must buy as an entry level machine in the laser printing market. It's only real drawback is the lack of USB, but most since everything else on our computer is USB, that left the parallel port free for this machine. I'm not sure how long this model will last out there as the more advanced machines will drop in price, but I seriously recommend picking one up if you are doing a fair bit of printing. You will probably save money in the long run with regards to the amount of ink you normally have to fork out for with an ink-jet printer.

One final note. When the Staples website was finally up and running a week later, they had this printer as a *Special Offer* £99.99 incl free delivery. Oooh, were we sick as dogs. But we got better.

~Regular Specs~

Up to 12 pages per minute print speed
Up to 600x600 dpi resolution
2Mb standard memory
Optimised drivers for Windows 95/98/Me/NT 4/Windows 2000
250 sheet universal paper cassette
Manual paper feed slot
Dedicated support page on solutions.brother.com
Automatic e-mail print software
Easy replacement long life toner cartridge
Parallel port

~Technical Specs~

See the website for all the full tech specs.

http://www.brother.co.uk/our_products/html/printer_hl1230.html

***Update*** It has started jamming a little more as I am using the single sheet feeder more often for printing my CVs and my impatience means I don't always get it in straight - (Oi! No laughing at the back) - and then have to pull it out and try to put it back in, but then it sometimes jams. A quick open of the paper cassette to check the paper is ok, then an open of the front panel and remove and re-insert the toner cartride works a treat.

 

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