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My Indesit washing machine review is still the most popular with 4000+ reads!
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Following my previous review of the Brother HL-1450, you probably thought that Brother couldn't make a worse printer, but somehow they have managed it with the HL-1270N. Where I rated the HL-1450 as a dog, the HL-1270N is a pure bred mongrel.
In appearance, the HL-1450 is almost exactly the same as any of Brother's range of desktoplaser printers. The top of the unit is taken up by the output paper tray and a blue plastic "plate" proudly declaring the printer make and model. The front is composed of a large door behind which the toner
and drum are located and underneath is the main paper tray (approximate capacity of 250 sheets of A4, Legal or Letter sized paper) which pulls out forwards. Also mounted on the front is the printer reset button and a woefully inadequate set of three LEDs which are used to indicate system status, job status and error status (you will get used to the error status if you buy one of these). Between the paper tray and toner door is a slot for feeding single sheets of paper or envelopes.
At the rear of the unit is a door from which paper jams can be cleared, the power input point and an RJ45 plug for connecting the printer to a network. There are also a standard Parallel port and a USB port for connecting the printer to a PC locally. If desired, the printer memory can be increased using a standard 72 pin SIMM by removing the network port and placing the SIMM in the socket provided therein.
As seems to be the case with most "work"group laser printers from Brother, the drum unit which is used to fuse toner to the paper during printing is attached to the toner cartridge itself. This is a nice idea in that it makes replacing the drum much easier than in say, an HP printer, but it does mean that when you replace the toner you have to pull the whole lot out of the printer, detach the toner from the drum, reconnect the new toner to the drum and then replace the whole lot into the front of the printer. Talk about rigmarole.
In terms of print quality the Brother is nothing special; this is a budget mono laser printer and is really designed for little more than printing letters. Graphics are reasonable quality, just bear in mind that you'll only have grayscale images to play with. Toner is relatively cheap and seems to last a good length of time. At my place of employment we generally find that a toner cartridge lasts between eight and ten weeks which is pretty good.
The HL-1270N which I have used showed its truly terrible pedigree through constant paper jams where the printer simply failed to pick up paper from its integrated tray any more. Adding a secondary higher capacity paper tray to the printer had no effect other than prolonging the pitiful life of this beast for an extra few months - once the extra tray was added, the original was no longer required.
However over time, the printer began to fail continually. Being a networked printer, the HL-1270N would receive up to twenty jobs at once and then jam on the first page of the first job in the queue. Clearing jams had no effect at all as the printer then jammed on the next page and so on, all the way through the queue, leaving nothing but a pile of half-printed pile of rubbish. Replacement of paper pickup rollers also had no beneficial effect and the only way to get the print jobs to complete was to manually feed every single page of every single job manually through the single page feeder slot at the front of the printer. It is impossible to give an indication of the print speed of the 1270N because I have never seen it complete more than two jobs in a row without jamming. I would reckon that if this printer worked, the manufacturer's estimate of 12ppm would be about right.
All the messing around clearing jams and print queues added up to hundreds of pounds in support costs on a weekly basis, but it took my employer 11 months to replace the 1270N.
There are plenty of other desktop laser printers available for a similar cost, and with my negative experiences of the 1270N, I would not recommend this unit to anyone.
As a wise man once said, buy cheap, buy twice.
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Advantages: Lots of features (postscript, network, easy to use) for the money Disadvantages: Sometimes tricky to kill print jobs (maybe more a Windows issue)
stevenkan 11.01.2001 ·
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Brother HL 1270
Advantages: Lots of features (postscript, network, easy to use) for the money Disadvantages: Sometimes tricky to kill print jobs (maybe more a Windows issue)
stevenkan 11.01.2001 ·
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Brother HL 1270
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Jan 12th, 2005
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