About me:I'm currently trying to raise £500 so that I can take my wife somewhere nice and special for our 10t...
Member since:08.02.2004
Reviews:39
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Review rated by 17 Ciao members on average: very helpful
This review received a counterstatement by a party concernedRead Comment
The Brother HL-1450 is, as far as printers go, attractively styled in it's plain beige, no-frills casing and due to it's compact size will prove popular with those who have limited desk space on which to store a printer.
The standard HL-1450 features a slot at the front of the unit for feeding single sheets of paper or envelopes and a second paper tray at the base for holding approximately 250 sheets of A4 or Letter sized paper. There are also three LEDs mounted on the front casing to give status messages and the ubiquitous reset button (if buying one of these printers you will get to know it well).
Most of the front of the printer consists of a fold-down flap behind which lies the toner cartridge and drum required for laser printing. Removal and replacement of the unit is relatively straight-forward, but the drum then needs to be separated from the old toner cartridge before being connected to it's replacement and put back into the printer. This makes removal of the drum relatively easy in comparison to many other laser printers, but a bit of a pain if you have to replace the toner on a regular basis.
Although billed as a workgroup printer, this unit needs to be locally attached to a PC or Mac by either the Parallel or USB port provided and then made available by sharing to other users of the network. The printer does not appear to have the option for the addition of a network card so there is no option of making it totally standalone.
Because of the requirement of connection to a PC, this printer is prone to all of the usual laser printer problems (paper jams, incorrect media loaded etc etc) but has the added disadvantage that if anyone is actually using the PC to which it is connected, printing speed and accuracy suffers accordingly. And this is only for starters...
The company for whom I work have, until relatively recently, had a 1450 as their only laser printer for use by the Admin department and it has been nothing but trouble in the two years it has been in service. Paper jams happened several times a day; the main causes were paper sticking between the toner and drum unit or simply failing to "pick-up" from the paper tray for no apparent reason. Because of these continuous paper jams and the time it takes to resolve them, the cost of owning this laser was infinitely larger than the cheap price tag attached to this unit, not to mention the amount of paper wasted.
The toner lifetime for the HL-1450 is actually quite good, but I think this may in fact be due to the fact that users get so fed up of their work never completing a job first time they simply use other HP LaserJets elsewhere on the network. I would also point out that the drum life is appalling. The last drum bought for the printer apparently only managed to complete 2500 sheets before deciding it had had enough; at over £100 a throw, the drum unit costs more than the printer these days.
And it continues to get worse. In order to cut manufacturing costs, all status messages are delivered via three LEDs mounted on the front of the printer as opposed to using some form of LCD display as is more common on workgroup printers these days. The status messages generated are totally meaningless but due to the frequency of paper jams, you can be fairly sure this is what the printer is referring to.
In terms of speed, if by some miracle you can get several pages through without a jam, you should get a respectable 12-14 pages per minute but again, this is dependent on what the host computer is doing at the same time as spooling print jobs...
Sadly the HL-1450 has absolutely nothing to offer to make up for all of these short comings. My biggest complaint about the printer is that cannot even do the job of printing very well. Sorry Brother, but if this is the standard of hardware you provide, it is going to be Hewlett Packard all the way in future...
can I advise you to go to the "edit review" link at top of page and add some information - the price and availability of this machine, for instance - is it portable? it looks small in the picture - in fact it looks similar to one I was considering from Viking Direct before I discovered I would probably not get a grant (after all) for equipment. jes ≈≈≈≈{; -)-{{::::: |||||<
by (59%):
by (41%):
15.01.2005 17:14
Dog? More like a poised cat of much worksgroup printness.....
12.01.2005 18:29
can I advise you to go to the "edit review" link at top of page and add some information - the price and availability of this machine, for instance - is it portable? it looks small in the picture - in fact it looks similar to one I was considering from Viking Direct before I discovered I would probably not get a grant (after all) for equipment. jes ≈≈≈≈{; -)-{{::::: |||||<
11.01.2005 20:32
Prob only good for the home user. John