Brother HL 6050DN

So working from home, you really need a good printer, yes I have the HP Photosmart 2610, but really I didn't want to be constantly using a colour printer, so I decide that a Laser printer was what I needed.

*** What did I get ? ***

After much thought, and looking at various options, I went for the Brother HL-6050D, although as I have a network at home, I should have gone for the HL-6050DN, oh well live and learn.

I got this printer on line from Misco, and it cost me around £340, but looking around you can get it for anything from £315 up to £390.

*** What's in the box? ***

The box is rather large, about a 75cm cube, it weighs about 20kg. Opening the box, and fighting through the very robust packaging, you come across the contents, A quick set up guide, a CD rom, the AC power lead, a toner drum, oh and the printer!!
The thing that really gets me about any of this type of peripheral is that you never get an interface cable, so remember to buy an Ethernet, USB or parallel cable. I went for the USB option; it is actually the High Speed USB2 that the printer supports.

*** Setting it up ***

First thing though, it is actually quite heavy, so take care when lifting, also the packaging is pretty big! Mine had to go upstairs to my office, so I unpacked before attempting the stairs.

To set it up, really easy, just follow the setup guide, when you do set it up, do not connect the interface cables, insert the CD and follow the set up guide. The set up guide actually tells you what to do when, which parts need to be taken out when. It is all done using graphics, so anybody can follow it. Again the set up routine will tell you when to connect up the interface cable, and when to print test pages. All in all it took less then 10 minutes to put the printer on my desk, connect it up and get it working.

On the desk, the printer takes 400 x 425 x 310 mm, so it is not small!

All the cable connections are neatly fitted at the rear of the printer, the on/off switch is located on the left side, and easy to reach.

*** Using it ***

Basically select print from whatever package you are using, select the printer, the number of copies, and off it goes.

I recently printed a number of documents, which were over 300 pages each, and it took about 5 minutes to print each document, so I would say it is really fast. According to the documentation the printer is "a high quality 24 ppm printer" By default the printer is set to 600 dpi, so the print rate is much faster than the 24ppm published, as this is the rate for 1200dpi.

When you select print from say a word document, you are presented with a printer dialogue box. From here you can select the quality of the print, the page layout, and more importantly if you print duplex. To print duplex (double sided) the printer controls you!! The first page prints, then a dialogue box appears telling to feed the already printed sheet back into the feed tray. I then realised that I had selected manual duplex doh! Selecting auto, the printer re-feeds the paper back through itself, and then prints the reverse of the first sheet. As a test I have just printed a 36 page document in duplex, and it took 1 ½ minutes at 600 dpi, I was quite impressed with that!

The controls in these dialogue boxes give you many options. One feature I really like is the watermark, so you can print a draft document, and put a "Draft" watermark on every page. You can customise this, and created your own watermarks.

On the front of the printer there is a manual feed tray, so if you are using say pre-printed sheets, you can feed them individually into the printer, I personally haven't used this feature on the printer

*** Is it any good? ***

Oh yes. I would certainly say that if you are looking for a good reliable laser printer, then this is the one for you.
The print quality is excellent. I do a lot of printing, and I found that the toner drum lasted for nearly 4 boxes of paper!! (a box being 2500 sheets)
A replacement toner drum costs anything from £50 to £60, depending where you go.

I have had a couple of feed errors with the paper, but I think I can put that down to the paper having just come out of my garage!!
The good thing about this printer is that if you do have a mis-feed, and you have to clear the mis-fed paper, the printer reprints the failed sheet, and then continues with your print job.

*** Some techie stuff ***

The printer has 32MB of standard memory, which can be expanded up to 160MB
The paper tray holds 500 sheets, and has a level indicator, so you know when it is running low.

You can do duplex printing (double sided)

It provides true 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution - a lot of the documents I print have graphics on them, and I have found that the greyscale printing quality is excellent.

On the CD you get software to install on a Windows based machine (from Windows 98 up to XP pro), you also get software for a MAC, also support for Linux based machines.

On the top of the printer, to the left there is a control panel and a 3 colour backlit LCD display. This has messages on, so if it is red, it indicates a problem, the message then tells you what to do, such as "clear jam from feed tray", if the LCD is orange, then it generally means the printer has data in its print buffer ready to print.

I have found that the power consumption is quite low, when the printer is in standby mode, it hardly uses any power!

You can buy an extra drum, which will support printing 30,000 sheets of A4! I'm not sure of the cost of this though.

The printer comes with a manufacturers 12 month guarantee.

You can check this printer out at http://www.brother.com where there are data sheets and various downloads to be had.

Thanks for reading this, and if you are in the market for a good quality laser printer, then this is certainly one to consider.

Larry