As a student who rarely has a need for colour printouts and for the most part, someone who prints out text simply because it's easier to read on paper, a cheap laser printer seemed a great improvement over my, slow, old, ink guzzling ink-jet.
The 1510 fit the bill perfectly. At the time it was priced at a bargain £49.99 making it comparable to many inkjets. It's clearly the cheapest and potentially the smallest laser out there. I purchased online so on its arrival I was expecting a flimsy plastic effort. I was very surprised. The pure weight of the machine is an indication of its quality, and it looks good too. The undercarriage type paper tray (250 sheets) is a feature usually left out of cheap models, but extremely useful as it makes the printer look much neater (unlike some of the older models where paper sticks out of the top). The automatic cooling fan and automatic power save features also make it feel like you've bought something that does contain a substantial amount of electronics. Clearly these are simple, and cheap additions but they do make the printer feel as if it's worth more than you paid for it.
It has to be said that it probably isn't the quietest of printers (52db) but it is quieter than many Inkjets (and silent when on standby) and at 15pg pm it's certainly fast enough for me. The There's only one button on top and that's to turn on and off the toner save (I leave it mostly on as the quality is fine for proof reading), otherwise the maintenance features are controlled by the easily installed software driver. It comes with 2MB of memory and a 68MHz processor. This means nothing to me but is a comparable spec to that of my first PC! Claims to be compatible with WIndows, Mac's and even Linux. Unfortunateley its USB but it's been fast enough for me.
Another nifty feature is the auto-sensing manual sheet feed on the front of the printer. This takes in envelopes / alternative media such as transparencies (for which it is excellent). With Word's envelope feature I simply insert the envelope and the printer does the rest for me. No need to mess around with paper size settings on the driver either.
The downfall is the fact that the toner cartridge is expensive (around £45). As a laser 'newbie' I'd no idea how this compared but a quick kelkoo search indicates that its around the low to mid range end of cartridge prices. The cartridge claims around 3000 pages but you'd get more with toner save on.
All in all I find this printer excellent. I've currently got it shared over a network and it's proving to be a fantastic workhorse. It comes with a two year ON SITE warranty which is fantastic considering its weight and it even came with a free 32MB pen drive.
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Jan 25th, 2005
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