Excellent small office solution
Written: Nov 25 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Network connected, Postscript, Superb package
Cons: May seem costly to some, but it's worth the money
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| rikw's Full Review: Brother HL 1270N Laser Printer |
I have a small home office, which consists of a WindowsME desktop machine, a Win2K/Linux laptop and a Linux gateway/firewall, which connects me to the Internet. What I needed was a platform independent printer, which would give excellent quality and decent speed. After looking for quite a while, I discarded Ink Jet models due to higher running costs, smudging (yes, even the latest models smudge) and dependancy on a given OS/server platform.
I would be mainly using the printer for outputting MS Word, PDF, and LaTeX Postscript documents. If I wanted to print colour digital photos, I would certainly reconsider an Ink Jet. However, 99% of everything I print is plain greyscale.
Other printers are around, such as the Samsung range and other Brother printers (1030, 1250 etc.) which would have done the job just as well as the Brother 1270N. However, I really wanted Postscript emulation capabilities, which the 1270N had. This means that I can throw plain Postscript at the printer without having to translate it to PCL (as you do with other laser printers around this price). Now, many may say that the translation to PCL wouldn't make any difference. However, if printing from any OS other than MS Windows, you don't get a guarantee of driver performance with most modern printers. Therefore, having a standard, Postscript printer can be a bonus in the long run.
So what do you get? Well, there's the printer (duh), a tray capable of holding 250 pages (which is a really good size for the home office), a drum, a toner cartridge, and some drivers and docs. Installation is simple enough. Just put the drum/toner in the printer, load the tray, and fire it up. The printer does have a standard printer port (for connection to the parallel port on your PC), a USB port (for USB connection to a server) and a 10/100Mbps RJ45 connector. The latter is my chosen option for connectivity. The printer will do DHCP, which I run on my home LAN, so plugging it in had it find an IP address and appear on my network. You can then use the very easy (but functional) Brother software to configure your printer. You can get up and running in <30 minutes if experienced with this sort of setup.
Output quality is excellent. I first got the system up and running on a Linux box. The documentation that comes with the printer is superb and has sample printcap entries for Linux and detailed instructions for other OS. Kudos to Brother for this. You can then print directly to the 1270N over the LAN (e.g. lpr -P1270N filename.ps). Very easy, very convenient. To take this further, you could configure up SMB services on Linux to share this with MS Windows machines. However, I wanted to see what the Windows drivers were like, so set up printer sharing on my WindowsME system. Again, it was very easy to set up and gives excellent configuration options under Windows.
Initially I was put off the 1270N by reviews which said that it had "banded" graphical output. However, on my unit at least, I have seen no evidence of this, and put the output alongside any other laser I have seen before. However, if you want to print out lots of graphics, get an Ink Jet, not a laser. A colour laser may set you back a little more money!
I am highly impressed with the 1270N package, and put it as probably the best value network-connected printer, especially given its Postscript emulation. Furthermore, you can expand its memory with standard 72-pin SIMMS, which makes it very easy and cheap to upgrade.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
rikw
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Member: Rik Wade
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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