Product Reviews

It's been some time now since USB (universal serial bus) ports began appearing on the backs of PCs and notebooks with the aim of tidying up and simplifying the connection of peripherals. Until the advent of Windows 98, however, support for the new 'standard' was thin on the ground and the supply of hardware was even thinner.

Brother's latest laser printer, designed for small office and personal use, is one of the very few printers to use the USB system (although you can still connect it using the more traditional parallel port connection if you prefer). Even here, though, the commitment to USB seems half hearted: the company only recommends using the USB connection on Windows 98 systems and, at the time of writing, doesn't even supply the USB cable. It makes you wonder why on earth it bothered with USB in the first place.

Apart from this innovation, the HL-1050 joins the ranks of devices that have recently been launched as high-speed alternatives to the low priced, high-quality inkjet printers currently dominating the low-end of the market. It boasts a fast 10ppm (pages per minute) print speed, a true resolution of 1200x600dpi, as well as 4Mb of memory and an internal formatter board to help it with more demanding print jobs and graphics.

In design terms, the HL-1050 looks very much like its predecessor, the 6ppm HL-760. A 200-sheet capacity paper bin protrudes at an angle from the rear of the printer with a manual feed slot just in front. The output tray folds out at the front

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like a large plastic tongue, giving the HL-1050 a virtually straight paper path, a feature which should reduce the frequency of paper jams and allow the printer to deal with thicker, card-like media without damaging it.

Another hinge on the front of the printer allows you to gain access to the toner cartridge and print drum assembly. You shouldn't have to replace the drum too often, as it lasts between 8,000 and 20,000 pages depending on the average length of your print jobs; the longer the print runs, the longer it will last. The easily-installed toner cartridges should last 2,400 pages each, giving an overall cost per page of between 1p and 1.6p per page, but most people's printing activities will put them at the more expensive end of this range.

Once connected, the HL-1050 is a breeze to get up and running - if you decide to run with the more traditional parallel port approach, that is. If you've decided to go with USB you'll need to install an extra driver before the main drivers - an odd approach considering that USB is supposed to make installation simpler - and you'll be deprived of Brother's useful printer status monitor, which tracks job progress, paper jams and the like.

Print speeds, once the printer was up and running, were acceptable but nothing mind-blowing. For a fourteen-page plain text document at 600dpi, the printer managed 8ppm, while - strangely enough - printing a report with a few charts and graphs produced a more acceptable 9.4ppm; not quite up to the claimed speed but close enough. Print quality for text was as crisp and clear as you'd expect from a laser printer, right down to the smallest of fonts. However, graphics were less impressive. The HL-1050 produced badly banded results and although boosting the resolution to 1,200x600dpi helped with the level of detail, it seemed to accentuate the banding.

Overall, the Brother HL-1050 is a bit of a mixed bag. Its implementation as a USB peripheral is at best half-cocked and print quality is only average. On the other hand it's reasonably quick and, at just £309, very reasonably priced.