Labs

The HL-1060 is the least expensive of this month's crop, but it has the look of a bread bin, with paper sitting in two sheet feeders at the top which are prevented from bending backwards by a wire support. It's not elegant, but it's obvious when you're about to run out of paper, and both feeders take 200 sheets of A4. The front one takes paper of variable widths, while the rear takes A4, Letter, Legal, B5 and Executive paper sizes.

If you want your output to be caught by the printer, the output tray has to be flipped out at the front, which adds about 27cm to the depth and makes it larger overall than most conventionally-styled lasers. The output tray is also rather flimsy and liable to be caught if it hangs over the edge of a desk. Fortunately, it's fairly flexible, but the whole arrangement won't win points for careful design.

The

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HL-1060 doesn't have an alphanumeric display of any kind, relying on five LEDs to keep you informed, along with the bidirectional interface which will talk to Windows and give you error messages via software. It has just one button, to take it on- and off-line and to let you wake it from sleep mode manually.

The Brother's nominal 10ppm print engine delivers 600dpi, with a 1,200 « 600 mode for Windows bitmap graphics only. It comes with 2Mb of RAM as standard, but for 1,200 x 600 resolution output you could need more. The printer memory can be expanded to 34Mb, but there's only one SIMM socket, so think about future needs before splashing out on memory.

The HL-1060 claims a manual duplex feature, although this isn't real duplex; a driver software extension simply prompts you to remove the paper, turn it round and re-insert it. This can give poor-quality, misaligned results.

In printing speed tests, the Brother came last. Our graphics-intensive 23-page test took 12 minutes, ten seconds to drop into the output tray, compared with two minutes, 27 seconds for the HP. This isn't surprising given the unit's relatively low price. Print quality was also fairly poor, but bitmapped images came out ahead of the more costly IBM unit. The HL-1060's text quality was markedly better than its graphics performance. Here, the quality samples ranked above the efforts of the Fujitsu and Lexmark models in some cases.