Product Reviews

Although better known for its low-end mono laser solutions, Brother introduced a huge number of high-end models during 1998 and now has a comprehensive range of printers to suit every need. The latest is the HL-2060, which uses a 20ppm print engine and boasts a true resolution of 1,200dpi, although this brings the print speed down to 10ppm.

As with all of Brother's high-end lasers, the HL-2060 retains the classic cube shape. There are a few minor design changes: the front-mounted, hinged control panel has disappeared in favour of an inset panel in the top cover, which makes it easier to navigate. As well as its Type B parallel port and optional Ethernet print server card (£270), the HL-2060 also has a USB port - a feature that's common to all the latest Brother printers.

The HL-2060 can handle paper sizes up to A4 and Legal, and comes with a 150-sheet multipurpose tray and a single lower 500-sheet cassette. Capacity can be increased with a second 500-sheet lower tray (£229), while a duplex unit (£399) brings double-sided printing into play. Although the HL-2060's printing costs are soundly beaten by Kyocera's workgroup printers, they're still comparatively cheap: the toner cartridge lasts for 9,000 pages at five per cent coverage, giving overall running costs of 1p per page.

Hidden away inside the cube-shaped casing is a controller board based on a 100MHz Fujitsu SPARCLite processor. The printer also comes with PCL6 and PostScript 2 emulation as standard. Standard memory complement is only 8Mb, however, which is odd given that the printer needs a minimum of 16Mb to print at 1,200dpi using the PostScript driver. Fortunately, the printer takes industry-standard SIMMs and can be upgraded to 72Mb. The version on review came with 16Mb installed, adding just £20 to the asking price. In fact, Brother appears to be one of the few printer manufacturers that doesn't take liberties with its memory pricing and actually recommends shopping around on the street for the best upgrade bargains.

Installation can take a number of different paths thanks to the range of ports available but, if you want to connect it with the USB, Brother recommends using Windows 98 systems. You'll need

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to load a proprietary USB printer port driver first, but afterwards you can plug and unplug the printer at will. As with the HL-1050 (reviewed issue 49, p163), the local status monitor that can be turned on from the driver panel will only work with the parallel port connection.

Network installation for the HL-2060 sees substantial improvements with the introduction of Brother's BRAdmin32 utility. This is similar to HP's JetAdmin in that it automatically searches the network for Brother print server cards and displays them in a list for easy selection. At this point you can configure NetWare bindery or NDS (Novell Directory Services) and create and assign queue objects, although you can't create users and assign printing privileges. However, the network card is fully compatible with JetAdmin and WebJetAdmin so, if you already have HP printers on your network, you'll be able to manage the lot from one interface. The card also supports TCP/IP, allowing you to access printer settings directly using a standard Web browser.

I tested the HL-2060 using a Pentium II/266 USB-equipped system with 64Mb of memory and running Windows 98. In terms of performance, I found it printed at a remarkable range of speeds depending on the resolution selected. At 600dpi, the printer delivered both text and graphics-based documents at close to the quoted speeds. But printing at the highest resolution caused it some serious problems. A 24-page Word document took 75 seconds at 600dpi for 19.2ppm, while the heavily formatted PC Pro mono laser test was delivered in 85 seconds at an average of 17ppm. Adjust the settings to 1,200dpi, however, and you'll be in for a long wait; print speed took a tumble down to around 5.5ppm for both tasks. The choice of port made little difference: printing using the USB, parallel port and network card produced almost identical results for all the tests.

The print quality is good, but not good enough to make it worth waiting for 1,200dpi. As with most lasers, text is sharp enough at 600dpi but you'll be hard pushed to spot the differences at 1,200dpi. The higher resolution is primarily aimed at graphics printing but, unlike HP's LaserJet 2100TN (reviewed p170), the improvements aren't that great. Even so, photographic images show high levels of detail and smooth greyscales with only minor banding to spoil the overall effect.

Surprisingly, the HL-2060 has little competition; the majority of printers offering similar speeds and higher resolutions such as HP's LaserJet 5000GN (reviewed issue 44, p165) can also handle A3-sized paper. If you don't need the latter feature you'll find the HL-2060 offers a good specification for the price, but bear in mind that the claimed print speed at 1,200dpi will be virtually unachievable with the standard 8Mb of RAM.