Product Reviews

It's been quite a while since we last saw a personal mono laser printer from Brother, with the HL-820 appearing way back in issue 52. Since then we've seen a number of medium-sized workgroup printers, although none have really grabbed our attention, such as the HL-2060 (see Labs, issue 70, p110), which disappointed with low output quality and speed. The HL-1650 is Brother's latest personal mono laser printer, which maintains Brother's traditional naming strategy, but hopefully not its recent performance trends.

The first thing that strikes you about the HL-1650 is its subtle styling. Gone are the straight lines and industrial, boxy appearance to be replaced by an altogether more curvaceous and, dare I say, modern design. It's certainly among the more stylish mono lasers.

The basic specification of the HL-1650 reflects the recent advances in laser print engine technology. The HL-1650 boasts a maximum quality setting of 2,400 « 600dpi and is claimed to reach a maximum 16ppm (pages per minute) - around 4ppm higher than current designs, such as the 12ppm Xerox P1210 (reviewed issue 76, p149). Helping to drive this performance is a 100MHz Fujitsu processor, supported by a healthy 8Mb of RAM. This can be expanded to a maximum of 136Mb using 100-pin DIMM modules, which should cater for the vast majority of users.

More impressive, though, was the inclusion of an integrated duplex unit. This shows a good deal of consideration on Brother's part, as duplexing can save huge amounts of paper in the general office environment. I was also impressed by the three-colour LCD, which gives you an at-a-glance indication of the printer's status by, for example, changing to red when there is an error.

Brother also offers an IrDA interface for £119, which provides infrared data transfer capability for PDAs and notebooks. There are also facilities for automatic email printing and secure printing with a PIN, which are both worthy additions.

After such an impressive array of features I was then disappointed to find only a 250-sheet main input tray, which means you must separate a full ream of paper and store the rest, unlike Samsung's ML6060 (reviewed issue 74, p177) which can accept a full ream. However, Brother offers a secondary 250-sheet tray for £149, which boosts

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the overall capacity to 600 sheets, including the multipurpose tray.

I began performance testing with our 50-page plain text document at the standard 600dpi setting using the parallel interface. The test was completed in a very quick two minutes, 59 seconds for the full 16ppm. This is a fine achievement, giving a significant performance advantage over the Samsung ML6060, which has a maximum 12ppm rating. Text quality was also hard to fault, with text reproduced in a crisp dark black, easily matching the Samsung ML6060.

Next was the 24-page DTP document, which often presents problems for printers with small amounts of installed memory. However, the HL-1650 hardly broke a sweat reaching a highly impressive 15.7ppm, in some part thanks to its 8Mb of memory. Even IBM's InfoPrint 12 (reviewed issue 78, p148) with 36Mb of RAM failed to achieve its rated speed in this test, so the HL-1650's performance is all the more impressive. Text was again superb, although graphics fared less well, with a lack of contrast and detail compared to the Samsung ML6060. Retesting using the integrated duplex unit also produced an impressive turn of speed, managing just over four double-sided pages per minute, equating to about 8.4ppm in normal terms.

The trend continued when it came to our 12-page Excel test, with the HL-1650 achieving a quick 15ppm. Quality was poor, though, particularly with greyscales, which appeared as fine meshed patterns instead of smooth shades. The HL-1650 also had difficulty resolving text set against shaded backgrounds, in some cases distorting text badly.

It's worth noting that the performance through the USB interface was considerably poorer than when connected via parallel. Through USB, print speeds fell drastically to 9.5ppm, 4ppm and 5.2ppm for the text, DTP and Excel tests respectively. As there should be no difference in speed between the two connections, this suggests a driver-related problem.

Our final test was the high-resolution quality test, which was printed at the maximum 2,400 « 600dpi setting. This was handled well, with reasonable detail, although shades were still not smooth, and greyscale fades displayed noticeable stepping.

At £51 for a 6,500-page toner cartridge and £95 for a 20,000-page drum unit, the HL-1650 is quite economical to run, working out at around 1.3p per page at five per cent coverage. Also, like most current personal laser printers, such as the Samsung ML6060 and IBM's InfoPrint 12, the HL-1650 features a toner-saving option, which reduces the amount of toner used, potentially extending the life of the toner cartridge.

The Brother HL-1650 is certainly commendable, especially its built-in duplex unit and excellent performance. The only area of concern is with graphics output quality, although if your main criterion is text quality and speed, then the HL-1650 will serve you well.