Product Reviews

At first glance the Brother HL-820 could easily be confused with the HL-1050 (reviewed issue 49, p163), since both printers are more or less physically identical. The HL-820 is less well specified and cheaper, however, placing it more firmly in the SoHo desktop printer market.

Essentially, the HL-820 is a passive GDI-type device, although it doesn't make use of WPS (Windows Printing System). It uses Brother's version, called the Brother Printing Solution, instead. This works in much the same way as WPS, intercepting and compressing GDI data from Windows and passing it on to the printer in a form requiring minimal processing. The result is similar to other WPS printers in that you end up with an inexpensive but reasonably fast device, as long as the host PC is up to scratch. The HL-820 has 2Mb of memory, which it uses as a straightforward data buffer, but there's no provision for adding more.

A number of laser printers use some sort of variation on the classic cubic case design, incorporating a U-shaped paper path that deposits printed pages on top of the box. This has the advantage of being compact and moderately dust resistant, but in some instances the nature of the mechanism can produce page curl and can be unco-operative when it comes to printing on thicker paper.

Brother has given the HL series a very flat paper path leading from a fairly upright 200-sheet feeder tray at the back to an output catcher tray that folds down at the front. This is good from the point of view of paper handling, but it does make for a rather deep, space-consuming product. With the tray open for business, the Brother measures over half a metre front to back, which is the full depth of a conventional desk.

Setup was simple enough to suggest that even relatively inexperienced users ought to be able to get the Brother connected and working unless something unexpected goes wrong. All the software comes on a single CD-ROM, and there's a simple installation manager to walk you through each step. Admittedly, I've done this sort of thing many times before, but I went from sealed box to test page in under ten minutes, which is an encouraging sign.

The printer

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was equally straightforward to use once set up. In addition to the multipurpose sheet feeder tray at the back, there's a manual feed slot that sits just in front of it for the occasional envelope or brief change of media size. The driver contains the standard options for selecting resolution - 150, 300 or 600dpi, the degree of toner saving, as well as paper size and orientation, but there's no option for controlling toner density to fine-tune the appearance of shaded graphics. In fact, the only thing beyond the extremely basic is the final tab in the dialog box, which contains the various printing order choices for manual duplexing.

Like most printers these days the Brother goes into sleep mode if you don't use it for any short period of time, and it takes around 30 seconds to warm up again. This may be an eco-friendly function but it can be irritating, so Brother has provided the ability to disable it. If you're an Office 97 user, however, you might not need to bother doing this as the Brother Printing Solution driver senses when you select an application's Print option and wakes up the printer automatically. If you perform a preliminary setup, the machine should be awake and ready for action before you send the first page.

New printers are supplied with a so-called starter toner cartridge, which is rated for just 1,000 pages at five per cent coverage. However, replacement cartridges (£14.50) should last for an estimated 2,400 pages. The £82 drum unit is given an approximate lifetime of between 8,000 pages at one page per job and 20,000 pages at 20 pages per job, so the overall cost per page will vary depending on the sort of printing you do. Based on toner-only costs, this works out to between 1p and 1.6p per page, which is very reasonable for any laser printer, let alone in this class.

I couldn't quite reach the claimed figure of 8ppm. Text-only pages popped out at 7ppm, text and graphics at the same rate, and graphics-only pages at around 6ppm. As far as print quality was concerned, text was entirely satisfactory, with sharp edges at all point sizes, and dense, even black fills on large fonts. The clean edges applied equally well to line-art, which also reproduced very well, with minimal stepping on curving and angled lines.

Unfortunately, things weren't quite so rosy when it came to shaded graphics, which didn't reproduce particularly well. The main problem here was banding, which was clearly visible in photographic images but also showed up on anything with more than the most basic shading.

It's a shame, because apart from this deficiency the Brother HL-820 is a decent personal laser printer. It's reasonably quick, has good text output quality and a good price of just £209 as well as affordable consumables.