Brother HL-1650 review

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.

Author: Gareth Ogden