Brother HL-1260e

Unlike the disappointing HL-1060, which features in this month's Labs (see page 120), Brother's HL-1260e has been designed as a workgroup or standalone printer for use in more demanding environments.

The HL-1260e is quite large, weighing 15kg, but it has some attractive smooth curves despite being cube-shaped. At the front there's a huge paper input tray with a capacity of 500 sheets. An optional lower tray unit (£200) is available which can hold another 500 sheets, and the printer will switch between the two under software control. In addition, the HL-1260e has a separate multipurpose tray which can accommodate a further 150 sheets and handles more awkward media such as thin card and envelopes.

Printed pages emerge face down at the top into a 250-sheet capacity output bin. A small flap at the rear can be positioned to force the output to emerge face up, but there's no optional rear output tray. Instead, you can buy a duplex unit (£399) that enables you to print on both sides of the paper.

The HL-1260e has a very neat control panel positioned just under the top edge, which has a small LCD screen and four status LEDs. A series of eight buttons provides access to the various functions and settings, with menu options displayed in the LCD panel. Particularly useful is the way the panel can be tilted and locked in different positions to make it easier to read and operate.

High-speed, bidirectional communications come as standard via the parallel and serial ports. There's the option to add a modular input/output (MIO) card for direct connection to a network, but it's quite expensive and puts the price up a further £280. The basic model comes with 2Mb of RAM, which can be increased to a maximum of 66Mb using industry-standard SIMMs. The model reviewed here came with 6Mb of RAM installed. Brother uses a special memory management system, which performs data compression so that RAM consumption is minimised when printing complex pages.

At the front of the printer there are two extra slots. One is for an HP LaserJet-compatible font cartridge and the other is a PC Card Type III slot, which can be used to install Flash memory cards or even a hard disk PC Card for storing macros or downloaded fonts. The HL-1260e also features auto-emulation switching and is compatible with HP LaserJet 4 Plus, BR-Script Level 2, IBM Proprinter XL, Epson FX-850 and HP PCL5e. This means it can be used with most popular software without problems. The printer also has a total of 87 built-in fonts and 11 barcode character sets.

A 20MHz RISC processor enables the HL-1260e to achieve a maximum printing speed of 12ppm, so it's reasonably quick. From a cold start, the printer takes about a minute to warm up, around 20 seconds to produce the first page, and from this point maintains a steady output rate confirming the claimed speed. Printing a ten-page document took 48 seconds from start to finish.

Print quality is superb. A maximum resolution of 1,200 x 600dpi coupled with Brother's High Resolution Control and Microfine toner cartridge produces ultra-crisp text. When printing photographs the HL-1260e's 256-level greyscale Advanced Photoscale Technology helps it produce detailed and smoothly rendered images.

Consumables consist, unusually, of a single combined drum and toner cartridge costing £105. This is good for 6,000 pages at five per cent coverage,which works out at a more expensive than average 1.75p per page.

Documentation comes in the form of a basic user guide, which covers the initial setting up of the printer and troubleshooting. The rest of the manual is, irritatingly, supplied on disk. This isn't the most ideal solution, especially since the utility software supplied for printing the extra chapters doesn't let you view the document on screen - you have to print it out in order to access it. Supplying the additional chapters in Adobe Acrobat format or as a Windows Help file would have been more helpful.