Back to Basics With Laser Printer
If you work in a busy office, there is no substitute for a good laser printer. Sure, low-cost inkjet printers now are capable of producing good-looking documents, but for speed, economy and quality of black-and-white printing, the laser is still king.
I’ve been testing two new laser printers designed for small businesses and busy home offices. The Brother HL-1650 ($599) and the IBM Infoprint 12 ($399) are speedy, economical and print clearly. Best of all, they’re a lot cheaper to use than an inkjet.
Costs for the Brother are about 2.3 cents a page plus the price of paper. Toner for the IBM costs about 3.3 cents per page. Both printers support Windows machines and Macs. The Brother comes with eight megabytes of printer memory and the IBM has four. Four megabytes is fine for small offices that don’t print a lot of complicated graphics.
Both printers accept optional Ethernet cards, which enable you to connect them directly to your office’s local area network, making them accessible to anyone in your office. Brother also makes a nearly identical HL-1670N model ($799) with a pre-installed network card and an extra eight megabytes of memory. The Ethernet version of the IBM Infoprint 12 costs $604, or you can upgrade a standard model for an additional $205.
Brother equipped my loaner machine with an Ethernet card, which enabled me to connect it directly to my network hub. The IBM machine didn’t come with the optional network adapter, so I connected it to the Universal Serial Bus port of one of my PCs.
Installing the IBM Infoprint was a breeze. It took me less than 10 minutes to take it out of the box, insert the toner cartridge, install the software and connect it to the PC port.
Setting up the Brother and connecting it to the USB port of a PC also was quick and easy. However, setting it up as a network printer was a bit trickier. Both printers come with a CD-ROM with drivers, but to get the Brother hooked up as a network printer I had to install and fiddle with a program called Brother Administrator Utilities. Any time you see the word “administrator” in a software package, it’s a dead giveaway that you’re going to be dealing with some complexity.
After plugging an Ethernet cable between the printer and my network hub and entering IP addresses and other minutiae into the software, I finally got the machine to print over the network. Unfortunately, I had to go through the same configuration process for every other computer on the network. But once I was finished, I had a single printer that could serve every machine in the office.
If all you need is a basic laser printer, the IBM is an economical way to go. But if you’re willing to spend a couple of hundred dollars extra for speed, the ability to automatically print on both sides of a page and some very handy printing options, then Brother’s new machine is tough to beat.
The Brother HL-1650 and 1670N print at 16 pages a minute, while the IBM model operates at 12 pages a minute. For limited use, the extra speed probably won’t matter much, but if you’re using it in a busy office, an extra four pages per minute means you won’t have to wait as long if others have printing jobs queued ahead of yours.
The biggest advantage of the Brother is its ability to automatically print on both sides of the page. If you have the “duplex” feature turned on, the printer spits out a piece of paper and then immediately draws it back in to print on the other side. The process is faster than inkjet printers with a similar function because there is no need to wait for the ink to dry before printing the other side of the page.
I’ve used the feature to print hundreds of pages, and, to my delight, it’s never jammed. My only complaint is that the duplex printing system isn’t smart enough to know whether you actually have enough material to require printing on both sides. It will still pull the page back even on one-page documents. That wastes a couple of seconds and a tiny amount of electricity, but it doesn’t waste any toner.
A handy feature of both printers is the ability to print multiple pages on a single page. I know that sounds impossible, so let me explain.
Let’s say you want to print a 100-page document. You could print it on 100 sheets of paper, use the duplex mode to print it back to back on 50 sheets or use the “4 in 1” multi-page mode to print four miniaturized pages on each side of a page, so you actually wind up using only 13 sheets of paper. Yes, it’s smaller and harder to read, but even with tired eyes, I was able to decipher a manual that I printed out this way. You can use this feature to print as many as 25 postage-stamp pages on a single page, but I can’t imagine why you’d want to.
Other nice features of the Brother include a color display panel that tells you--in plain English--what the printer is doing and whether it needs attention. You can load as many as 350 sheets of paper, compared with 250 sheets for the IBM printer.
Both printers are EnergyStar certified, which means that they use very little power when they’re idle.
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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 2:10 p.m. weekdays on the KNX (1070) Technology Hour. He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com.
