Printer Reviews

More economical than an inkjet, but do a price comparison of other machines, factoring in the separate costs of both the toner and drum. Brother's own specs. are deceiving, leading one to believe that a 20,000 page count for the drum means that one actually can print approx. 20,000 pages, when in fact that estimate is based on triple spacing -- when was the last time you did triple space printing? I also had the expectation that the toner would last for somewhat longer than it does - Brother should consider manufacturing high yield toners. Over the long run, if one is doing relatively large output printing, it is more cost efficient to purchase an HP.

Approx. halfway into the life of the toner, the "toner low indication" light appears, so there is obviously a problem with the toner sensor.

Sometimes the machine does not pick up faxes (I use the distinctive ring feature), although clearly people are trying to fax a document to me. I am not sure if this is a failing of the distinctive ring feature or the machine generally.

The automatic feeder function is generally unreliable if you try to fax or copy more than one page at a time; for instance, I have tried faxing/copying upwards of 10 pages at a time, and sometimes it will only fax/copy 5-6 of the 10 pages.

Sometimes the print command is unresponsive, and it will involve either re-sending the print command, or shutting off the MFC altogether. Considering the time required for warm-up, this can be annoying.

I could never get the scanner software to work, even after calling in techs to ensure proper installation, so have not used this function.

If the machine is within 5 feet of your work station, you will have difficulty hearing anyone on a phone.

Sometimes it would be useful to have legal (flatbed) photocopying capability.

Also, there must be a defective hinge, because the cover has always felt ready to fall off.

When taking the machine in for repairs, most repair shops will provide you with a courtesy fax machine, without distinctive ring, while the MFC is undergoing the typical 5-days in the repair shop. The problem with that however is you may not have a separate phone line for the courtesy fax. In other words, this defeats the purpose in having the distinctive ring feature in the first place, because you are either going to have to install another phone line or have to rent an MFC - the costs of which will overcome the initial purchase price of the Brother MFC. Unless, of course, you can close your office for a week and don't care if you miss any faxes.

My warranty has yet to expire, but I've already purchased an HP MFC to replace this product. The Brother MFC6800 probably suffices for most home and very small office purposes (overall, the printer works very well and produces quality output), but if you have high demands, don't want to in the long run spend a lot of money on toner, and don't want to stand over the machine feeding paper into the sheet feeder one by one, then keep looking for something more suitable for your needs. (I can't endorse the HP MFC just yet as I have not put it to the test, but I've done the cost comparison and it will be less costly for supplies.)

I was going to buy this just for the stand alone fax but after I installed and set up the whole package, I've turned it into my default printer. I've had multi function machines before but this is far and away the best. Maybe it's because it's a laser, but it prints and copies fast. The fax setup was a breeze as was installation. Output is very good. In short, a winner. True, it doesn't have color, but I have little need for that. I will admit I haven't tried the scanner yet, but the excellent fax, copy function and printer function make it worth the money.

I replaced my long-running Brother MFC-P2000 with this unit because of the excellent experience I had with the original Brother product. This one is even better! I needed to add fax capability and wanted a flatbed scanner - this model does it all! Trust me, if you need color, buy a less expensive ink jet for those times in addition to this one. The laser quality of this machine is perfect for any home office work you need to do. It is fast, SUPER QUIET, and produces excellent fax, copy, scan, and most importantly print output. The key layout and menu structure are simple and great. I recommend this product without reservation.

I've read all the prior reviews with interest. I bought my 1280 over a year ago based on reviews on several well known and trusted Digital Photography sites. I have been very pleased with the output of this printer. Yes, the printer takes more work to get a really GOOD print then the HPs. But then I have the HP printers also and they do not measure to pure quality of print. Yes, the ink cartridges are small and do not last long if you print alot of 8x10, 13x19 like I do. But, for 250 bucks you can buy a CIS (continual inking system) that pays for itself in 3 months. Yes, the Epson ink will jam the heads IF you do not use the printer at least once every few days. Again, the printer is for PHOTOGRAPHS, not text, not the occasional print job and certainly not the occasional picture. This printer is for the professional or serious amateur photographer. I have seen alot of prints from other printers and even with the flaws, this printer is the best. I wish a few things. Epson would update the drivers more often. The supplied software is marginally usable and they ding you 30 bucks for the real package. At 400 dollars for a printer, Epson could have given us the software given the price tag of the ink cartridges. I have run Epson, Illford and Inkjetart paper through this printer will very good success.

I just set up my new Epson Stylus 1280 printer. It works great with my iMac computer. The only drawback I can see is that I was looking for a printer that used separate cartridges, and this one doesn't. Otherwise, it prints beautiful pictures, although I like the ones I printed on the Matte paper better than the ones I printed on the Glossy paper. It prints great documents, too. I think I'll keep it, for awhile.

I have an Epson 1280 and it consistently produces prints that are as good or better than any laser fiery printer I've ever used.

As an advertising copywriter, I depend on this printer to make new copies of my work and it comes through every time.

Now, this is not the perfect printer, because it does drink ink something fierce, but the print outs are worth it, just ask any professional.

In fact, it was a photographer who first turned me on to this machine. At the time I was looking at a Lexmark or HP.

As any graphic designer will tell you HP's are word processing printers and with only rare exceptions any good at graphics and Lexmark is just to be avoided. You get what you pay for, and with Lexmark that isn't much.

Epson wrote the book on graphics and photo reproduction printing and with the 1280 they have added another proud chapter.

I have bought this print server for about a year, and it brought me nothing but anger and frustration every time I wanted to print something.

First of all, you could not just send your print out to the server. You had to ping it first to "wake it up." Otherwise, it wouldn't respond to the client.

Then, sometimes even pinging wouldn't work. The server responded to ping but I still couldn't print. The client on my PC kept telling me that there wasn't a server. Rebooting the server or my PC would not always work.

Worse, often when I tried to use their tools, trying to "shack up" something (there weren't sufficient tools in the first place), the tools sometimes crashed and the server port disappeared from my PC. I had no way to get the port back, but to uninstall and install the thing again.

Do not buy it. If you really want it, I am selling it cheap.

I have to say that I'm not at all impressed by this product. I originally got it because of its size (it's relatively small), and the fact that I have an older laser printer with a parallel port interface (HP LaserJet 6P).

My main problem with the product has been its unreliability to complete a print job. Whatever I send to the printer, I have about a 50% chance of actually seeing output. That drops to around 10%-20% if two or more jobs are being sent concurrently (what's the point of having a print server if one can't print more than one thing at a time?). I should note that this happens whether printing from Windows 2000, OS X or Linux (lpr or CUPS).

My hunch is that printer support is iffy, but one is hard pressed to find out from NetGear which printers work and which don't. Unfortunately experimentation is often the only route. I'm pretty sure the printer is fine, as when I use a computer to share the printer (via printer sharing), I never lose a job and everything works well.

Losing jobs wouldn't be such a pain if all printing was done from the same room as the printer (since it would be easy to tell when something needed to be printed again). However, in our household, we have two wireless laptops, and it's a pain to have to always walk into the office to make sure the print job got through right away rather than just being able to rely on it getting done to be picked up later.

Another complaint I have is that the unit seems to lose its configuration quite regularly. I find that if I power cycle it, I have about a 20% chance that it will reset to factory defaults. This is a pain for me, since I print from OS X and Linux which both like to have a static IP for the printer. When the unit resets, it loses its IP address, and all of a sudden I can't find the printer.

The only reason I didn't give this product one star is because when it doesn't lose my print job and actually retains its configuration, it actually works semi-well.

Overall, if you're like me, and you don't like constantly tweaking, prodding, goading, etc. to get something to work, or you might be printing from outside the immediate vicinity of the printer, I would spend the extra money and desk space and get something that works reliably.

Having read the reviews of this product (and seeing little competition) I decided to give the PS101 a try. I have a machine running XP & a Mac with OS X 10.3 so I figured that once the device was setup by the windows machine the Mac would just need the right settings--wrong. The setup on XP was tricky & confusing, but did indeed work. I have a Brother HL-1250 (great printer) that isn't a native OS X printer. I couldn't get the IP Printing settings to take the brother as default. As per another review on this product, Mac printing is possible (theoretically) with the right printer. Be careful with this product...

The printer is not very old, 1-2 years or so, but has the grey matting that many others seems to have found. Not through the first toner cartridge yet. A new drum and toner would cost as much as a new printer so I won't be taking that route. Very dissappointed. Would have rated 4-5 stars before this fault, but I now feel like I have been robbed.

I have owned this printer for over a year and a half (bought new)and at first it printed clean and crisp pages but not anymore! Pages are dingy grey colored and warped. I have not even used all the original 3,000 page toner cartridge and now the drum unit is shot! Brother claims a new drum and toner will fix this problem but, others state differently. Besides, the cost of a drum ($179.99) and a 3,000 print toner ($56.00)is more than I paid for the entire printer! Too bad Brother, I'm going to Lexmark or HP for my next lazer printer.

This is my second Brother Laser Printer,the last being the HL-1240, which I still use. The Brother HL-1450 is reliable, fast, easy to set-up.

Expanding memory is easy. I happened to have an old 16 meg simm laying around, so out went the four meg, and in went the 16 meg, for a total of 24 megs (4 megs are built in).

Actually there are two annoying things about this printer. As noted above, in order to add memory, you first must remove the pre-installed 4 meg chip. It would have been nice to have 2 slots, to avoid removing the factory-installed simm. Also, simms are cheap but nearly as cheap as SDRAM and faster forms of memory. The second item of annoyance is the optional additional paper tray. Only Brother makes it and apparently only they sell it. It goes for $200. Geez, I could almost buy a second printer for that!!!!

These two factors don't influence what this great printer does--print fast, high-quality documents! BTW graphics look especially sharp. Now only if Brother would introduced an affordable COLOR laser printer....

After getting sick and tired of all the streaked printing from a series of Epson printers--okay, it could have been me doing something wrong, but when I mentioned it at several stores, the clerks smiled and said, "What else is new?"--I decided to get my first HP. I wanted a multifunction unit because I have two kids in middle school and a bit of copying and scanning always comes in handy. I am more than pleased with the PSC 1350. It is remarkably small and attractive, and the black and white text printing is plenty fast, and color printing is terrific. I'm not using it to scan photographs, so you may not be happy with 36 bit scanning if that's your bag, but it is a wonderful sidekick at a very reasonable price.

I was thrilled to find a multifunctional printer for such a good price. It prints gorgeous photos even without the special photo ink, the scanner is the best I've used so far, the copier function is super easy to use, and the card reader was a nice surprise (I thought it was only for printing directly from a memory card - turns out you can use it to open files from the card on your computer). I haven't used the proof-sheet function yet so I can't comment on that. I only have two gripes with it: 1. the top of the scanner doesn't come off - this would make it a lot easier to scan/copy book pages or other things that aren't completely flat or are larger than the scanner itself; 2. The ink costs a small fortune! Even at a military exchange store, where prices are usually pretty low, it's $25 for black, $35 for color. I guess that's how they make up for the low price of the printer itself! Overall, though, it's such a great item that I had to give it 4 stars.

This printer is a really good value. I am just heading off to college and I think that this printer can do everything a college student needs to do. It can do everything from print out my essays, to creating high nice looking photographs (the printer includes 15 sheets of photo paper). The all-in-one also make copies fast and with good clarity. This printer is with out a doubt the best bang for the buck.

I WOULD NEVER BUY ANOTHER LEXMARK PRINTER. THE INK DOES NOT LAST. I BUY INK CONSTANTLY. MODERATE USER.

I've owned a Z43 purchased back in 2001 knowing that replacement ink cartridges would be pricey (personal laser jets were not affordable even when my tech heavy portfolio was doing well). However, I was willing to make that tradeoff since the printer was highly rated and reasonably priced. My color printing requirements are relatively modest, about 1-2 pages/week. Here is a review of this product with a historical perspective. 2001 cartridges: Excellent 2002 cartridges: Good 2003 cartridges: Fair 2004 cartridges: Extremely poor Over the years, the quality of the cartridges has deteriorated significantly along with the quality of the retail packaging. I've always bought from reputable retailers, including Amazon, but who knows whether these retailers were buying authentic cartridges or unknowingly moving counterfeits that were slipped into the wholesale channels? My most recent and FINAL purchase of the 15M0120 color cartridge was from Target last month (July 04). I print in color about once a week, and the cartridge was dead in one month. Good thing that I bought it on sale for only $25, since those four color prints cost me ONLY $6.25 each... I attempted to exchange it but even Target with its GENEROUS return/exchange policy politely told me to call their corporate 800-number. The Target voice response system then referred me to a Lexmark 800 number. After being placed on hold for tech support even though I wanted to make a warranty claim, I finally gave up. For kicks, I checked Lexmark's website only to find out that problems with printing supplies are supposed to be handled with the retailer. THUS, NEITHER THE RETAILER NOR MANUFACTURER WILL STAND BEHIND THIS PRODUCT. It's not worth my time to pursue this matter any further, but I figure that a review of the product is my way of saying GOODBYE.

This is a good product and works well with my Lexmark z52 printer. The price is kind of high compared to (almost all) other color ink cartridges... but this cost is offset with the low cost of Lexmark printers.

I purchased this printer last August, and am now on my second replacement. The feed mechanism broke on the first two units, and I suspect it's going on the machine I'm using now. My volume is not all that large, by the way.

Even when the printer is not broken, the ability to feed 11 x 17 paper is pathetic. Yesterday, it took me two hours to get two tabloid size pages printed, with about a dozen jams occuring in the process. I use good quality paper, am careful about positioning in the tray, and have tried all three trays with the same abysmal results. This, but the way, is when feeding one sheet at a time; I long ago gave up on feeding multiple copies!

Another thing: every one of the printers I've had feeds slightly crooked. This seems to be an HP thing as the 1220 I had before did the same thing.

On the plus side, print quality and speed are good, as least compared to other printers I've owned, and the multiple ink cartridges and separate print heads are a plus.

But when you spend as much time as I do clearing paper jams and returning broken machines, it's impossible to recommend this product. If you need large sheet print capabilities, avoid this model at all costs!

Works great for 1 year then it started locking up. I think it is something electronic because both the lights blink like crazy then it starts spiting out paper with some symbols on it. have to unplug it to stop it. Let me know if you want one I will send you mine.

I find the quality of prints to be just perfect...text is the best I have ever seen, nothing else comes even close.

the cartridges are really long lasting, hovewer not too cheap, but on the long run they pay off.

Quality of image printing is just excellent - a comparison to epson 1280 left the epson way behind.

the drawbacks - slightly crooked feed, a bit uncomfortable to insert new paper (especially when you change size), and terrible manual feed - it just grabs the paper without any aligmnemt and prints is crooked every time.

Overall, I love it.

A great personal laserjet, with superior quality, great aesthetic & functional design, ready availability of toners, initially good reliable paper handling, and easy set-up.

UPDATE- 75,000 prints later, feeder wear and jams every print- so had to throw away. Just barely stayed with HP (new LJ1012), and hopefully won't regret decision.

Having had a HP 4ML (400DPI, 4ppm, Postscipt, PC/Mac interface) for 7 years without problems printing about 1500 pages per month (DTP, engineering graphics/reports etc..), I have great confidence in the ability of my latest HP to perform well in future years. The specification and performance match well the target small business or home user- those who want more just have to move up the range for higher print speeds, higher volume paper handling, and greater capacity toners.

The only real shame for the HP range, is that there isn't a very portable laser for business use with notebooks (if possible).

The moron known as Mikepee has obviously missed the point of these reviews. People share their thoughts and experiences so that others may replicate the successes and avoid the mistakes of previous buyers. Yes, this printer has a paper jam problem that many people mentioned. For those without Mikepee's self-congratulatory wisdom, information about the paper jam problem is very helpful. The people who mentioned it are not whining, they're commenting (Mikepee said wining, but I assume he's too stupid to know how to spell or edit his text).

I am extremely pleased with the speed and quality of work that this printer is capable of. I currently have it shared on a network, and it's extremely capable and handles the jobs we throw at it with amazing quality and speed. The machine is fast to warm up. The printer software that HP included is extremely easy and intuitive to use with a lot of nifty features. Also, the secondary tray is very helpful with smaller print jobs.

However, the 1100se has a slight design problem. Since both loading trays are on top of the machine, they become collectors of dust. I owned the HP LaserJet 5L before this one and it has the same ergonomic issue, which led to numerous paper jams or the printer pulling multiple sheets at once. I have owned the 1100se for about a year, and have thankfully not experienced as many jams as the 5L, but this is a problem. If you're able to fashion some sort of dust cover, it would help.

However that aside, the 1100se produces excellent quality print jobs and is very speedy. It does a good job and I am very pleased with this machine.

The Officejet d145 is the second multifunction HP I've had, the first being a g85 series. Having it all together is a great feature, and the d145 has one over my previous multifunction in that it has slots for my digital camera memory cards (thin, thick and even the memory stick). And, what's terrific is that when you insert your camera's memory card into the d145, it asks you if you want to upload the pictures. When you press "1" for yes, it creates a folder in "My Pictures" for the particular months the pictures were taken and uploads them. The print quality is as good as my photosmart printers, which is terrific!

Faxing and copying are effortless, with fax numbers taken from Outlook and other address books.

The d145 would have gotten a 5 Star rating from me had the scanning software been as easy to use as what came with the g-series multifunction I had. When you scanned with the other, it asked you what you wanted to send the scanned article to (Word, Wordperfect, PaintShop Pro, etc.), with the d145 you have to establish the applications that it will scan to. This may not be a problem with other buyers, and once I learned I needed to do it, it presented no problem.

One last item, I have an unbelievable number of items hooked-up to the computer that has the d145, so many that I use two USB routers to expand the number of USB ports. I've noticed that some items, such as my PDA desktop cradle, caused my d145 to go slightly haywire with the LED's flashing. Making sure both did not share the same USB expansion router solved the problem.

Overall, the d145 is the best multifunction printer, copier, fax, scanner, I've every had, and I'd recommend it to anyone wanting the best of all worlds.

UPDATE: I recently purchased an HP Camera for my Step-Daughter (Photosmart 720) and one for myself (Photosmart 850). Both use the little SD memory cards. The d145 I purchased only a couple of months ago does not have an SD slot. So make sure your camera's memory is compatible with the slots on the d145.

I shopped long and hard before I settled on the HP d145 as the multifunction solution for my home office. Compared to the other affordable ... all-in-one machines, this one was the best. Although it was the most expensive, it's not perfect by any means.

PROS:
Fast plain paper prints and copies. EXCELLENT, mind-boggling plain paper copy quality. In fact, I printed some photos for a friend, and after printing 4 or 5 copies on photo paper, she preferred the plain paper copy over them all. Double-sided prints are a nice convenience, and the paper feeder is nice when you need to copy something that's double-sided and/or multiple pages. A big time saver over scanning the pages one at a time, figuring out how to place the front side in the feeder to copy on the reverse, etc... This feature alone makes the machine worth the price. The card reader works great, and although I usually just download my images to my PC and pick them for printing from there, the few times I've used the index feature (for when I just took a bunch of photos and wanted to show them to somebody right away), the speed and ease of it was very nice. The onboard LCD is comprehensive, easy to learn and use, and my 9 year old son figured out how to make copies on his own in about 10 seconds.

So why didn't I rate this machine 5 stars?

CONS:
Put simply, photo printing. I own a cheap (less than one hundred dollars) Epson color printer that embarrasses the d145 when it comes to photo printing. Why would HP put a PHOTO CARD READER on this machine, and then offer such lousy photo printing quality?! You can't print anything borderless without using a paper cutter or scissors after the fact. My Epson machine will print beautiful borderless 8.5 x 11 photos that are much sharper and photo-like at a fraction of the cost. Now I see that HP has a new model, the d155, that comes with an onboard print server, but appears that everything else is the same as the d145.

SCANNING: Not impressive. The spec sheet would lead you to believe that this machine can do some quality scanning, but I was very unsuccessful in that area. I have an older, SCSI HP Scanjet 5p that won't work with Windows XP, so I wanted something newer that would take it's place... The d145 scans were full of static and noise, as if it was running some sort of sharpen filter by default. I spent 30 minutes reading the manual and going through the settings trying to fix this problem with no luck. If you are content to scan at lower resolutions for web use, then the scanner is probably fine... but if you want high resolution scans for printing, I have some reservations about this machine. Also, it gives you the ability to "Scan to..." a few different applications, like Outlook, Word, and HP Scanning software... but I couldn't find a way to scan to my program of choice, Photoshop. I had to scan, then cut and paste to get the images into a graphics program for editing... which they needed desperately for touch-up because of the noisy scan.

CONCLUSION:
If plain paper printing and copies, ease of use, speed, and saving space are your priorities, then this machine is PERFECT. However, if you want to print nice, frameable photos, I suggest you do what I did and buy a dedictated photo printer ... You might also want a dedicated scanner as well.... which sort of defeats the point of an All-in-one doesn't it?

This is the second MF printer I have owned, and it supassed my wildest dreams. The printing quality is very high in both color and B&W. The copier and fax capabilites are very simple to use. And the HP software is very easy to scan in pictures. Even the ink cartridges are reasonably prices ... Setup was a breeze with the USB connection. I set it up in under 15 minutes.

I would highly recommend this printer for some one looking for a all-in one machine. While it might be a little expensive, the quality is very high.

A cheap printer that prints. No more, no less. I will admit that the print quality is actually pretty decent considering the low price. It's ok for occasional home printing. If you're going to be doing anything more than that, go for a better printer. The biggest disadvantage that I found is the cost of the ink cartidges. They are rather expensive. It's also not most sturdy machine. It broke after two years of "OCCASIONAL" use. Like I said, you get what you pay for.

Overall, I like the printer. It set up easily, prints quickly in black and white, and not all that bad in color. I haven't had it long enough to need new ink cartridges yet, but I think I will definately look into a do-it-yourself-refill-kit. I've looked around online, and the cheapest cartridge I have found is just over $26.00. The best feature so far is it lacks the CLICK_CLICK_CLANK_GRRRRR_CLICK_CLICK_CLICK of it's HP predecessor. I would recommend purchasing this printer.

Keep in mind that this printer is an older model. It won't have all the bells and whistles that newer models offer. I think it is a great first time user printer for someone that doesn't want to spend a lot of money, or for someone that just prints school reports or "light" printing. However, I have printed pictures with this printer and they have turned out fairly decent. It is verrrrrrry easy to use and prints fast enough for me. I like that it uses black AND color cartridges...saves on ink by allowing you to chose if you want something printed in black only. I always own Lexmark printers and have been completely satisfied with their printers and customer service. At the time of this review, you can pick up this printer for thirty bucks! That is cheaper than one ink cartridge..and it comes with one black and one color. You can't beat that!