Printer Reviews

Our office got one of these since it was hundreds cheaper than a similar Hewlett Packard (HP) LaserJet. While I was a huge fan of HP LaserJets because in my years of experience with them they never, ever, ever complained, rarely jammed, and never died, I was willing to give the Brother (HB) a fair trial.

What a mistake! Over a year's use in a small office (7 users) with fairly simple print jons, this Brother printer would regularly hang and require a power cycle and random opening and closing of doors to make it reset.

I never saw this sort of behavior with HPs

The moral? Laser printers have a lot of moving parts in a harsh environment (high internal temperatures and toner dust). You can get away with a cheap monitors, motherboards, and almost anything else electronic, but with printers a cheap design will absolutely cost you downtime and frustration.

My advice - if you value your time and rely on your printer, look at something more solidly designed. I recommend HP LaserJets.

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

The Brother HL-1250 monochrome laser printer works great up to one point. The carriage in the laser printer is susceptible to breaking if the paper gets jammed or is too thick like in card stock. It can break. It broke once under warranty; it broke a second time outside of warranty.

I bought this printer about half year and never had a problem with it. Print quality is very high and it starts very fast and prints fast. It's a very quiet printer with a low price per page (a suggestion: go with a high-yield replacement toner cartridge). It may be true that output is a bit fine, but for 99.9% of users it will be perfect in my opinion. Overall, very happy with it.

This cartridge evidently is not compatible to my BJC-250 Printer
as it only prints in small print and only 1/2 the page. Cannot use it

This product is way over priced. It can be purchased at local stores for less than the total cost here.

This is a good color cartridge for the printers that use it, but don't use it for black printing as the colors that are mixed look terrible. It is expensive like the previous review says, but you really have no choice. I would recommend buying a BJC-3000 or BJC-6000 if you are considering a new printer as ink is cheaper and you can replace invidiual colors as they run out. Don't buy the BC-06 photo cartridge, it's a big waste. Colors look the same as the BC-05, and sometimes the BC-05 even looks better.

1) Misses some incoming faxes! (There is really no need to read further, is there?)We are still attempting to determine what causes this, but it is none of the usual suspects, and Canon has such great suggestions as check the telephone line.
2) We bought this unit because of the feature set and and the excellent scan/print quality, but the negatives of the small, shoddy paper tray outweigh these.
3) No Sound. There is no keyboard sound feedback, no ring (without connecting a separate phone or answering machine), no beeps, nothing. It is surprising how important sound feedback is on a fax machine.
4) There are vertical lines which appear on faxes, scans and copies after several weeks. This is a recurring problem that is easily solved by hard cleaning the automatic document feeder, but this unit seems to be especially prone to this -- so much so that Canon has a sticker on the machine that tells you how to solve the problem.
5) Sorry, Canon, but this machine is not a good choice for any use at any price.

I bought one of these and returned it after a week. It is not horrible. The print speed & quality are good, ditto for copies. (However, copies made from the auto-document feeder are not perfectly centered on the page, a minor annoyance.) I haven't tried it for incoming faxes, but for outgoing faxes it usually works just fine. One idiosyncracy is that the fax operation is completely silent. Every other machine I've used had a little speaker that let you monitor the dialing and transmission, so it's weird that the fax on this machine is silent. Finally, the price is decent for a machine with all these features.

Nonetheless, I recommend you look elsewhere. The main reason is that the build quality of the Canon MF5550 is mediocre. It looks great in the store, but get it home and it just feels cheaply built. I was really afraid that mine wouldn't last more than a year. The other problem is that printing envelopes (or anything on non-standard paper) is confusing, awkward, and time-consuming.

I've read elsewhere that Canon outsourced the design and manufacture of this particular model to save costs. I believe it. The Canon MF5550 is not of the same quality as other Canon machines I've used or owned.

I purchsed this machine because of the relatively low price after rebate - it was a replacement for a HP OfficeJet v40 that kept having problems.

The other reviews make a valid point - printing single envelopes is a stupid, time consuming process. Aside from that, this is an excellent machine. It makes excellent copies, scans, and faxes, and it is lightning fast.

I use the machine as a fax machine on a dedicated line, and to print large quantities of handouts for my athletic club - this saves me costs for printing and copying that I used to take to the office supply store or the professional printer. Now I only need them to make 2 part forms and color advertisements. The laser printer function alone was worth the purchase price, and the scanner, fax and copy functions all work well. It does what I need it to do, it does it quickly, quietly, and cheaply (only one toner consumable, much cheaper than anything inkjet).

This was not worth buying.......by the time I had it working it ran out of ink!

This black ink cartridge is almost empty when you get it. Don't even bother with it.......you will be disappointed. I was!

The ink was not black more like a light gray. You get about 1/2 to 2/3 LESS print with 2 not 1 but 2 Ink Cartridges for 1 Epson ink Cartridge

The second star is for Delivery in 2 days-Great job!

Keep Looking

5 out of 10 print jobs are slanted, maybe because it grabs the paper so hard. I've invested a small fortune in ink cartridges alone. Never have seen a machine similar to this one require so many ink cartridges as this one does. When the message displays "change ink cartridge" you can't get anything else to work, so you're forced to buy more. I'll count my losses and buy a better machine.

I've had my Lexmark X125 for almost a year now. I'm now shopping for an HP. At least once every 50-100 sheets, the paper feed mechanizm goofs and I have to open up the printer and pull out scrunched paper. And the lines of text on all pages are slightly slanted due to the paper pulling mechanism being on the paper's left side.
The fax/copy feeder slot tries to feed as many sheets at the same time as it can. So to fax or copy a multi page document, I have to feed the sheets one at a time. What a pain.
Ok, one more complaint. This printer, when it grabs a new sheet of paper makes a startling loud noise that makes some people jump.
Pick another printer.

I've owned Xerox multi-function lasers and God knows how many Epson ink-jets. All I can say is that the unit has worked flawlessly from moment I set it up (took all of 3 mins.). I've had it about 6 months now. The quality of the color printing is superb. Unlike Epson units that seem to clog up and become useless hunks of color-glob spewing plastic junk if you let them sit idle for a few days without printing, the Lexmark prints perfect, crisp color pages every time - on demand. I will never buy another Epson and would gladly trade the 875DC I have for a single Lexmark ink cartridge!

I strongly urge you to NOT BUY THIS MACHINE!
You have to replace the drum unit every 3-4 toners. They told me this at Brother after I bought my printer and it started splotching after the 4th toner.

We bought the printer expecting it to be a good buy. We could not install the drivers and the software for 3 days. When we called their support, they also did not know what to do. Btw, got hold of a representative only after many hours of being on hold and only after 4 calls (each with many hours on hold). They said they would call me back..but did not. Brother's customer support ... And the software would screw up your PC.

This is a great machine for small home office. The letters are good quality; I didn't need color. I have had it for over 6 months and all the faxes have gone through and come in without a problem. Toner easy to change.

This would be a fine printer. It produces lovely prints. The problem? For reasons I cannot fathom, CANON HAS DECIDED *NOT* TO RELEASE A WINDOWS XP DRIVER!! Now that I've upgraded my PC to XP, my Canon is a paperweight.

I own a CD-300. The quality of the prints is quite good -- indistinguishable from a regular 35mm print. However, as another reviewer has stated, avoid this printer. Canon has announced that it will not develop a Windows XP printer driver for the CD-300. To add insult to injury, Canon announced today that it is producing a new 4x6 dye-sub printer, the CP-100, which I have no doubt will be XP-compatible.

I have this printer and love it. Or used to love it. I just got a new computer which runs Windows XP. You cannot use this printer with a new computer because Canon has arbitrarily decided not to release printer drivers. Their nonsensical stated reason is that the printer does not support USB (universal serial bus). Windows XP could support this printer. It recognizes the printer as new hardware over the parallel printer bus and asks for a driver. Since Canon has decided not to support Canon products there is no usable driver. Canon has only released Windows 95/98 drivers.

Do not buy this printer unless you are willing to keep around a Windows 98 computer with which to use it.

I've bought my last Canon product.

I have owned the X75 for nearly 5 months and it has been nothing but constant problems. It would never perform as advertised. First, the cartridges were haywire. Then the software balked; then stopped altogether. Save your money and go to the local copier shop. In 5 months I got no more than 5 decent color photo copies and none from scanning/enlarging. Terrible.

I purchased a Lexmark printer. One of the deciding factors is there was a rebate offer if I purchased an ink cartridge at the same time. To make a long story short, I sent the rebate in well in advance of the deadline, almost 2 months after the deadline I got a letter stating I had to send the proof-of-purchase (which I had sent and they returned it to me. It is the original, full p-o-p with part of the box cardboard still attached. I returned everything back to them. 2 months later, I get my unopened envelope sent back to me with a stamp stating "Return to Sender - Offer Expired"

As far as I'm concerned, Lexmark is a scam and I don't know how great their printers are, I will NEVER purchase anything from them again. It may seem like a piddly thing, but how many people have they done this too? Is this how they handle repairs and customer service? I don't trust them. I will not be replacing the cartridges in my printer, I'd rather buy a new printer.

I got this as a present for X-mas and haven't had any problems with it. Its a bit on the slow side, the print quality is about average, but all else is what I would expect from a low end printer.

Epson has "defense" mechanism built into its printer so you won't want to use another company's ink! When the printer communicates with the ink "Chip" it sees it is not Epson and gives you a warning message.

In addition, I was mostly using my printer to print B&W documents. Yet, it still wasted all of my color ink due to the nozzle cleaning utility. It clogged a lot... but I don't know if that is due to the printer or Rhinotek...

My suggestions:
1) Buy Epson ink (There isn't a big cost difference)
2) Get a B&W Laser printer if you are printing alot of B&W documents
3) Use your Epson Photo 780 sparingly for printing Color

I bought the Rhinotek cartridges thinking I would save money. Wrong! I have had to clean the print heads almost every time I print (which is almost daily) and the ink didn't last near as long as the Epson cartridges. The couple of bucks I saved has certainly not been worth the time and energy I have to use every time I try to print anything. I will buy Epson next time.

This ink caused me so much frustration! It was constantly clogging up. I wasted more color ink on prints that I had to throw away because the black ink cartridge was not working!

If you are thinking of buying this printer because of the capability of printing on 12 x 12 inch paper for scrapbooking, DO NOT PLAN TO USE IT TO PRINT PHOTOS. The photo quality is actually worse than my old 3-color, HP 700 series printer. The horizontal markings from the printing are so bad it looks like you have printed on corragated cardboard. The image quality is fuzzy, and the colors are not true-to-life.

I probably have as much experience with 11x17 capable color printers as anyone in the world and I've got to say this is easily the most difficult and unsatisfactory printer I have ever dealt with. HP's last 11x17 product (1220c) had amazing print quality, was faster, and lasted me for 3 solid years of heavy use. By contrast, the 9650 is MUCH slower for "best" print setting and MIND BOGGLINLY SLOW for its "maximum DPI" setting...try 35minutes for an 11x17 plot. Unacceptable. Not to mention that my printer is now broken and wont print at all.

I don't normally buy HP printers but was looking for a speedy model for use in a work environment and was told this would be a good fit. First off, if there's a slower printer on the market today I would be amazed. My 4 year old Epson 880 will print 3-4 pages per minute faster than this unit, and the prints look far better on the Epson. Have not found 13x19 paper so I cant say how this works. The ink cartridges run out too fast to be of any use. For the price there aren't any good reasons to buy this unit. There has to be better large format printers out there, keep looking.