Brother HL-1650 Laser Printer

by Brother

Product Details

Product Manual [2.67mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 37 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B000059RDO
• Item model number: HL1650
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 4, 1999

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The Brother HL-1650 is ideal for small offices that require outstanding print quality along with a reliable ability to keep up the pace during crunch time. This quick and capable laser printer speeds through printing of standard office documents with its built-in two-sided printing and a normal speed of 16 pages per minute.

Automatic e-mail printing, intelligent sleep mode, and secure job reprint are all standard features that can be operated from the intuitive three-button interface. Print clarity reaches an impressive 2,400 x 600 dpi, and the included toner cartridge has an expected lifetime of 6,500 pages. The lower paper tray can handle up to 250 sheets of letter or legal paper, while executive paper sizes, envelopes, transparencies, and labels can be printed from the upper tray. A third paper tray may be added, and the standard 8 MB of memory is expandable up to 136 MB.

Print drivers for the HL-1650 are compatible with Macintosh OS 8.0 or higher, as well as Windows 95/98/2000 and Windows NT; it can connect to either system via a USB or parallel port. Brother provides a one-year warranty on parts and labor, which includes a convenient Express Exchange service.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars High Quality, Fast Duplex Laser Printing for under $1000, March 17, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Brother HL-1650 Laser Printer (Office Product)

I have owned this for about a month. The HL-1650 is just about the best $600 I've ever spent. The speed is a little slowish on graphics heavy documents, but still much faster than inkjets with the laser quality output. The unit has a good number of features, but probably the strongest selling point for this unit is duplex printing at the $600 dollar price point. That's about half the cost for an HP with a similar feature without a noticeable drop-off in print quality. Outlets such as Office Depot display both Brother and HP brand laser printers, so they can be compared side by side. I was resistant to buying a laser printer that was not an HP, but I can honestly say I'm glad I took a chance on the Brother HL-1650. For the money it is by far the best printer out there for b&w printing, and the duplex feature makes it an even better buy.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great value, user friendly, useful features, May 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Brother HL-1650 Laser Printer (Office Product)

I've owned HP, and I've owned Lexmark. One can get cowed by the dominance of those companies in the marketplace, but I think that is too bad; consumers may limit themselves to bad choices when they don't look to other brands like Brother. I had a Lexmark that printed great -- but died *well* before its claimed life expectancy. So, I did not want to repeat that mistake. I wanted automatic duplex printing, and that requires at least a couple hundred dollars extra -- or more -- in any other brand, including HP, Xerox, etc. And just look at the price of upgrade parts on those guys! Brother has been around for a long time, and I felt it was worth giving them a try because the value was so much better. I've only had my 1650 for a few days but I feel very good about it. The setup was incredibly easy (used the parallel cable in Win98). And the included CD-ROM has animation that visually shows you every step of the printer set up! Of the printers I was considering, the Brother is the only one with a backlit LCD display with menus for features and settings (all of which are also controllable by software on the PC). The ergonomics are very good and the printer driver interfaces with my regular software just fine. The duplexing works great. It comes out of "sleep" mode pretty fast, while between print jobs it saves a lot of electricity. I haven't tried labels or anything but I put some fairly heavy cover stock through it, using the manual tray and rear exit tray, and had no problems at all. So far I have no complaints about the print quality. I'm not sure if it will match the Lexmark Optra R+ that it's replacing -- but this printer cost *half* as much as that one did, and the toner is also much cheaper. For text it's great, and the blacks are totally solid. I think that the inexpensive memory upgrade I've ordered for the Brother will improve the grayscale output even more, but I'm mostly looking for business use and this looks ideal. So far I've gotten all I could want: larger input capacity than I had before, auto duplexing, good quality, good speed, and a good selection of reasonably-priced upgrade options, like adding a second input drawer, networking, IRDA memory, and so on. And when I called Brother (toll-free!) for pre-sales information, I reached a person with virtually no hold time.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Now, I do do duplex, January 20, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Brother HL-1650 Laser Printer (Office Product)

I chose the 1650 for its duplex (prints both sides)capability and
I am delighted with it. For $40 plus S&H I maxed out the memory
from an on line source. I down load sheet music and print it with
the duplex on, the only way sheet music should be printed. I've printed entire novels downloaded from the net. The large capacity
paper holder is a great convenience.

One bit of caution: Give this printer its own electric outlet.
I first plugged it into a cheap power strip and the printer warm
up and printing power on popped the circuit breaker on the strip.
It needs more power than the Lexmark Z-51 I was using as my main
printer.

I bought it from Amazon.com because they have the best price and shipping was free.

After you order it, go out and buy some three ring binders and paper with prepunched holes. The duplex feature will bring you the opportunity to print more book-like things and you're going to realize that every other printer you've ever had that didn't do duplexing was holding you back.

If you've been using an ink jet printer you'll find this printer capable of saving you lots of money on paper and "ink". A large spread sheet document printed on the Lexmark Z51 depleted a $28 ink cartrige and on the 1650 made only a small dent in the 6500 page capacity of the toner cartridge that comes with the printer.