Customer Reviews

Brother HL-1650 Laser Printer

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I recently purchased the Brother HL-1650 to replace an old Brother 8e (which was an outstanding workhorse for a good 12 years). While it's much too early to evaluate the 1650's long term reliability, I can say that when it comes to product features the printer is an excellent value for the money... especially given the fact that the street price is now under $400. Where else could I have gotten a 16ppm, 8 meg, duplex printer for that price? Beats me. And the tone saver feature will undoubtedly save me money over time.

I also want to comment on some reviews that I read here and elsewhere. First, the 1650 does indeed have a multi-page printing feature which enables one to print anywhere from one to 25 pages side-by-side on a single sheet of paper. So I'm not sure what the reviewer "cwasche" was refering to (unless it's some sort of a Mac vs. PC phenomenon). You just have to make sure that you select the proper printing mode in the properites panel. Similarly, I read one review that reported greyish vs. black print. Should this occur just make sure you don't have the toner saving mode on. In the "off" mode I've found the print to be dark and sharp.

Finally, I should note that the setup was about as easy as it can get. I'm also using the parallel port (vs. the USB) connection. Should you use the parallel port connection be sure to use an IEEE 1284 bi-directional cable as instructed.

Hope this review helps someone.

The previous two reviews pretty much cover this printer. I simply was so impressed by the quality and function of this that I wanted to add my 2 cents. I have always had HPs in the past, but my last hp laser died at a page count of just over 1200 pages. Looking around my office, I have 2 very old fax machines--both Brother and both working--so I decided it might not be taking that much of a chance to buy a laser from them. I also explored the newsgroups, and everything said was very positive. Upon arrival, I found everything about this printer to be exceptional, and I'm pretty picky. The drivers are first-class and the build quality is high. I'm not going to go on about this, but suffice it to say that I couldn't be more pleased. I feel it's the best value in any computer hardware I've purchased this year. I would not hesitate to purchase it again, and I hope your experience with it is as positive as mine.

This is a pretty good printer. Its about the cheapest duplexing laser available, and is feature packed and pretty sturdy too There is a new brother 18?? out that is the same thing only slightly faster with more standard memory. But the 1650 is fast enough.

Im at about 3000 pages on my first toner, so I can't comment on toner life. Out of those 3000 I have had only one jam (my fault) and only a few cases where it would take 2 sheets instead of one. Having a real duplexer has the advantage that if it feeds 2 sheets at once, you only waste 2 sheets, and not a whole stack of paper (using the flip over the stack manual duplex method)

The controls on the printer are nice. There is an option for print density ranging from -6 to +6. Setting this to -1 should improve toner life in addition to the tonersave feature, and is uaually still dark enough for most purposes.

Having both postscript and PCL is convienent, but it can get pretty slow with large postscript graphics. It seems to handle complex and large PCL jobs without any speed penalty.

It doesn't seem able to deal with long parallel cables (as in out-of-spec long) But USB is better anyway so it doesn't really matter.

By default the 1200dpi mode is a little too dark, and it doesn't have tonersave. I usually use the printer's menu to lower the density when printing at 1200. In general the graphics output is less than stellar, but it is good enough for most things.

The booklet printing mode is flawed. It puts 4 pages on a sheet, and you have to fold the stack in half. But for big books one can't very well fold a stack of 100pages. A solution is to prent in 16 page sets, but it would be nice if it could be done automatically (it should be possible to add this feature via a driver update). A book printed in this manner can be bound using a small drill, a clamp, and some cord, and feels a lot like a real book.

Now I just wish I could find a source for extra thin A5 sized paper.

I purchased this printer to print old B/W photos for a family scrapbook. Each of the 10 copies of the scrapbook is 200+ pages (both sides).

I bought this printer because of its good ratings for grayscale and its inexpensive initial cost for automatic duplexing. This project would have been considerably more expensive using inkjet or getting them printed at a copy store.

I am very pleased with the quality of the photo printing, the cost per page, and the printing speed. I installed an extra 128 MB ram, and never had a problem printing the entire photo intensive scrapbook.

This printer could easily be used for office use in a small workgroup.

I have had this printer since last March and love it. The big drop in price caught my eye so I decided to review it. There is just no comparison between this printer and my previous HP LaserJet 1100. When I bought this product the new LaserJet 1200 had just come out. But this machine has so many more options. I am very glad I switched. The toner costs more but goes much further. The only downside is that Brother does not sponsor a recycling program for used toner and drum cartridges like other manufactuers. Brother are you listening?

This is certainly the best valued printer you can get. I have been user later printer for a long time. They have mostly been HP which I have always believe to have the best quality and value with it's reputable name in the market. However, I have been doing a research on the brother HL-1650 and found that it's feature with the price tag are just too good to be true. But with the 5 star rating it has, i decided to give it a try. I can tell you that I haven't regretted since. It's got professional printing quality with excellent function. Automatic Duplex-Printing is one of my favorite. Now I don't think i will go back to HP now more considering the price and the function that you can get between brother and hp.

I have had this printer for over a month now, and so far, it is performing extremely well for me. This is despite the fact that I have not upgraded the memory at all from the original configuration.

Set up was very simple; pretty much, the instructions that come with the printer are dead-on accurate, and the CD-ROM takes you through the rest of the setup process without any difficulties. Even if you aren't extremely computer savvy, setting up this printer should be a breeze.

Faults? So far, I haven't seen any faults with this printer - it has performed wonderfully. We'll see how it holds up a year from now though...