The sporadic paper jams and spool errors can be annoying
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yes
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I have used this printer both at home and at work. When I used it at work; I was between offices, so I didn't get the full brunt of just how good or bad the output could be at times.
The Brother HL 1450 is just over a foot in length and width and less than a foot in height. As laser printers go it has a smallish footprint but HP (as an alternative) do offer similar sized laser printers. It isn't too heavy in itself but the paper tray is pretty annoying - you almost have to lift the printer to pull the paper tray out to refill it or to clear jams. Holding about 250 A4 sheets, I'd say I was satisfied with the amount of paper this printer holds, but don't expect anything exciting for the manual feeder. You have to hold the paper at the manual feed slot and send your document to print at the same time as there is no flap to hold the paper - some people might find this acceptable, personally I find it annoying.
The print quality is pretty good when you're printing standard text documents but add graphics or pictures to your document or try to print black and white photos and your print quality deteriorates. I wouldn't recommend it for printing graphics heavy documents and the memory doesn't like an A4 photo. If you try to print a large picture at 1200 dpi it makes no difference to the quality so don't waste your toner. It comes with 8Mb of memory as standard; which I understand can be expanded to 36Mb. This small amount of internal memory could be why it doesn't like graphics heavy printing…
I hadn't been able to pinpoint why the Brother jammed so often in the first couple of years of use. I have to admit that it seems to have improved with age, as I get far fewer jams nowadays compared to the first 2 years of use. Previously it would have paper jams about 75% of the time and now it's practically 0%! Isn't that strange?
Is it cheap and cheerful? Well cheap it might be (at around $350) but cheerful it certainly wasn't at the start! I would have been using the printer to print off documents in Word or Excel then suddenly out of nowhere I get a print spooler error, I never had this problem with any other printer I had connected to my PC. The toner cartridge retails at around $50 and has a yield of 3000 (I'm fairly sure I've printed more than that since I've had mine though)!
It's advertised as being able to print 15ppm. I've not actually checked as I don't print a lot from home, just random letters here and there - maybe 20-25 pages a week. It has actually jammed often enough in the past for me to doubt it would actually print 15 pages in a minute without jamming or flashing some sort of error message at me. That leads me onto the lovely little LED display relating to printer problems. As they've obviously done this to save money by not displaying actual error message for you to work on, you have to refer to the manual to find out what the errors are, so more time wasted. More often than not, it's a paper jam! On the other hand, it's fairly easy to open the front hatch to remove the paper when it does actually jam.
All in all, having used this Brother for over 4 years for home use I am not sure that I would consider buying one again. Even though I've mentioned the various gripes I've had with the jams and graphics printing quality - I have to admit that it hasn't actually broken down on me yet and I've still not had to purchase a new toner cartridge! All in all, I'd give this particular "Brother" of mine a 5 out of 10.
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