After a decade, I bit the bullet and bought a laser printer. Perhaps I am one of the last holdouts, clinging to the mindset that laser printers were far too expensive for home use and the limited amount of things I print. I can always just go to my office and whip out the docs I need. For the past decade I have been using inkjets at home, slow and expensive per page; but they were cheap at the time, and I had color printing. To me it was a reasonable trade off, inexpensive and I could print in color if need be. I work out of my house most of the time; so for text, Word Docs etc that were a few pages long, I would print at home. For anything of substance or that I needed several copies of, I went through the process of emailing the doc to myself or putting it on a USB drive, get in the car, drive to my office, and print out the copy. A complete waste of time.
Well I finally gave in. I realized I was going through the process of driving to the office at least once a week if not more just to print. 20 minutes there, 10 minutes of printing, and then either 20 minutes back to the house or off to the meeting that I was printing the doc for. So, close to an hour a week and sometimes a lot more lost due to my lack of having the appropriate hardware at my home office. I figure the investment will save me around 60-70 hours a year, well worth the $$. Laser printers have come down to reasonable prices these days, so no longer time for me to delay. What used to be a luxury is now a necessity for any home office. What took me so long? I'm cheap, and I use what I have until I absolutely need to upgrade.
First steps? Well of course, start the research on the Internet. In a world of options I only had a few requirements.
- A decent pages per minute speed
- Full automatic duplex printing
That was about it. Networked would be nice but not a necessity, scanner unnecessary, color not needed based on initial price as well as cartridge costs, and fax worthless, not having a land line even connect to.
First stop was CNET reviews on inexpensive lasers printers. Luckily they had an article on the top five printers from less than two weeks ago. Eliminating the multifunction options I narrowed it down to two out of the five, the HP LaserJet Pro P1606dn and the Brother HL-2270DW. Next stop Amazon to get some actually end user reviews. You can’t beat real life criticisms as long as you can sift through the BS. The brother had an amazing amount of positive reviews (586 5 Star reviews) so that one went immediately to the top of my queue. List price at $100 certainly was a huge plus for me as well.
Though I am a big fan of Amazon, and a Prime Member, in general I would prefer to buy my electronics locally so if I get a dud a don’t have to go through a mail in RMA process. I had to go to my local Staples for another item anyways so I figured I’d take a look at their inventory. What do you know; the Brother I wanted was in stock and at the same $100 price as online. Slam Dunk! Pack it up and take it home.
The Brother HL-2770DW is a nice looking small footprint machine. The printer is a 14”x14” black unit and about 7” high. Setup was quite simple. The unit has multiple connection options (Networked Wifi & Ethernet, as well as a USB connection. I opted to connect it via USB to my TP-LINK MFP and Storage Center which allows me to put multiple USB devices onto my network, and holds the connection to my HP DeskJet as well. I installed the printer driver that came on CD with the unit locally on my laptop and within ten minutes I had printed the test page, tested out a single sided Word doc and then a 10 page duplex doc. I was up and printing.
What I can say is this is one heck of a printer for the price tag.
Specs
- 27 pages per minute in single sided mode (Wow that's fast)
- 3 Connection options, WiFi, Ethernet and USB
- Full Duplex printing at around 10 sides per minute
- Inexpensive cost per page at around 1.7 cents based on the high yield (2600 page) toner cartridge at $46
- 32 MBs on board memory
- Up to 2400 x 600 dpi resolution
- 250 sheet paper tray for letter and legal sized paper
- Manual feed slot for thicker media and envelopes
I’m loving this product so far. The only noticeable issue is that duplex printing causes a slight curl to the paper that I easily flattened out. Make no mistake, this is not an office printer (although I am sure it would work fine in a small office setup), but for home office / personal use, it’s quite a deal.
The printer driver has a whole bunch of advance options like “Toner Saver mode”, watermark printing, a sleep timer and a slew of other stuff that I will probably never use. I love extra options. I rarely use them, but it sure is nice to know that they are there if you ever do want to do something advanced.
Conclusion
I don’t really have a rating system as I feel the words should do the tell you what you need to know, but for the sake of those of you that require one, I’d say this is 5 out of 5 stars at least for my purposes and the price. I’ll revisit this blog entry if I find paper jams arising or stuff like that, but for the moment I highly recommend this for anyone looking for an inexpensive home laser printer. Small footprint, fast as I could possibly ask for at home, and a great price per page. A hard to resist purchase if you are in the marker for a laser printer. If you need color, scanning, faxing etc, get prepared to dole out a few more bucks than the C-Note Brother we're talking about here. But ask yourself, how often do you really use those things. Doing much faxing these days?
What a great post with nice details. Can i print Plastic cards by laser printer?
ReplyDeletei have made this circuit but when I test it with the LED it doesn't stay on constantly, it flashes. Why is this? Plastic cards Printing
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