Customer Rating: 
Summary: great printer for its price
Comment: the printer is perfect for home office.
it is fast, efficient.
toner is cheaper than other brands.
the only problem is that it comes with only 2 mb of memory, so you will have to buy more to print high-quality graphs/pictures (although it is cheap to get it - search in the internet or ebay).
there is some learning to do, like what the lights mean, or how to fix paper jam, but after some learning, it is pretty ok.
it would be nice to be able to print front and verse without manually changing the side of the sheet, but i guess this is asking to much from a small scaled printer like this.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Gray background problem
Comment: The printer worked great when I bought it. About 9 months later, it started to print pages with dark gray background. And that declares the end of life for this printer. According to other reviews, this is a common problem on Brother HL-XXXX printers.
This defect seems to be a design issue, not isolated problems. Beware if you plan to buy it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you like a light gray background on all of your documents
Comment: I purchased this astonishingly low priced printer in December of 2002. It was used casually, maybe an average of 5 printed pages a week (not much). It worked great for about a year. Then the annoying light gray background developed, which appears to be a common problem judging by all of the reviews; apparenly the drum unit is poorly designed or manufactured. It's not a big deal if you're just using it to print receipts and personal items, but the faint gray background makes it unsuitable if you need to print out a resume or anything that needs to look professional. I haven't had any other problems with it besides this one.
With rebates I've seen this thing as low as $89 in recent months. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't buy it even for that low of a price. Spend your money on a better model or different brand.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice printer (when memory added) - bad driver
Comment: The printer works fine (at least for now - I've had it for a couple of weeks now). And it is cheap - got it for $70 AR.
You would need to, however, upgrade its memory - 2MB is not enough. Buy it on ebay for about $7 with shipping included for 16MB!
However, the driver is not very good. If you have a document with pages in both landscape and portrait orientation and want to print it double-sided (with manual duplex)...forget about it. It doesn't handle it well. Will break the job into many smaller ones with window popping up for each one. However, Brother may fix it - they forwarded my case to their software department.
Otherwise, this is a very good printer (with a paper tray, unlike Minolta 1350W) when you add memory.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Stellar performance for pennies!
Comment: I've owned 5 of these printers. The first was purchased in 2001. They have each been stellar performers with no downside at all. All of them are used to print a variety of materials (invoices, articles, graphs in b&w, etc.) and handle these jobs well. Cost has been low at each stage - upfront the price now is amazing, consumables are cheap when you look at the per page cost, and upgrades are cheap for memory (not at Amazon I'm sad to say though). If you need laser performance and don't need duplex and collation this is the printer for your home, home-office, or small office.
Summary: great printer for its price
Comment: the printer is perfect for home office.
it is fast, efficient.
toner is cheaper than other brands.
the only problem is that it comes with only 2 mb of memory, so you will have to buy more to print high-quality graphs/pictures (although it is cheap to get it - search in the internet or ebay).
there is some learning to do, like what the lights mean, or how to fix paper jam, but after some learning, it is pretty ok.
it would be nice to be able to print front and verse without manually changing the side of the sheet, but i guess this is asking to much from a small scaled printer like this.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Gray background problem
Comment: The printer worked great when I bought it. About 9 months later, it started to print pages with dark gray background. And that declares the end of life for this printer. According to other reviews, this is a common problem on Brother HL-XXXX printers.
This defect seems to be a design issue, not isolated problems. Beware if you plan to buy it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you like a light gray background on all of your documents
Comment: I purchased this astonishingly low priced printer in December of 2002. It was used casually, maybe an average of 5 printed pages a week (not much). It worked great for about a year. Then the annoying light gray background developed, which appears to be a common problem judging by all of the reviews; apparenly the drum unit is poorly designed or manufactured. It's not a big deal if you're just using it to print receipts and personal items, but the faint gray background makes it unsuitable if you need to print out a resume or anything that needs to look professional. I haven't had any other problems with it besides this one.
With rebates I've seen this thing as low as $89 in recent months. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't buy it even for that low of a price. Spend your money on a better model or different brand.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice printer (when memory added) - bad driver
Comment: The printer works fine (at least for now - I've had it for a couple of weeks now). And it is cheap - got it for $70 AR.
You would need to, however, upgrade its memory - 2MB is not enough. Buy it on ebay for about $7 with shipping included for 16MB!
However, the driver is not very good. If you have a document with pages in both landscape and portrait orientation and want to print it double-sided (with manual duplex)...forget about it. It doesn't handle it well. Will break the job into many smaller ones with window popping up for each one. However, Brother may fix it - they forwarded my case to their software department.
Otherwise, this is a very good printer (with a paper tray, unlike Minolta 1350W) when you add memory.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Stellar performance for pennies!
Comment: I've owned 5 of these printers. The first was purchased in 2001. They have each been stellar performers with no downside at all. All of them are used to print a variety of materials (invoices, articles, graphs in b&w, etc.) and handle these jobs well. Cost has been low at each stage - upfront the price now is amazing, consumables are cheap when you look at the per page cost, and upgrades are cheap for memory (not at Amazon I'm sad to say though). If you need laser performance and don't need duplex and collation this is the printer for your home, home-office, or small office.