» Brother HL-1650 Laser Printer

Brother HL-1650 Laser Printer Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Good features, poor quality, breaks down fast. Name the brand "Oh, Brother!"
Comment: I bought this printer in March 2002 and the price was very right for the features. I particularly like the duplex printing feature. However, be forewarned that Brother does not privide good Mac support or drivers. Not all the features are supported on Mac computers.

What I don't like is, the build quality is cheap cheap cheap. Very cheap plastic trays that don't slide in and out easily. When printing card stock, the stock gets caught on a lip on the back of the printer and will cause a jam if you don't stand there and manually guide & remove each page. On one occasion, a regular page got stuck in the drum and I had to replace it at a cost of over $150. Suddenly this printer is not such a bargain.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Works great for first year
Comment: The printer works fine for the first year or two. I had no complaints until the third toner cartridge. At that point, I needed to replace the magnetic drum as well. The symptom is that the printouts become gradually darker. This symtptom is common to several other users as well.

Anyways, I replaced the drum ($100) and the toner cartridge ($60?) and the printouts are now darker than ever.

I am just going to buy another printer.

My advice: Buy it knowing it will work fine for a couple of years, and don't bother getting a new drum. Just throw it away.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Best laser printer I ever had
Comment: I have been a HP laser printer since de mid 80s. Over a year ago I switch to Brother because of the added features this printer had as standard. The automatic duplex printing is a great feature and I am hooked on it. The price tag is fantastic. HP cannot even come close in quality and features let alone price.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: not bad
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent bang for the buck 1200 dpi laser printer
Comment: This Brother HL-1650 is a surprising great workhorse. Its as solid as the HP 5MP it replaced and prints a realistic 14 ppm. Since I use the printer mostly with accounting software, I gave it 4 stars and not 5. Reason being that I use pre-printed checks with this printer. So the checks don't offset (ghost), the printer must be set in "transparency" mode, which allows it to print slower (at approx 10ppm) so the fuser can apply more heat to the toner. All in all a great printer that I highly recommend...

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