Over this past model-year, some manufacturers have been revealing desktop inkjet printers that aren’t the typical design for this class of home or small-business printer. The typical design is where a print head moves back and forwards over the narrow edge of an A4 / Letter document page or a scanner head faces upwards scanning the document which is placed on the glass platen face-down. Similarly this is where output and input trays jut out from each side of the inkjet printer.

At the moment, I am highlighting four printers that have been examples of these newer printers and what they can offer, rather than machines that have advanced-functionality software.

HP OfficeJet Pro X Series

This business desktop inkjet printer implements a full-width printhead to print the document. Here, this allows the document to be printed very quickly rather than having the a small printhead move back and forwards over the page to be printed. This kind of mechanism is similar to how older dot-matrix impact “line printers”, or the thermal printer setups used in the old fax machines, receipt printing or some Brother and Pentax mobile printers marked what they were printing line by line.

It has allowed for the documents to be turned out very quickly in so much that the OfficeJet Pro X Series earned its place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest desktop printer by turning out 500 sheets in 7 minutes 19.2 seconds using the fastest available colour mode. Other advantages included high colour accuracy which would yield high-quality documents due to the head not having to move across the document line by line.

Even the documents emerge from this printer in a similar manner to a laser printer. That is at the top of the machine, “easy-over” with the printed side of a single-side document or the odd pages of a double-side document facing down.

Here, the printer has been positioned as a competitor to the colour laser and LED printers that would satisfy a business’s colour-based “workhorse” printing needs. This is one such printer that could end up as a short-run “printing press” for a small-business’s promotional printing needs.

Brother MFC-J4710DW series

This new multifunction printer series from Brother uses the conventional printhead but has the long edge of the standard A4 / Letter document paper being fed in the the machine. It has allowed for a compact chassis for a conventional-feed inkjet printer. Even when the printer isn’t in action, the unit looks neat and trim and doesn’t take up much desktop space.

Similarly, the printer is able to print the large sheets like A3, Ledger or Tabloid by marking across the narrow edge just by the user inserting the narrow edge of the large sheet through the front manual-feed slot.

HP Envy 120 Multifunction printer

Based on the HP Envy 100 low-profile multifunction printer previously reviewed on HomeNetworking01.info, this printer uses that same ultra-slim chassis with a low-profile mechanism that is capable of printing both sides of a document. Here, it has the same aesthetics as a home video recorder made from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s, thus  being acceptable in the main lounge area. This is augmented with the way these printers close up when they aren’t printing anything but raise the front panel and expose a ledge when they are turning out a document.

But this printer uses a scanner that has its scan head integrated in to the see-through lid with documents laid out “sunny-side up” with the image facing you. It will allow you to make sure your photos are laid out in a manner that will have them be scanned properly. This is a different approach to designing the multifunction printer but it may yield issues when working with bound materials.

HP OfficeJet 150 mobile multifunction printer

HP OfficeJet 150 mobile all-in-one printer

The low-profile printer-mechanism design that had taken place for the HP Envy printers had been extended to the HP OfficeJet 150 mobile multifunction printer which was reviewed on HomeNetworking01.info. In the same compact chassis that you would expect for a battery-operated mobile printer, you were able a unit that integrated a sheet-feed scanner as well as the printer, allowing you to scan documents in to your laptop computer or make a quick copy of an A4 document.

Conclusion

What I see of these printers is that HP and Brother are working towards printer designs that break from the norm and provide quicker output, increased document-handling flexibility or an ability to improve the device’s industrial design.

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Article – From the horse’s mouth

Hewlett-Packard

HP Officejet Pro X Printers with HP PageWide Technology (Product Site)

My Comments

HP have joined Brother in raising the bar for wet-ink-based printing. What Brother have done is to develop a compact inkjet multifunction printer that works the printhead along the long edge of the paper rather than the short edge to allow for this compact design.

But HP have taken things differently by using a stationary “full-width” printhead in their latest run of desktop business inkjet printers known as the OfficeJet Pro X. Here, this avoids the need for a small printhead to move back and forth to print across the page. This has allowed these printers to achieve print speeds of around 70 pages per minute for the premium models in the series and 55 pages per minute for the standard models in the series.

The stationary “full-width” printhead is a technology used in some of the digital printing presses used by an increasing number of print shops to turn out short-order process-colour printing jobs for small businesses and community organisations at cost-effective prices.  As well as this high-speed feature that HP promotes, there is the obvious reduction in mechanical parts needed in the printer, which gives other benefits like increased reliability and reduced operating noise.

As for costs, these printers sell at prices that are comparable to a lot of the high-end desktop colour laser printers like the Brother HL-4150CDN and they have a similar duty cycle to these machines. There may be still some further questions to raise such as the cost of the ink cartridges for these machines.

On the other hand, HP could even take this technology further with other printer classes such as using the stationary inkjet printhead in areas dominated by the thermal-paper printing method such as receipt and label printers. It may also be interesting to see whether Epson or Brother may integrate the stationary-printhead technology with their piezoelectric “pump-method” ink-delivery methods as another competing high-speed inkjet system.

Of course, who knows what kind of game-changing technologies would appear in many of the different product classes.

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Previously I had reviewed the Brother HL-6180DW monochrome laser printer on this site and had recommended it as a mono laser printer for relatively heavy-duty requirements.

But yesterday, I had seen one of the printers in the same series as this printer used by my doctor, who practices at am inner-suburban clinic, to turn out some prescriptions that I needed. Here, this machine had to be used with the secondary paper tray that held the special stationery required for printing out the prescriptions. This printer has shown up the same abilities as the review sample when it came to the way it worked. The fact that this unit uses a separately

I would expect that it would satisfy the high-mileage requirements that would be expected for a printer being used by one or more family doctors who work at this kind of medical practice.

As well, the second paper tray could be offered as an option on any mid-tier monochrome laser printers so as to allow for the use of particular stationery, rather than having to manually load the particular stationery one sheet at a time on these printers.

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Articles

HP’s new all-in-one printer adds more to that ‘all’, turns into a WiFi hotspot

HP printer can act as Wi-Fi hot spot | CNet

My comments

The network-capable multifunction printer has come to a point in the level of functionality that it can offer. Now HP has taken this further by making the Wi-Fi network functionality work as a wireless access point or wireless client in one of their latest SOHO / small-business laser multifunction printers.

Here, the wireless segment created by this printer can serve up to 9 users as well as providing for CD-free driver installation for most operating systems. Of course, like all HP consumer and SOHO / small-business network-enabled printer devices, this printer offers the expected ePrint “email-to-print” ability for smartphone and tablet users and AirPrint for iOS-based Apple mobile devices.

The printer can work as an elementary low-traffic wireless router to a static-IP, dynamic-IP or PPPoE Internet service that comes via an Ethernet cable. It also has home/SOHO WPA2-Personal security with the shared password, which may be of benefit for small businesses who rent office space such as a serviced office and have wired Internet access as part of the deal.

But I would like to see the printer able also to work as an access point for those of you who may work from a garage or barn and share network and Internet facilities with the main house or have to use this feature as an infill access point for a dark spot in the network’s wireless coverage. Similarly, it could benefit from anther Ethernet socket on the back for use with other wired-Ethernet devices like network-attached storage.

Of course, the idea of “ganging” the Ethernet socket and the Wi-Fi circuitry in a network-capable device like a printer that offers Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity to make it be network infrastructure has impressed me. It then allows these functions still to be of use even if just one is implemented for connection to a host network.

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Brother HL-2240D compact monochrome laser printer – an example of a workflow printer

I have come across situations with small offices such as clinics who run one or more dedicated laser printers that turns out receipts, invoices and other documents as part of the customer-facing business workflow. Some offices may run the printers also for some back-office requirements like preparing reports or balance sheets for that workstation.

But there is the situation where the printer can break down, usually with a mechanical failure like frequent paper jamming. This can happen more frequently as a machine ages and is worked hard in a busy office. It is analogous to that situation most of us experience when a car gets to that point in its life where it frequently lives at the mechanic’s workshop and drills a hole in your pocket because it is always breaking down.

This situation can impair the business’s workflow especially as one has to work out how to rectify a paper jam or, in some cases, reset the machine. As well, no woman would want to ruin their beautifully-done fingernails knocking them on the machine’s internals while removing jammed up paper.

In these situations, it is a good idea to set up a failover printing arrangement where you have other printers that come in to play if the workstation’s primary machine fails. This is easier to achieve if all of the printers accessible to the office or reception area are linked to the network.

For example, you could use a multifunction for this purpose even though each workstation computer has a dedicated laser printer like the Brother HL-2240D or Dell 1130n. The multifunction printer, which is often expected to serve as the main copier and fax machine for the organisation, could be a machine like the Brother MFC-8370DN or HP LaserJet M1536dnf for a monochrome variety or a Brother MFC-9460CDN or HP LaserJet Pro Color M475 Series for a colour variety. Even one of the high-end business inkjets like the HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 could do the job just as well.

Some environments that have two or more workstations may prefer to have one workflow printer per workstation. Here, it would be preferable to connect the printers via the network rather than directly to the workstation computers. Here this can allow the other workflow printer to be used as a failover measure.

HP LaserJet M1536dnf monochrome laser multifunction printer – an example of a multifunction expected to be a small business’s copier and fax

But what you would have to do is to set up the workstations to use the printer that is local to them as well as this main multifunction printer or other workflow printer. This may be as simple as adding the driver set for the main printer to the computers or it may also require the line-of-business software to be set up to allow the use of two or more printers.

As far as default printers are concerned, you would have to set the primary dedicated printer as the default machine, then have the users select the main multifunction printer as a secondary printer whenever their primary printer fails. This can be done as part of ordering the print job in most software or going to the Printers option in the operating system and setting the multifunction printer as the default while the single-function workflow printer is out of action.

If you run a server-driven printing environment, it may be worth looking at options that allow failover printing so that print jobs that come from one workstation appear at particular printers in an order of availability.

Once you look at this option for setting up multiple printers in your office or reception area, you could then be sure of an arrangement where a printer failure doesn’t impede on your business workflow or affect how your business is perceived by the people your business benefits.

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Introduction

I am reviewing the Brother HL-6180DW monochrome laser printer which is Brother’s latest entry in to the “office workhorse” laser-printer market.

The printer that I am reviewing here is the top-of-the-line model which has a page throughput of 48 pages per minute, a high-capacity paper tray and wireless networking. There are cheaper variants that have a lesser-capacity paper tray and work more slowly, with the models in this group having different connectivity options having wireless networking, Ethernet networking only or USB direct-connect only. All of them are driven by the same heavy-duty monochrome laser print engine and can print on both sides of the page.

Prices

Printer

Recommended Retail Price: AUD$549

Optional Extras:

Optional high-capacity paper tray: AUD$180

Inks and Toners

Servicing and Other Parts (Laser Printers)

The printer itself

The Brother HL-6180DW is able to connect to a wired Ethernet or 802.11g/n Wi-Fi wireless network. For that matter, it can support Wi-Fi Direct where it effectively becomes its own access point as well as AirPrint driver-free printing for the iOS platform. It still works with Brother’s iPrint&Scan Android app, being able to print Web pages, PDFs and photos from Android or iOS devices. It is also future-proof by being equipped for IPv6 in a dual-stack manner.

As a monochrome laser printer, this printer and the rest of the series are pitched as a “heavy-duty” take of the HL-2240D and similar units that I previously reviewed. These used a separately-replaceable toner and drum setup with the toner cartridge being “nested” in the drum unit that is loaded in to the front of the printer. This still has the advantage of the drum unit being separately replaceable which is more relevant to equipment that is expected to do a lot of work.

But the difference between these units and the other compact units is that the print engines on these models are optimised for heavy-duty printing. Here, you notice the difference with behaviour like the printer sounding like it is doing a normal print run even when working on both sides of the paper.

Printer setup experience

Hardware setup

Control panel

Something that can confuse some users is the front-door latch being confusingly part of the output retainer tab. This may be of concern when you are setting up the printer and removing all the packaging material or if you have to ask someone who isn’t familiar with the machine to change the toner or rectify a paper jam.

But once I opened the machine’s front service door, it didn’t take long to get the printer up and ready for use. The drum unit, with the toner cartridge. dropped in to the slot without any risk of user confusion, The paper was also easy to load up with a drawer that didn’t feel tacky.

Software setup

As is my practice when reviewing printers, I install the latest driver set from the manufacturer’s Web site rather than working from the CD that came with the equipment. This is to be sure I am not running a driver set that has bugs or isn’t tuned for best performance with current needs because of the desire amongst manufacturers to get the product to market very quickly.

During the installation phase, the driver software discovered the printer very quickly and was able to have the printer ready to go within a few minutes. Like other driver programs used with Brother printers, it still has the same easy-to-use user interface where there is a list of selected options for the print job.

Printer useability and page quality

The Brother HL-6180DW laser printer doesn’t take long to start turning out the print jobs. Here, it took only a second from when I clicked the “Print” button on the computer for it to come to life and have the first page of the document coming out of the output bay. There wasn’t any unnecessary curling or buckling with the paper after a print run because the printer’s fuser unit was effectively at temperature when the job came in. Even the auto-duplex cycle was very quick with it taking around three seconds to print both sides of the page.

There is a confidential-print mode where you can set up a passcode that you enter in to the printer to claim the print job. But, like the other single-function printers with this feature, it requires the user to enter the passcode using the “pick’n’choose” method with the arrow keys and this can cause users to be impatient with this printer.

Separately-replaceable toner cartridge and drum unit that nest in to each other

Like all of the Brother laser printers, the HL-6180DW uses a separately-replaceable toner cartridge and drum unit which slot in to the front of the unit. Here, like the compact HL-2240D and others in that series, this unit requires the drum unit to be removed from the printer before you can replace the toner cartridge. But it is still easy to detach and attach the toner cartridge and drum unit by you pressing a distinct green tab to separate these pieces.

The auto-duplex function was exact with the registration when printing A4. This would be important for desktop publishing, especially if you want to turn out tent cards, door hangers and the like.

When you print colour photos using this printer, the 1200dpi image was brighter than the 600dpi image, thus was also close to what a colour image would look like on those old black-and-white TVs. The printer also turned out some very sharp text from material printed out from the computer.

The Brother HL-6180 laser printer was very reliable with turning out a large auto-duplex print job, thus not being prone to jam up. In fact if it runs out of paper, you don’t need to do anything further to get the job going beyond just putting the paper in the drawer.

Limitations and Points Of Improvement

The Brother HL-6180DW and others in this series could benefit from a few useability improvements here. For example, a distinctly-coloured latch release for the front service door could be beneficial here because this is hard to find amongst the document retainer flap on the top of the printer. Here, the confusion can occur if a user had to open up the printer to replace the toner or rectify a paper jam.

As well, there is the absence of a “fuel-gauge” on the display to show how much toner is available. Here, this can be useful if you were to determine whether to always run high-capacity cartridges or know if you were to order extra toner after a large print job.

Similarly the printer could benefit from a USB port to permit walk-up printing of PDF files or use of a USB keypad to improve the useability of the printer’s “secure print” function. This could be delivered as a product differentiator for the high-end models. As well, the HL-5470DW could be able to work with the extra-high-capacity toner cartridge, which could be handy if you were to avoid having to spend heaps of money on toner.

As well, the end-of-job cool-down noise could be reduced by, perhaps, gradually slowing down the fan’s speed through the cooling cycle or running the fan very fast for a few minutes just at the end of a print job.

Conclusion and Placement Notes

The Brother HL-6180DW laser printer is one I would recommend for use as an office’s main laser printer. This would be very important in paper-intense environments like schools or medical and legal practices or for those of us who are doing plenty of monochrome desktop publishing. If you could afford to, you may be at a point where you can use the high-capacity or extra-high-capacity toner cartridges for most of the machine’s working life and use the standard-capacity toner cartridge as a short-term measure if the organisation was short on cash.

If you want to save money but want a heavy-duty laser printer, I would recommend that you could go for the Brother HL-5470DW if you value Wi-Fi connectivity or the HL-5450DN if you are just connecting to an Ethernet or HomePlug network segment. Here, you don’t have the ability to load up a large quantity of paper or use the extra-capacity toner cartridge. But, as I have said before, I would recommend using the high-capacity toner cartridges due to the low cost-per-page and the long time between replacing them.

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Article

Brother crams all-in-one functionality into a pint-size package for Business Smart series – Engadget

From the horse’s mouth

Brother USA

Press Release (PDF)

My Comments

I was reading the Engadget article about this Brother multifunction printer and found that this is another example of improving on the printer’s design. The previous examples I have seen and consider of note include the use of a “capillary” pipe system and front-loading ink cartridges to allow for a compact printer design, the design of A3 multifunction inkjet printers and designing compact colour LED printers that use four colour drums.

Typically a printer or multifunction prints in a portrait manner where the paper is fed in to the machine using the short edge. Then the print head works across that sheet along that edge. This has been the way to go for most printers because it was known not to be likely to jam but makes it hard for manufacturers to design a compact printer system with a reduced footprint.

What Brother has done with their latest “Business Smart” inkjet printers, headlined by the MFC-J4510DW is to implement landscape printing. This is where the paper is drawn in by the long edge and the print head moves across the long edge of the page. It has allowed them to design a very shallow machine that doesn’t need to occupy much desk space because the paper is held lengthways within the machine. Another advantage is to avoid the bulky look of paper trays that jut out from the front of the printer, which can be seen to make the machine look ugly.

Of course, the MFC-J4510DW which was cited in the article and the press release has the expectations of a current-specification business printer. These include network connectivity including Wi-Fi, low running costs due to availability of separate-colour cartridges including high-yield cartridges, app-assisted printing from mobile devices and auto-duplex printing which cuts down on paper used, prints documents that are more intuitive to read and opens up desktop-publishing possibilities. It can also print 11”x17” pages as long as the paper is fed in the bypass tray.

There are some limitations like the inability to print without borders when doing auto-duplex printing but I would expect for Brother to iron out these difficulties come the next iteration of this series.

Once these printers are released, it could be a chance for Brother to work further on compact printers that could appeal to particular applications where the narrow footprint is desired.

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Introduction

I am reviewing the Hewlett-Packard OfficeJet 6700 Premium business colour inkjet multifunction printer. This is the successor to the OfficeJet 6500 series of network multifunction colour inkjets pitched as a SOHO or small-business printer and has a similar capability to these printers. They have money-saving functions like a four-cartridge ink system and automatic duplex printing as well as a Super Group 3 colour fax and automatic document feeder.

But this one, like the OfficeJet 6500a, also supports the HP ePrint ecosystem and Apple AirPrint abilities which allows email-to-print as well as app-driven walk-up printing. They also use a different cartridge to their predecessors but which cost similarly and have a similar page yield to these ones.

Prices

Printer

Recommended Retail Price: AUD$279

Inks and Toners

The printer itself

The HP OfficeJet 6700 is the typical size of a SOHO / small-business inkjet multifunction and, like most HP printers offered nowadays, has the paper concealed in a tray that is fully closed. It is not as well-built as the OfficeJet 8600 Series but is still well built as expected for an office printer.

Walk-up functions

The touchscreen control panel

The OfficeJet can become a high-quality colour copier which can also support ID copy abilities. It also can become a colour fax machine which works to Super G3 fax standards.

The USB port on the front of the machine is for walk-up printing of photos held on memory keys or memory-card adaptors. It can support walk-up scanning of documents to the memory key but doesn’t support walk-up printing of PDF or similar documents. As well, it could benefit from working as a print device with PictBridge-enabled cameras.

The ePrint apps allows the printer to work as a “walk-up” stationery or newspaper printer and even has access to the various document repositories like DropBox so you can have documents available to “print on demand”.

Computer functions

The driver software setup was very quick and it didn’t need the printer to be fully awake for the computer to discover it. Even as the installer was loading the software on to my hard disk, the printer was being discovered as a destination device while it was in the dormant mode with just the standby light glowing.

The print driver doesn’t draw too much on the computer’s resources and is able to give a rough preview of how the print job would appear with the current settings. It even provides just the basic setup options with the ability to go to the advanced options by clicking the “Advanced” button. This tactic avoids the need to think of “hope I have set it up correctly” and can benefit those of us who may find the computer difficult to use. Similarly, the scanning function that is part of this driver responds properly to control-panel-initiated scanning and doesn’t take up too much resources.

Like nearly all HP network-capable printers, this printer supports the HP ePrint system which I have covered a lot on HomeNetworking01.info. This has the printer having its own email address so you can send documents to the printer at that address. It also has the ePrint Apps facility so you can turn out newspapers, forms and similar documents.

Print quality and useability

Front-loading ink cartridges rather than lifting a heavy lid

Like its bigger brother the HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 Plus, the HP OfficeJet 6700 has a front-loading arrangement for the ink cartridges. This avoids the need to mess with a heavy lid when you need to change the inks. But the print area isn’t illuminated which may be of concern if you had to identify the location of a paper jam in the print path.

The speed in which a document is printed was very quick where it took only a few seconds to turn out one side of a document. The dwell time that has to occur between printing each side of a double-sided document was around a few seconds and could be capitalised on by slowly retracting the paper in to the duplexer while this occurs rather than pausing then retracting the paper.

Speaking of this, I did a registration test on the auto-duplex function to see whether there was any drifting when a double-sided document was printed. The duplex print of the “Stop The Traffik” download-to-print door-hanger was exact in such a way that you could print then cut out the document exactly. This is a bonus for those of us who do desktop publishing and want to print booklets, door hangers, luggage tags and other documents where an exact lineup between front and back are critical.

As I have observed from this, the printer has been very reliable with the basic print job which uses regular office paper. It didn’t matter whether the job was turned out on one side or both sides.

The HP OfficeJet 6700 has a problem with the scanner when it comes to handling bound documents like books. Here, the unit shows up paper-jam error messages relating to the automatic document feeder if the lid is partially open and allowed to rest on the document, usually to allow optimum copying of these documents.

The  HP has shown a problem with loading and handling photo-grade glossy paper and doesn’t even support this paper as far as the driver is concerned. I even noticed that it shown up “out-of-paper” error conditions when it tried to feed the glossy paper where I had set the driver for “other brochure papers”. However, it loses definition in some areas and is weak with some blue colours but is OK with other colours including flesh tones.

Limitations and Points Of Improvement

Being a cheaper printer, the HP OfficeJet 6700 has a smaller display which may affect useability with some older people.

The automatic document feeder could be worked on so as to allow the user to partially close the scanner lid when they scan or copy bound documents. As well, like many multifunction printers equipped with this feature, it could be able to handle till rolls and thermal receipts in varying conditions when users scan these as part of receipt reconcilement for tax or expense reimbursement.

Similarly, the HP OfficeJet 6700 could be set up to work reliably with glossy photo paper so as to handle photo printing tasks, which may be asked of in a SOHO environment.

The walk-up printing abilities could be improved with an SD card slot for camera SD cards, PictBridge support and / or the ability to print PDF and XPS files off the memory keys.

As far as connectivity goes, this printer should support IPv6 as this next Internet standard is becoming a “given” amongst business computing hardware and will be a standard for all network and Internet setups. Similarly, the fax could work as a T.37 / T.38 Internet fax endpoint as we move away from the traditional circuit-based telephony setup towards IP-based telephony.

Conclusion and Placement Notes

I would recommend that people purchase the HP OfficeJet 6700 printer as an entry-level printer for small-office / home-office use where photo printing is not important but fax use is important. This is more so if you want to use a business-grade printer in your home because of its high-capacity ink cartridges.

It could also work well as a colour inkjet multifunction printer that you may use in your workplace as a secondary or “particular-user” printer. This may include applications like a reception-desk printer where you want one machine as a fax and ePrint endpoint.

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Hi everyone!

Brother HL-3075CW colour LED printer with Wi-Fi and walk-up printing

You may have seen the recent TV commercials for Brother’s printers and may be interested in the printers that are featured on them, especially the ones shown at the end of the ad.

They are:

• The HL-3045CN colour LED printer which is the lower-spec variant of the HL-3075CW which I have reviewed here
• The MFC-J6910DW multifunction inkjet printer which can print to and scan from A3 paper
• The HL-4150CDN colour laser printer which is known for a very-quick auto-duplex function, something you can use for colour short-run flyer printing.

This informatiom may be of use if you want to find out more about these printers after seeing that TV ad.

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Introduction

I am reviewing the Brother HL-3075CW colour LED printer which is an economy colour xerographic printer based on LED technology. I have covered this technology before in an article about the difference between laser and LED printer technologies.

There is a cheaper variant of this printer, known as the Brother HL-3045CN which has USB and Ethernet connection to host computers only and doesn’t have the walk-up printing abilities that this model has. The comments about the print quality would apply to the Brother HL-3045CN as well.

Prices

Printer

Recommended Retail Price: AUD$449

Inks and Toners

It is worth knowing that Officeworks are selling in Australia a pack of each of the above-listed toners for AUD$375.

Servicing and Other Parts (Laser Printers)

The printer itself

The printer’s control panel

The Brother HL-3075CW was very easy to set up. This included establishing it on to the home network via Ethernet and is what I would prefer for any networked printer so as to assure reliable operation. It also is future-proof with inherent support for IPv6.

Walk-up functions

The Brother HL-3075CW has a USB socket on the front for PictBridge printing from cameras or to print PDF and JPEG files from a USB memory key. The PictBridge setup worked as normal with may Canon PowerShot G1X camera, making use of the camera’s user interface properly.

USB socket for connecting document-filled USB memory keys or PictBridge digital cameras

But when you navigated a directory structure of a USB memory key, the display truncated the file and folder names to a shorter form of the kind you would have expected from earlier MS-DOS versions. It could work better by scrolling the full file or folder name if you wait on that folder name without touching any button, and can make it easier to choose the right file to print.

It also works properly with the Brother iPrint&Scan mobile printing app for the iOS and Android platforms and was ready to print when the photo print job was 85% through on my Samsung Galaxy S Android phone.

Computer functions

Although I install the software from the drivers on Brother’s Web site so I can be sure of the latest drivers, the driver installation procedure went smoothly for my Windows 7 computer. This included the ability to discover the printer quickly and without any ambiguity.

The driver’s user interface still has the same features as all the other Brother print drivers that I have used. This is where it clearly shows you the settings you have implemented for your print job so you are sure of what you are specifying for the print job.

The printer supports a “confidential-print” mode which is similar to what is offered on the Brother HL-4150CDN. It is where the job is turned out only when you enter a password that you set when you submit the job from your computer. It has the same user experience with that “pick ‘n choose” password-entry method where the user uses the arrow keys to select numbers for the password.

Printer speed, quality and reliability

Toner cartridges in place

The Brother HL-3075CW printer took 10 seconds from the “sleep” mode to be ready to print. It didn’t matter whether you touched its control panel so as you could adjust a setting or do a “walk-up” print job; or sent a job from a computer. If you did send a job from your computer, the first page would be finished and in the output tray a few seconds later. Even the printout speed was very quick for both the colour and monochrome print runs, in a imilar manner to what was expected for most of the colour laser printers that I have reviewed..

If you print photos on this printer, they do come out noticeably darker and it doesn’t matter if you use 2400dpi or not. As well, the Brother printer doesn’t yield strong colours for the images. I also noticed the same effect with printing a picture that I took on my digital camera through its PictBridge interface.

Other than that, the documents that this printer turn out are very crisp and have that distinct “laser-quality” look about them.

Limitations and Points of improvement

There are ways in which Brother could improve these economy colour LED printers. One would be to provide an auto-duplex mechanism so as to capitalise on the advantages of this feature such as paper being saved and the flexibility that this offers for desktop publishing.

As well, they could provide optional high-capacity toner cartridges like they have done previously for most of the monochrome laser and LED printer range as well as the high-end colour laser printer range. This feature could make these colour LED printers appealingly efficient to run and suit different operating patterns.

Brother could also improve the way their laser and LED printers, especially the colour models, turn out photos so that the pictures come out with improved contrast and colour saturation. This is because most of us may use the photo-printing capabilities on these printers for printing proof images that are used when you shortlist pictures for your print or online publication.

As well, I would like to see the USB port on these printers able to be used for a USB “Human Interface Device”-compliant numeric keypad which works as a password-entry device for the “confidential-print” feature. Brother could then sell one of these keypads as an optional “deal-making” accessory for their business laser printers.

Conclusion and Placement Notes

I would position the Brother HL-3045CN as a networked entry-level colour xerographic printer if you don’t place value on the walk-up USB printing feature and the HL-3075CW if you do place value on this function. In some cases, you could use the walk-up USB printing and the wireless network ability as a bargaining chip when you do buy this printer. As well they would work well if you are placing emphasis on them as colour document printers and you don’t intend to print both sides of the page.

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