My old laser printer, a Brother HL-5270DN which I've been running
since 2006, was getting mechanically unreliable. They don't make it
any more, so I looked for the nearest equivalent. Almost. I wanted a
paper tray that would take a whole ream at a time.
That turned out to be quite difficult to achieve. I've been very
happy with Brother's networked monochrome lasers in the past, and
didn't want a combination machine (I have a lovely portable scanner
that runs off USB power, and I have no use for fax). But if you want a
full-size paper tray, you have to get out of their domestic and small
office ranges into printers intended for medium-sized businesses,
where many sites rather than quoting a price want to set up a
conference call with your tech purchasing manager.
Tough luck, those sites.
The HL-L6300DW does the things I want:
- monochrome laser printer
- automatic duplexing
- wired network connection
- 500 sheet paper capacity
- no larger footprint than the old printer
It also does some things I don't want, like wireless and NFC
connectivity, but I can turn them off.
Because it's fourteen years newer, it comes with a whole 256M rather
rather than 32M of memory, which makes large bitmaps more likely to be
printable. (Too many vendors of tickets and such seem to like these in
their PDFs.) It's also about twice as fast as the old one, which was
twice as fast as the one I had before.
The build quality is very noticeably better than the "domestic and
small office" printers I've had before, and not just because there was
a cute little plastic tompion in the ethernet port. Things have proper
spring catches rather than just friction closures, and enough
thickness of plastic that they don't feel likely to snap off when
handled casually.
As promised, a full ream of capacity. Since I buy my paper by the
ream, and I think most other people do too, this seemed like an
obvious thing to have, and yet…
An undocumented, but genuinely useful, feature: the touch-screen
display folds flat when not in use, and the top opening is small
enough that I can leave a sheet of A4 on it as a dust cover when the
printer's not in use. (And when I print something, the printout will
push it aside.)
The 5270 could print onto envelopes, but it always curled them severely and
crinkled the edges, and recently was prone to misfeeding them. This
one can take an envelope and leave it with only mild curling.
(Quick quiz: how well do you know Roger? Given the requirement to
print addresses into an envelope, he will:
do whatever he does when addressing an envelope by hand; or
use the largest text that will fit in the address area; or
look up the Post Office Preferred options for typeface and font
size, and adhere strictly to those.
In other news, did you know that the Post Office actually prefers you
not to put the county in a UK address these days? Postcode is all
they use at that level of sorting, with post town as a backup, and
extra writing can confuse the machines.)
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