printer and another guide

The Brother HL-5170DN is another strong contender in the mono printer market aimed at small or home businesses.

The real strength of the HL-5170DN is the ability for it to be networked. Workgroup discovery is simply a matter of connecting it and turning it on. It arrived in our workgroup a few seconds later. Once we had downloaded the drivers it was ready to use. Warm was a respectable 10 seconds too. With the first print appearing a further 10 seconds after issuing the print command.

At 21 pages per minute, the HL-5170DN is plenty quick enough for most offices. The prints themselves are reproduced in high quality up to 2400 x 600 dpi. Text is clear, with very crisp edging. There was no bleed at all when we tested ours, which is unusual for a modestly budgeted printer like this. Image reproduction is about what you would expect from a laser. Good but not great. Plenty good enough for office use and even handouts where of sufficient quality as to not embarrass.

The SPARC processor runs at 133Mhz and is plenty powerful enough to process even the longest print queues. The 32Mb provided memory is respectable, even more so when it’s upgraded to the maximum 160Mb.

With good memory, a decent processor and a good quality finish, you would expect to pay much more for this device. The 250 sheet standard paper tray is expandable to 500, a further 50 sheets can be added to the multipurpose tray, and the output tray is enough to cope with 150 sheets. Handling large print jobs is something the HL-5170DN can do with ease.

High yield cartridges can last up to 6500 pages, and are competitively priced making this a good printer for the cost conscious user. Drums will keep going up until 20000 before needing replacement, which again, is a great deal.

Installation is simple, just connect the Ethernet, USB or parallel port and away you go. Drivers are installed in minutes, without issue on our Windows Vista test box, and we were up and running within 10 minutes.

The 5170DN is ideal for those business users who want a no-fuss printer that does exactly what is says on the tin. It can easily cope with almost anything you throw at it. The built in automatic duplex allow double sided printing, and produces prints fast enough for even the most enthusiastic employee. The consumables are great value and easily obtainable through online retailers like Quikshiptoner.com making this a cost effective as well as quality solution.

To view the page count for an AR-M237 copier, hold down the Copy button for a few seconds.  The total page count will be displayed on the screen, 3 digits at a time.

To view the page count for a Ricoh 2510 or 3010 copier without having to print anything out:

- Press the User Tools/Counter button
- Select Counter on the touch screen

The purchase of the Brother MFC-4350, the three in one multifunction printer allows me to manage my work quickly and efficiently. After starting a new business I dreaded having to fill my space with separate copier, laser printer and a fax machines. When I learned about the three-in-one Brother MFC-4350 I breathed a sigh of relief and bought one right away.

It’s a user friendly, simple to set up laser printer, photo copier and fax machine all in one. Buying this machine allowed me to save a ton of money that I would have spent in buying three separate machines. It also saves lots of space in what is a limited office. I had visions of being a lonely figure surrounded by office equipment, but luckily that isn’t the case.

The Brother MFC-4350 provides excellent results for standard black and white printing at a standard 600 dpi. It has a 14.4kbps fax modem and prints 6 pages per minute and 64 grayscale shades for enhanced results.

The photocopies are of average quality but the text and lines are much sharper in the text than images. It has a 200 sheet capacity paper tray and a 20 page document feeder which is automatic and also comes with 124 station auto dial and broadcasting on the fax. That’s handy for me because I always seem to be sending to the same numbers. Three button presses is much better than 15!

The extensive features and specifications of the Brother MFC-4350 makes handling all the work prints, faxes and copies a breeze. The machine produces excellent, high quality results with sharp and clear images and text that is easily readable.

Other features of the Brother MFC-4350 include reduction and enlargement of up to 50-2000%, dual access call waiting, straight paper path and multi copying up to 99 copies with sorting, fax forwarding and remote fax retrieval. This machine has the capacity to accommodate 200 sheet paper tray and stores more than 130 pages for out of paper reception.

Maintenance is minimal, you can install the cartridge and drum unit easily by removing the vacuum sealed foiled cover from the cartridge and place the cartridge in the provided space. They clip into place behind the flap and away you go again. It’s as easy as that.

The Brother MFC-4350 is a high performance three-in-one machine that is suitable for all types of businesses. The large number of features, good print quality and acceptable speed makes it an ideal choice for the budget and performance conscious amongst us.

Continuing the trend of producing good quality laser printers, Xerox released the Phaser 7400. It is a large format color laser printer that has been designed for busy offices or businesses that need fast, high quality copying.

The large format option allows it to print at up to 12 x 18 paper, which is a standard format for artists and graphic designers. Not many other lasers can support paper of that size, certainly not at this price point anyway.

There is a small control panel on the front with one of the clearest and most informative LCD screens on the market. The menu is very intuitive and it’s obvious that a lot of thought went in to designing it. Each menu function is a maximum of three button presses away, and there is also a back button, which saves a lot of time when you choose the wrong function.

Performance-wise the 7400 is pretty good. Print speed is around 35 pages per minute for a typical business document, and color around 32 pages per minute. This isn’t far off the Xerox promotional material, of 36 pages per minute for color, and 40 for black and white.

Print quality is good for both black and white, and color. Text and images are sharp, even down to fine details. There were examples of banding on grayscale images, and a little darkness for color, but overall the quality was good.

The 7400 is network ready, including a built-in Ethernet port. Connecting it to a network was as easy as plugging it in and switching it on. It appeared in our workgroup a couple of minutes later. The included driver package is good, easy to use and worked first time. There were also useful programs in there to add features to it.

The standard paper drawer holds 800 sheets. As this is a large format printer they natively support the larger 12 x 18 in the drawer. This makes a nice change as normally, to print at that size we have to use the manual feeder. Paper capacity can be enlarged to 3000 sheets with additional drawers.

It also includes a hard drive for storing and scheduling large print jobs, a finisher for stapling, hole punching etc, PostScript support, and optional duplex printing to allow for a fully functioning almost commercial printing environment.

Toner is relatively inexpensive, with high yield versions being able to produce around 15000 sheets before needing replacement. Color ones cost more, but also produce more, with an average lifespan of 18000 pages.

This is a good printer for business or those who want to provide commercial printing services on a budget. The Xerox Phaser 7400 puts the company in the fight for a share of the lucrative laser printer market.

On the Workcentre 7525, you can see the page count directly on the screen.  To view the page count (called "impressions") press the Machine Status button, and then select the Billing Information tab.