Are you satisfied with your printer? Is it a laser printer? Will it do double sided printing? OK - it works with your Mac or your PC, but have you connected it to your home network? How fast is it?

One problem I had with my old, long term NEC SilentWriter 95 (bought in 1992) is that it wasn't very silent. For each page it produced, the printer groaned loudly and almost painfully - I did come to wonder if it was in agony. Don't get me wrong, that nice printer did a lot of work in the nine years I've owned it. But time had passed it by. It was time for me to get a new printer.

I went looking at the stores up in Tucson. I shopped a number of the online malls and comptuer stores. Every printer I saw, and I saw a lot of them, had its good points, some more than others. One day, I was wandering in an office supply store up in Tucson, and I saw the Brother HL-1650 printer. I almost started drooling over it, and if I were a PC or Linux person, I would have picked it up right then and there. Unfortunately, an empty space next to the HL-1650 had an even better deal, the HL-1670N. By and large, the only major difference I saw between the two printers was the connectors on the back side (more in a moment.)

The HL-1670N is a modest little printer about the size of a breadbox - a very largebreadbox. It has connectors for USB, standard parallel, and the reason I got it: a 1-/100BaseT Ethernet connection. I have an older Mac and a newer Mac, so while a printer would work with one machine, it wouldn't work with the other. Here with the HL-1670N, I got the best of both worlds - network connectivity. I plugged it into my little 4-port hub, installed the drivers, and I have a printer that works with both of my machines. Imagine if I had a PC on this little LAN as well - the CD that comes with the printer has drivers for Windows NT 4.0, ME, 2000, 1998, and 1995 as well as for the iMac, G3, and G4s. Unfortunately, the drivers are for MacOS 9.1 or earlier, but I'm sure newer drivers will be out soon; this printer is one of Brother's newest on the market. Not only does it handle standard TCP/IP network protocols, it will work on a Novell Netware network, and AppleTalk network, NetBEUI, Banyan, and a whole lot more.

Why am I so enthusiastic? Well, the printer pumps out paper at up to 16 pages per minute. It is very quiet; the loudest sound out of it is when the printer is turned on. It does double sided printing at resolutions up to 1200 dpi. Brother has emulated PostScript Level 3. The toner cartridge handles up to 6500 pages (several Master's theses if you are into education.) It handles odd sizes of paper such as the European A4 size. Oh, and the best feature of all is that with the neato advanced capabilities this printer has - many of which I haven't seen on much higher end and much more expensive machines - the HL-1670N printer only costs US $750; this is a real deal.

I can't say enough good things about this printer. (And to think I don't get paid for this!) The premier aspect that I like the best is that it, like Elmer Fudd® hunting the wabbett, is that it is vewy vewy qwiet.

The only down side I have seen about this printer is that while the toner cartridge/drum is good for about 6,500 pages, the replacement toner/drum cartridges cost about $200. And speaking from experience, this cost will not be going down in the near future.

Correction to the original: I have been told that the replacement toner cartridges/drums actually cost about $65. If this is the case, then that makes the Brother printer an even better buy, especially for students with lots of papers to write.

OK - the bottom line: If you are looking for a new, inexpensive printer with a lot of features, take a close look at the Brother HL-1650. If you need networking capability, look at the Brother HL-1670N. You will like what you see.

Details

If you have any questions about this product or any other I have seen, please feel free to contact me here.

Date Revised: 23 December 2003