We are the Authority in Desktop Color Laser Printer Technology - Your source for desktop color laser printer and multi-function reviews

Review by Joseph H. Armstrong for Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer with Built-In Duplex Printing and Wireless Interface
Rating:
I purchased the ’4070′ when I was getting tired of paying for the ink cartridges in my HP DeskJet 6840, especially for ‘everyday’ home printing (online order confirmations, homework, drawings, etc.) I was also looking for a printer to operate on a Mac network. This one is great! The wireless feature allows you to ‘plop’ this thing down wherever there’s a power cord and setup is fairly easy. It’s a single-pass unit (e.g. color and B&W printing are the same print speed) and has duplexing built in. Does a ‘realistic’ job with color photos (not overly saturated). I don’t think it’s too noisy as previous reviews have stated, but it’s certainly not as quiet as an inkjet. The cartridges are neatly laid out in a removable ‘drum’ tray, making changeout that much easier. I particularly like the LCD display with 3 backdrop colors (green for ‘everythings okeydokey’, amber for ‘I’m in maintenance mode, so don’t bother me’ and red for ‘Help!’. This screen tilts out so you can read it more easily as you walk by it. There are some notes for those Mac (maybe windoze too???)folks that I’d like to bring up:

1) get the latest firmware update – especially for PDF files, the first version of firmware caused all sorts of problems where files didn’t print at all. It may not be an issue, but as I got one of the first ones out I got the original firmware version.

2) memory – get more! Especially if you use the BR3 (Brother’s PostScript3 emulator) you’ll need at least another 64 MB just to make it work. There may be some confusion as to which memory it takes, but the notch in the connector indicates that it’s an SDRAM. I pulled memory out of an old laptop I was parting out and works fine.

If you’re looking for a cheaper, water-resistant printout, especially if you need duplex, this is your printer!

—

UPDATE – almost 2 years later and still running strong. I’d recommend locating the ‘TN-115′ series of cartridges as the ‘TN-110′s don’t last nearly as long. Unfortunately, many traditional brick-and-mortar stores only carry the 110′s

Review by Andy Wycislo for Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer with Built-In Duplex Printing and Wireless Interface
Rating:
We needed a printer to print a fairly large volume of B&W and color notes and slides for my wife, who is in vet school. My Canon iP6000D, which is a great photo printer by the way, just wasn’t cutting it speed-wise, since she prints maybe 100 pages of color notes a week, usually all at once. Ink was killing us, too. So, I knew we needed a color laser printer with built-in duplex, which cuts down on the number of pages she has to pack around. It would also save us a bunch on ink, since laser toner goes a lot further.

Now I’m pretty picky when it comes to electronics purchases, so I did a lot of reading. After the positive reviews for this printer on Amazon I made the leap and got this one. I’m very glad I did.

SETUP

First of all, this thing is pretty heavy, something like 75 pounds in the box. The UPS man was glad to be rid of it. It’s all assembled out of the box, just a bunch of tape to take off, etc. Directions are easy to follow. It just fits on top of cheapo two-drawer metal filing cabinet like you’d get at Wal-Mart. It hangs off the edge maybe a half-inch on either side.

Following the directions for the software setup is easy, too. I initially set it up and configured it to print via the built-in wireless, since that’s how all my computers are networked. After the printer is setup on the first computer, you just install the drivers on the other computers with the same disk. Again, follow the instructions and it’s pretty simple. It prints flawlessly from all my computers, both Mac and PC (Apple iMac Intel, Apple iBook G4, HP Pavilion TX1000Z Tablet). By the way, I’m running Mac OS X Leopard on my Macs and Windows Vista on the HP Tablet. It also prints great from Boot Camp on the iMac (with Vista), as well as through VMWare Fusion (using the Boot Camp Partition as the virtual machine).

PRINTER START-UP

First, let me state that I leave the printer on all the time. It comes preset to sleep after 5 minutes, which is about right. When it sleeps it is silent. After you click print, it only takes maybe 20-30 seconds (on average) for it to get warmed up and start printing. If you have printed recently it takes less time. If it isn’t sleeping, it starts pretty much right away.

As expected for a laser printer, it uses a fair amount of power, as my lights flicker slightly when it starts up. But I haven’t blown the breaker yet, and I have quite a bit of stuff hooked up on that circuit.

SPEED

I haven’t timed it exactly, but I would say that the stated 21 ppm is about right for single-sided pages. In duplex, it’s less than half that, probably 8-10 per minute. This still suits me just fine, as my Canon iP6000D printed about 1 page every 3 minutes in duplex mode.

QUALITY

The print quality is very good. It is what you would expect from a good color laser printer. I have not printed photos with it, but I have no need to. It isn’t a photo printer and I don’t expect it to print them like they came from the lab. My Canon does, but it’s a photo printer. That said, it prints pictures of animal anatomy, etc. in my wife’s lecture slides very well. Definitely with enough detail to make everything out, even in small pictures.

It does curl the pages somewhat, but not bad. They flatten back out over time. This hasn’t been an issue for me, and it was something I was concerned about before I ordered it.

CONCLUSIONS

In summary, this is an excellent printer. I’ve had it for a month and a half now, with no complaints. I’ve printed over 500 pages, mostly mixed B&W and color, and all four toner cartridges still register as full. If I run into any problems I will edit this post, but I don’t foresee any. Excellent color printer with built-in duplex for the price. Of course, this printer isn’t for everybody, but if your needs are similar to mine, then this is the printer for you.

Hope this helps. I tried to include everything I was wondering about before I bought it. If I think of something else later, I’ll edit this review.

UPDATE 5/11/08: I’ve ran through the initial set of toner cartridges. The color ones gave out first (all at the same time). One thing I forgot to mention in my initial review is that through the printer control panel on your computer, you can access a printer info page on your local network. It is really cool because it tells you how many total pages you’ve printed, how many of those pages used which color, etc. That lets me see just how many pages I’m getting out of each toner cartridge. Anyway, the color cartridges that come with the printer are rated to put out 1500 pages at 5% cover. I got about 2000 color pages, while printing way more than 5% cover on my wife’s slide printouts! The black finally gave out today at 3295 total pages, and it’s rated at 2500. So I am not unhappy with that. I have replaced all the cartridges with the high-yield types, even though they are more expensive. They should last me quite a while. After about 4 months, this printer is still 5 out of 5 stars!

Review by Graham for Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer with Built-In Duplex Printing and Wireless Interface
Rating:
I was looking for a cheap color laser printer with a built-in duplexer. The Brother 4070CDW delivers that, with good text quality. The color quality is a little weak, but overall it still seems like extremely good value.

First the good:

* Black-and-white text quality is excellent: crisp and clear.

* Setup was very straightforward, with clear and simple instructions.

* It is silent when in sleep mode, and wakes up in around 15 seconds.

Minor weaknesses:

* Colors tend to be somewhat subdued. (For the price and the media, this is what I was expecting.) As is common with color laser printers, it seems fine for printing out web pages or powerpoint but not for any application requiring very bold or very accurate colors.

* Pages tend to get slightly curled.

* Double sided printing is significantly slower than single-sided. The documentation says around 20 sides per minute for single-sided, but only 7 sides per minute double-sided.

Overall, the 4070CDW more than meets my expectations. For $500 (less now!) I’m very happy with both the functionality and the print quality, especially for text.

Review by C. Ho for HP Color Laserjet CP1215 Printer
Rating:
PROS: low price, prints sharp and clean, quiet printing.

CONS: won’t handle all paper stock. Warm-up time is 1-2 minutes.

I bought this printer to replace my 14 year old Hp LJ 4MP. I assumed the CP1215 would be capable of doing the same things my old one did and more in color.

My immediate need was to print out baby shower invites. The card stock was within the limits of HP’s recommendations, no thicker than a 4×6 card. The printer would print 1 invite, then error out with “misprint”. After 20 minutes of making sure I removed all the tabs and protectors that HP ships with and making sure this model supported 4×6 card stock, I found a way to get the rest of my stock printed. I had to press the resume button, causing it to reinitialize the warm-up sequence and then print. Took 30 minutes to do 30 invites.

This printer seems fine to print every day stuff. But if you print specialty paper, size and type, be aware it might not handle the paper well.

Review by desertrider for HP Color Laserjet CP1215 Printer
Rating:
Wow, Amazon is selling this at a great low price and I am very happy with what I got. This printer is my first laser and color to boot and is very impressive in terms of the quality of graphics and text output. The printer comes with enough ink to print out 750 pages at normal mode printing. Then the cartridges are spendy but will have enough ink for 1400 pages for full cartridges (2200 pages for the black cartridge). There are 4 cartridges required for the printer, each costs around $65 each.

I think this will be far cheaper than ink printers when taking a long term view. One neat feature is the printer software is well designed and shows you exactly how many pages each cartridge has left remaining before the ink is depleted.

Very quiet when printing and the quality is great, however the printer itself is quite hefty and surprised me at how big a footprint it turned out to have. Make sure you have a big space for this printer. Also, the printer occasionally makes a noise like it is resetting or something, not unpleasant or anything but keep in mind its not totally silent all the time when not working.