Brother HL-2070-N B&W Laser Printer

[fos]

I recently purchased a Brother HL-2070-N B&W Laser Printer.

The cost was $229 at a local Office Depot. I picked this printer due to its low price and the included network interface.

I was motivated to invest in a laser after having several HP and Epson ink jet printers.
(I had a very bad experience with the Epson C-82 color printer but that is another story.) The HPs are reliable and perform well but the roughly $20 B&W and color cartridges add up rapidly. I still have the HP Deskjet 3740 hooked up for the occaisional time that I want to print color.

Naturally, the Brother was easy to setup using my WinXP box. Now that it is summer, I will rarely use this option. The Brother web page had an LPR driver and a cups wrapper available for Debian and Red Hat versions of Linux. I downloaded and installed rpm version per the web site directions for my new CentOS 5 box. The installed software however didn't include the model number I purchased. :( I installed it with the next one down that seemed similar, ie. HL-1870-N and fiddled with the http address (192.168.1.102) (http://192.168.1.102) on my Lynksys switch. It performs quite well. The test page went slightly off the bottom but a test page from OO Writer stayed within the indicated margins.

Supplies for the brother include:

Toner cartridge: $69 for approximately 2500 pages
Image Drum: $129 for approximately 12,000 pages.
(As with many printers, it would probably be best to purchase a new printer once the drum wears out, since a new printer will include both the drum and a toner cartridge.)

Note: The factory warranty provides free replacement for one year from date of purchase.

It works nicely from all of the computers on my home network.

The only drawback: My wife recently printed several pages at about 3:00 AM. The initial warmup causes the UPS connected at the same outlet to beep momentarily as the voltage drops waking me up!!!! Debbie is a nite owl, I'm not.

fos

[Leon]

"The only drawback: My wife recently printed several pages at about 3:00 AM. The initial warmup causes the UPS connected at the same outlet to beep momentarily as the voltage drops waking me up!!!! Debbie is a nite owl, I'm not."

I'd suggest plugging the laser printer into an always-on (surge protection only) socket on your UPS rather than a switched backed up socket. I have my HP 1200 plugged in that way; it has a pre-warm feature that lets it print almost instantly. I suspect your Brother has the same feature, but it only works if it is plugged into an unswitched, i.e. always on, socket.

BTW I print mostly with WP8. I use the "medium" print quality option for finished documents; the"medium" print quality is indistinguishable from "full" and saves toner.

[fos]

Hi Leon,

Thanks for the tip on the toner. I will definitely check out the settings. The web based admin panel is very detailed. It maintains a plethora of maintenance information. It even breaks it down to the number of copies printed per paper size and print quality. It is much faster than the $1000 Okipage that we have hooked up in the science department.

My UPS is a very old 90s vintage. It will beep at the slightest provocation. The only thing I have hooked up to it currently is the modem and router/switch. The power in our rural area fluctuates frequently. If the modem and router lose power, I have to initialize the modem completely and then the router or the settings get mangled. The UPS saves the hassle unless the power is off for a half hour or more.

The fuser lamp in the printer goes into the standby mode after five minutes. It prints from standby in about five seconds. You can force it not to enter standby but the current consumption goes up considerably.

Thanks, fos

[fos]

The Brother HL-2070N network interface laser printer works very well with Debian 4.0. The linux drivers from Brother would not install.

Instead, I used the web based CUPS interface using the HL-1470N option. (HL-2070N is not available)

fos