Brother HL-730 review

Back in the mists of time, most ordinary users had to make do with dot-matrix or inkjet printers; a laser printer was a luxury for the corporate user.

This has changed with the introduction of the 'dumb' GDI printer, which uses the processing power of the host PC rather than expensive onboard electronics. Brother was one of the first to enter this sector, and has now released its latest GDI machine, the HL-730. Unlike many cheaper GDI printers, it's rated at 6ppm (pages per minute) with genuine 600dpi (dots per inch) print quality.

The HL-730 looks similar to the earlier HL-series printers, with its curved front and paper feeder at the rear. Initially the footprint looks small because the autofeeder sits up at a 45-degree angle, so it needs less space. However, the front of the machine folds out to become the paper out tray, and this does add 280mm to the desk space required.

Paper handling is dealt with commendably well. The autofeeder can handle different sizes of media and caters for up to 200 sheets of ordinary-weight A4, which should be sufficient for half an hour of full-speed output. Atop the autofeeder there's a separate slot for the likes of labels and envelopes. A pair of sliders means these are fed in straight, and another bonus is that you don't have to empty the autofeeder first. One more neat trick is that the bi-directional status box will display a graphic to show the user how to feed in envelopes.

The actual print speeds obtained will vary depending on the specification of your PC. On a 66MHz 486DX2 with 16Mb RAM, our 600dpi page hit the out tray in 25 seconds, and this dropped to just 20 and 18 seconds at 300 and 150dpi. This is certainly very acceptable, and the engine reached its claimed 6ppm throughput for multiple copies of the same document. At the same time, the print quality was as good as you'll see from any 600dpi device for both text and halftoned graphics.

The Brother is also reasonably cheap to run, for a number of reasons. The developer drum and toner units are separate and last for around 8,000 and 2,000 pages respectively. At £110 (£130) and £19.50 (£23) to replace, this equates to a maximum cost per page of just over 2p, which is pretty much standard for a GDI laser. To reduce costs even further, the driver offers two Economy modes equating to 50% and 25% toner saving, which can be useful for draft printing. Finally, the driver also allows the machine to be put into sleep mode after one to 15 minutes of inactivity, and it can then wake up in just a few seconds.

Ease of use and general flexibility are also well catered for. The driver gives plenty of control over the machine, while the status box displays the progress of print jobs as an animation showing paper being fed through the machine. Any errors are also displayed here. The driver is also useful in that it offers manual duplex (both sides) printing capability, and the ability to print two A4 pages reduced onto a single sheet of A4 paper.

The HL-730 offers interfacing flexibility too, with true MS-DOS printing capability for use outside Windows, and automatic emulation switching between LaserJet IIp, Epson FX-850 and IBM ProPrinter. The only downside is that print quality is limited to 300dpi under these emulations. Finally, while the machine has just a single parallel port you can get an optional board which adds Macintosh RS-422A and IBM RS232 serial interfaces, and this will allow the machine to be shared between two PCs, or a PC and a Mac.