Brother HL-820 review

When you think about it, £199 doesn't buy you an awful lot these days - there was a time when you could buy a couple of cars for this much money, or more recently, a low- to mid-range inkjet printer.

But this month, £199 ought to be able to get you Brother's latest addition to its HL range of laser printers - the 8ppm HL-820.

At this sort of street price, you might expect the HL-820 to be something of a sloth in the printing stakes, or to have pretty poor build quality. You'd be far from the truth, though. The Brother machine we reviewed is far from 'cheap', as inexpensive as it may seem.

The layout apes previous members of the HL series: the paper bin (150 A4 sheet capacity) is atop the machine at the rear, with a forward envelope/letterhead single-feed slot attached. During printing the paper travels through a straight path, ending up in a front-catching tray that folds down from the top of the machine. Alternatively, you can simply allow the output to spill onto your desk top.

Controls are minimal - the only two are the power switch at the back-left of the machine and a single multi-function button at the front-right-top. This single button cancels printing if it's started, wakes the printer up if it's asleep, and, if the data lamp is lit, performs a form feed function. Finally, although the printer can recover from errors automatically, it can be used to clear particularly stubborn ones.

Above the button are four LED indicators: an indicator that informs you when it's time to replace the drum, plus Alarm, Ready and Data indicators, all of which perform the functions you would expect of them.

Setting the printer up is simplicity itself. The assembled drum/toner unit (toner is replaced separately from the drum unit, for £17 per cartridge) simply slots into the printer from the front, and you're ready to install the drivers. The review machine was supplied with a CD containing the drivers, and installation was straightforward. Indeed, we'd estimate that most users with a quad-speed, or better, CD-ROM drive would be up and running in under 10 minutes from opening the box.

Print quality is the be all and end all of a laser printer. Without the advantages of colour to make a document look interesting, output from a mono laser printer has to be crisp and accurate and the blacks, well, black. The HL-820 does not disappoint with the density of its print, and textual output at 600 true dots per inch is very well formed, with very little evidence of stepping on curves unless you view a printout with a powerful magnifying glass.

Graphical output, particularly on photographic subjects, is excellent. There's some small evidence of a tartan pattern appearing on large areas of dark shading, a function no doubt of the dithering algorithm Brother has used, but this effect is only very slight, and probably not noticeable unless the viewer is specifically looking for it. A nice feature of the driver lets you print multiple pages on one A4 sheet - up to four miniatures - which makes it a lot less expensive to produce draft output before the final document is printed. There's also a manual duplex printing option.

Overall, for not a lot of money, you are buying a true 600dpi laser printer that does exactly what it says on the tin. Output is at the top end of the scale for a 600dpi unit, and running costs ought to be less than a penny a page on average printouts. Processing time before the first print comes rolling out has been commendably quick on our testbed machine, with text-only documents beginning to print almost immediately. A well and worthily recommended printer at an excellent price.