Brother HL-1070 review

Laser printers are much cheaper than inkjets to run, and for the heavy-duty user whose needs for colour are not pressing, could well be the better choice.

Because it prints just as well on penny-a-page copier paper as most inkjets can manage on posh coated paper, a laser printer quickly recoups the modest premium you pay for the unit itself. Toner's also cheaper than ink - as you'll see from the specs, exact costs vary, but we're talking a ballpark figure of around a penny per A4 sheet, less than half the price of a mono inkjet page.

Generally speaking, lasers are also a lot faster than inkjets, especially if you're producing multiple copies of the same document. With laser engines almost all now rated at eight pages per minute or more, you can realistically expect simple A4 documents to exit the printer in under half a minute, and subsequent copies to follow every few seconds.

Recently, low-cost lasers have also enjoyed a performance boost from increased processing power onboard. A scant eighteen months ago, the only way you could get a laser printer under £250 was to choose a GDI or Windows Printing System (the posh version of GDI) model that relied on your PC to do much of the print preparation. Nowadays, you get PCL5 or PCL6 processing included in the price. This means the printer does more of the work, leaving your PC free to do other things. It also means these budget models now make competent network printers.

Finally, laser output is always razor-sharp. All lasers happily produce at least 600 dots per inch (dpi) of (usually) dense black toner, which means you get the kind of crisp text that inkjets have a hard time reproducing - even on the best paper. Pound for pound, lasers will usually win hands down for text print quality. The same isn't necessarily true of graphics, however.

So, if you don't absolutely need colour, a laser such as Brother's HL-1070 may be the printer for you.

The HL-1070 is, in every way, one of the HL family. Recent reviews of this range in Buyer have repeatedly praised its build quality, and the 1070 is no exception. This model sets itself apart from the gamut of machines on the market today by having the new-fangled (but handy) Universal Serial Bus port - great news if you've already got a scanner and Zip drive hanging off your printer port.

Where the otherwise well-built HL-1070 slips up, though, is in using a permanently-attached ('captive') mains lead - definitely a thing of the past. Quite why it doesn't have a standard kettle lead (for economical replacement) escapes us.

For the heavy-duty printing to which lasers are best suited, it's important that your printer can accommodate plenty of paper, of all the different sorts you want. The Brother offers dual input trays, very useful for using headed paper for the first sheet of a document, or simply for lasting longer before you need to reload. Printed sheets collect in a decent-sized bin on top of the machine.

Armed with a resolution of 1200x600dpi, this printer should have absolutely no problem churning out good-looking text. Sure enough, such prints are pretty much flawless - easily good enough for those all-important letters to the bank manager explaining that you're overdrawn because you've just bought a new laser printer. What's more, it's pretty quick to turn out text-only documents - taking as little as ten seconds to get the results into your hands.

This is all great stuff, but these days almost any laser printer can attain this level of competency. The real test of quality is on a printer's graphics output.