Brother HL-1230 Toner Cartridges

Brother HL-1230 Printer Review

The Brother HL-1230 is a monochrome laser printer designed for the home or small office user. Its straightforward, compact design and excellent speed and quality make it a great choice for small space, without any sacrifices.

It is easy to overlook simple laser printers that simply get the job done, but the Brother HL-1230 is just such a printer. Its design is very basic, slightly boxy, but also fairly compact, allowing it to fit into tight office spaces when necessary. Since it weighs only 25 pounds, it is also very easy to move around. Its one major design flaw is that it only has a parallel connection, though convertors are available to go from parallel to USB cable. There is also an optional network upgrade to add an ethernet port for connecting the HL-1230 directly to a network.

For anything other than a personal laser printer, the HL-1230 might be a little underpowered. It has a 66 MHz processor and only 2 MB of RAM, but for a personal laser printer, this will likely be enough. Only users printing a lot of heavy graphics documents will likely run into problems.

Replacing the Brother HL-1230 toner cartridge is a very simple affair. The front panel opens to reveal the cartridge. Brother HL-1230 toner cartridges have a capacity of 3,000 pages for the standard version, and 6,000 pages for the high-yield cartridge, which is a much more economical option, as it lowers the cost per page significantly, saving money over the lifetime of the printer.

Print quality is excellent. The HL-1230 uses a 600 dpi printing engine, resulting in very sharp prints, both for text and for graphics prints. Print speed is up to 12 pages per minute, and first page out time is less than 15 seconds.

Overall, the Brother HL-1230 is a simple, reliable laser printer that gets the job done without any fuss. Limited connection options are its only drawback.