Brother HL-1212W All In Box
Box clever?
Basic printer produces short-term gains
PRINTER ❘ £160 from Currys www.snipca.com/35138
Brother’s ‘All In Box’ concept is part of a trend to offer printers with extra consumables (cartridges mostly) included, so you don’t have to spend another fortune on refills after a couple of weeks. While a mono laser printer like this would usually come with toner for a few hundred text pages, this deal gives you enough to print five thousand.
Apart from that, the HL-1212W is just a printer, without scanning or copying capabilities. It connects via Wi-fi or USB, and claims to print 20 pages per minute (ppm), although we got about 17 – still a lot faster than most inkjets. We found black-and-white graphics printed crisply as well as text, and photos came out fairly well, though with some banding. There’s no automaticc double-sided printing (duplex), and with no screen on the printer, operation is all via Brother’s software. It’s the kind of basic laser printer you’’d buy just for long text documents, perhaps in addition to a multi-function colourolour inkjet for other purposes.
Considering that a 1,000-page toner cartridge costs around £31 (see www. snipca.com/35140), you’re getting the printer for a fiver. It’s certainly better value than buying the HL1212W without the extra toner for £61 less ( www.snipca. com/35139). In the long term, including the £50 replacement imaging drum required after 10,000 pages, you’ll be paying just over 3.5p per page – not as cheap as some laser printers, but it may be of benefit that the relatively small refills help to spread the cost.
For comparison, Lexmark’s Mb2236adwe (£137 from Printerbase www.snipca.com/35137, see our review, Issue 557, page 25) includes scanning and photocopying, prints nearly twice as fast and with duplex, and has built-in touchscreen controls. It comes with only 700 pages of toner, while a 3,000-page refill costs £60, and a £70 drum is required after 12,000 pages.
So the Mb2236adwe is cheaper to buy, despite its considerably superior features, but suddenly starts costing you more once Lexmark’s starter toner runs out. At around 15,000 pages, however, it overtakes the HL-1212W again for value.
A basic printer with incentives to buy, but will cost you more in the long run