Two printers, no waiting - Brother HL-660 and Canon LBP-430W laser printers - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, August, 1995 by Rick Broida

Brother HL-660

Rating: ** 1/2

List/Avg. Street Price: $899/$650

Manufacturer: Brother, 908-356-8880, 800-276-7746

WIN / DOS

Canon LBP-430W

Rating: *** 1/2

List/Avg. Street Price: $549/$449

Manufacturer: Canon, 718-438-3000, 800-848-4123

WIN

Self-promotion begins at home. With a touch of creative inspiration and a good laser printer at your side, you can produce inexpensive, professional-looking newsletters, brochures, business cards, directmail pieces--you name it.

The creativity is up to you. As for the printer, check out Brother's HL-660, a compact, versatile, inexpensive laser that whisks out 600dpi pages at a rate of six per minute.

Brother HL-660 If the attractive, streamlined HL-660 looks familiar, that's because it has a twin: Brother's 300dpi HL-630, which burst on the scene last year with the industry's first sub-$400 laser price tag. The HL-600 sells on the street for about $650 and incorporates the same commendable features.

Like its older sibling, the HL-660 employs a 200-sheet vertical paper tray--good news if you do highvolume printing. The upright orientation of the tray creates a straight-through paper path, eliminating the paper-curling effect that plagues other lasers. The tray accommodates a variety of paper stocks and sizes, and a secondary manual-feed slot allows for easy insertion of envelopes, labels, letterhead, and so on, without interrupting the primary paper supply.

There's just one downside to this otherwise excellent paper handling: Although the HL-660 boasts an admirably small footprint of 14.4 by 14.3 inches, it stands (with paper in the tray) a full 15.5 inches high. If your desk has a hutch on top, you may find that the HL-660 is too tall to fit.

Extra height aside, the HL-660 is a breeze to set up. Just don't be confused by the printer's missing power switch--it forgoes one in favor of an automatic power-up and power-down feature. If any questions or problems arise during installation or operation, Brother maintains a toll-free technical support number and backs the unit with a one-year warranty. We appreciate the thoughtful extras bundled with the printer, like the list of phone support numbers for various software vendors and a packet of colorful paper samples from Premier Papers.

Unfortunately, the HL-660 gets lower marks in the all-important area of print quality. When we compare the unit's output with that of a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4P, it quickly becomes clear that you get what you pay for. The 4P costs roughly $250 more and produces just four pages per minute, but its print quality is vastly superior. The HL-660's grayscales look grainy when compared with the 4P's. And although the HL-660's Advanced Photoscale Technology works like HP's Resolution Enhancement technology to improve the caliber of photo reproduction, it's not nearly as good. We were also disappointed by the inclusion of a "starter" toner cartridge that's good for only 1,000 pages.

The Brother HL-660 has a lot going for it, particularly in the areas of speed, paper handling, and price. What's missing is eye-popping print quality--the core attraction of a 600dpi laser.

Canon LBP-430W The problem with Canon's new entry-level laser printer (and the Brother unit for that matter) is the name. LBP-430W brings to mind a replacement part for a 1979 Datsun, not a state-of-the-art laser printer. We hope Canon's next model will bear the moniker PrintSprint or ZippyPage or something cool like that.

Canon's latest offering is an excellent choice for businesses that have basic printing needs. Like Hewlett-Packard's popular LaserJet 4L, the 430W delivers four pages per minute at a maximum resolution of 300dpi. Both the Canon and the HP come standard with a 100-sheet paper tray and a combination drum/toner cartridge that's good for 3,000 pages. Where their paths diverge is in compatibility. The 430W employs Microsoft's Windows Printing System (WPS), which relies on the operating system for the generation of printed pages. Hence, this is a Windows-only printer; it won't print from DOS-based applications (unless they're running under Windows) and it has no options for Macintosh compatibility.

However, WPS offers a few distinct advantages. Because WPS uses your computer's processor to compose pages, a fast computer will print in less time. The 430W's actual print engine may not be a speed demon, but WPS lets it spend less time waiting and more time printing. Thus it also eliminates the need for lots of printer memory and so has just 512K of RAM, which is reflected in the unit's low price.

The 430W's print quality is first rate--as good as any 300dpi laser we've seen. You may not want to use the 430W for newsletters or brochures, but it's a fine choice for general correspondence, envelopes, fliers, and so on. We also like the pop-up Windows driver, which calculates remaining printing time and animates the course of pages through the printer.

We don't like the paper tray's limited capacity or the pages that tend to curl after snaking through the printer. Plus, although a straight-through path for feeding envelopes and card stock is available, there's no clipon or fold-down tray to catch such documents.