[geeks] Brother laser printers (specifically the 2170W)?

[Chad McAuley]

Chad McAuley wrote:
> Thanks for the opinions everyone.  I decided the price was too good to 
> pass up and went ahead and ordered it on Friday.  Once it gets here and 
> I've had a few days to play around with it I'll let the list know what I 
> think.
> 

I got my printer last Wednesday, and now that I've had about a week to 
play around with it here are my thoughts.

The printer itself:

* It doesn't take up a lot of space, which is good. If you've got a 16" 
x 16" square somewhere you'll have plenty of room for it.

* Looks to have a simple paper path, so any paper jams that occur should 
be a piece of cake to clear.

* I haven't timed it, but so far the advertised first page out and ppm 
ratings seem perfectly reasonable.

* Quiet, which is nice since it's in my bedroom with my other computer 
stuff.  Inaudible in sleep mode, and the only way I can tell it's on in 
standby is because the fan has a different sound than the fans in my 
computers.

* Manual feed "tray" only holds a single sheet and so isn't really 
suited for doing one-off jobs on other types of paper, but they do say 
it's intended for envelopes rather than as a true manual bypass tray.

* I haven't had it long enough to see how well it works, but the Windows 
driver has an "intelligent sleep mode option" that's supposed to 
dynamically adjust the sleep time based on how often you print.  The way 
it's described makes it sound like a printer feature, but the Windows 
driver is the only place I've found to set this option.

* Web interface for configuring printer settings.  Nothing special here, 
although I was glad to see that it does let you set the power LED to 
turn off completely when it's in sleep mode rather than just dimming. 
(The power LED is one of the bright blue ones that seems to popular in 
electronics these days)

* Print quality is good and seems comparable to any of the various HP 
LaserJets we have at work.

* I haven't tried it since I don't plan in using the wireless printing, 
but there is an option in the web interface to have it automatically 
switch between the wired and wireless interfaces.

Installation/Setup and Drivers:

* Installation was very simple.  The drum and toner cart are separate 
units, but their design mimics the toner carts with built-in drums. 
Obviously, this means the toner cart has to go "in" the drum unit before 
you can put them in the printer, but that takes all of five seconds.

* Hooked it up to the network and gave it a bit to grab an IP via DHCP 
and it was all ready to go.

* Installation of the Windows drivers was a piece of cake and they just 
work.  You have the choice of just the driver or driver plus software 
suite, so you don't have to install their special software unless you 
want to for some strange reason.

* They provide a CUPS "driver" for *nix usage, but I'd recommend just 
using the generic PCL6 CUPS driver with this printer.  The driver 
Brother provides is a CUPS wrapper around a lpr driver, which does work 
perfectly fine. The problem (for me, anyway) is you can't change any of 
the print settings from CUPS; or rather, you can change them in CUPS all 
day long, but it doesn't actually change what comes out of the printer. 
   So any changes (like changing the default paper size from A4 to US 
Letter) have to be done either through their brprintconf utility or by 
manually editing the config file.  It's not a huge deal, and there's no 
difference in print quality I can notice between the two, but I ended up 
  using the generic PCL6 driver to save myself any future frustration. 
I know I'll be able to remember how to get to the CUPS web console if I 
need to change any settings in the future; I can't say the same for 
remembering where the settings file for the lpr printer is located at. 
:)  (And I know I could just use locate to remind myself where it is, 
but it's already set up using the PCL6 driver and it works, so why 
bother changing it.

* There's also a CUPS driver for OS X. I don't have access to an OS X 
system and the .dmg file you download isn't a standard HFS disk image 
(so I'm guessing it's some kind of installer?) so I can't open it on my 
linux box and extract the files.  So I don't know if it's the same lpr 
wrapper setup that the *nix driver for this printer is or if it's a 
normal CUPS driver.



I haven't done a whole lot of printing, but so far I'm very happy with 
it.  If you've got any specific questions about features or anything 
else just ask.