By Ben Pate

With the introduction of the Brother HL 1850 printer and Brother HL 1850 Toner, you no longer need to purchase an expensive laser printer. This affordable laser printer perfect for small home offices who need a decent and fast laser printer. The speed of this printer is something you will definitely be talking about. This printer's expandability makes it possible for you to adapt it to the needs of any small and bustling office. Although in our opinion it could have a larger paper capacity.

This printer has made it possible for office managers to just dump their old printer and get a new one. The affordable workgroup features are enough reason to dump your old one for this shiny new printer. We liked the fact that the printer worked straight out of the box without extensive configuration.

The well illustrated guide that accompanies the printer makes installation of the printer quick and hassle free. The printer can connect either via USB ports or via sans cable which ships with the unit. The front panel of the printer has a three color LCD which makes read outs clear as well as four buttons that allow you to choose and change paper and perform many other operations.

The user guide that comes along with the unit on the CD Rom is in PDF format and includes everything you need to know about keeping your printer trouble free and running. Making your printer a member of the local network is as simple as connecting it to the built-in-Ethernet ports and adding an extra 16 MB of ram to the printer.

Now the HL's paper handling has its ups and its downs. One disappointment is the printer's paper capacity. The printer can just hold around 350 sheets of paper because it has one 250 sheet tray and one 100 sheet tray. For another two hundred bucks you can purchase another 250 sheet stray bringing your over all capacity to 600 sheets. However its still not enough as compared to the other printers that can hold over a thousand sheets of paper.

The thing we like about this Brother printer is its built in duplexer which is fast and furious. The duplexer works with almost no human intervention. The driver you install gives you an option to either flip the paper to its left or to the right or even to the bottom edge. The default settings allow for you to set your printer up for things such as paper type and size including print quality.

You also get a reset button on each tab with means if you don't like the changes you made you can reset it to its defaults. However there is a lack of a universal reset button which in my opinion should be there. This printer is pretty fast at 19pps.

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