HL-1210W

I bought this laser printer because I print very infrequently. My last printer, which I had for a decade, was an inkjet printer. I got sick and tired of going to print a letter or a label, only to find the ink cartridges had dried up. A new black cartridge was about £25. The next time I'd come to use the printer, that had dried out too. Laser printers have nothing to dry up, working in a very different way to your typical inkjet printer. It made sense to buy this, and save a lot of money in the long run. The printer itself is remarkably compact, but feels very solidly built. It came with everything I needed to get it set up. The only snag I encountered was connecting it to my wireless network. I have a Vodafone router, which just would not accept the WPS connection. This isn't the fault of the printer, but necessitated me borrowing a Windows laptop from a friend to get it set up. This was a breeze, but how about some Linux support? With that, I could have used my own laptop. In any case, the printer is greyscale, and produces excellent quality prints. Everything is absolutely razor-sharp with the black text being really black and very legible. It's quiet in operation, jobs spool from my phone, tablet and laptop (Linux sees the wireless printer and just works) and print just as quickly. I've not printed a lot on it, so I can't comment on how long a toner cartridge or a drum last. I did buy both spares so I wouldn't be stuck, and they were very reasonable in cost. Crucially, I used the printer for the first time in a year today. It pinged to life and printed my letter without any fuss. An inkjet printer would have had me down at Tesco buying an expensive cartridge just for a single letter. If you need a compact printer, or if you print very infrequently, you simply can't go wrong with this one. EDIT - I can now confirm that this printer is more than happy with high-quality paper. I'm using it with some really smooth, sleek, white 120gsm paper, and it feeds and prints no bother at all. If you want your letters looking and feeling sharp, this printer allows it.

The printer is great. Small footprint, quiet and good quality print. I’d certainly recommend it. However….. Unless you have a computer, setting up a wireless connection via the Brother app, I found nigh on impossible. I used the app on an iPad but it simply wouldn’t detect my home network (WPS was active). Tried manually entering the IP address but that didn’t work either. I gave up after numerous attempts (if you have put paper in the printer, it gives you a report of the failure and some hints - not that they worked for me. I then installed the drivers from the supplied disc on to my (Windows 11) laptop having loaded. You do need a cd/dvd drive but if one isn’t built in they’re cheap enough to by on Amazon. You also need a usb cable as this isn’t supplied. Again very cheap and given the amount you’ll save in toner compared to other makes, worth the investment! The install was flawless and even gave the option to download the latest drivers. Once completed, the printer automatically appeared in the app on my iPad (and myAndroid phone).

This printer is tiny, fits great on my 30cm shelf. It prints really quickly and quietly. Setup was easy, WPS on my router never seems to work but with a USB-Type B 2.0 cable and the software off the website it allowed setup to put the router settings on that way. It uses 2.4Ghz, won't work with 5Ghz, but once it was set up printing was flawless with the iBrother app on Android.

This may be a good printer but DO NOT buy if you have a Mac. This quote from Brother's IT support "From MacOS 11 and above, Brother printers no longer use our own drivers but Apple's inbuilt AirPrint, your printer unfortunately does not support AirPrint so you will not be able to use the printer on that computer and would have to get a newer printer that will support AirPrint" This applies, not only to wireless printing but also even to connecting with a cable. It will not work, AT ALL. 1 star given because the of the ease of return from Amazon. Brother - it is extremely unprofessional to not make this lack of compatibility completely clear for potential buyers.

Read the comments about people getting a euro plug. mine came with uk plug. so not sure whats that is about, maybe because i brought mine new. They don't include the USB cable any more with printers, but i was aware of this and had one just incase i needed it. But i was plan to set it up as a wireless printer, it was very easy setup. There printer has a WPS button on it, just hold it for about 10 seconds, press the WPS button on your router and the wifi light will stop blinking when you have been successful. if it still blinks hold it on the printer for another 10 secs or more. should work. (i did it from the web page of the router that had more options to make it easier. (it will do a print giving your wifi settings if it worked, so make sure you have paper and the starter toner installed before you do this.) So no needed for a USB cable just to set it up on the wifi if, provided your router has a WPS button on it. once the printer was connected to my wifi, i downloaded the full brother drivers from there web site, installed, setup detected the printer on the next work and installed. and I printed something from MS word to test it and it worked fine. The brother full drivers/software includes a little icon to allow you to see the toner levels which is nice. Prints are crisp and clean, I did have trouble working out how to install the Starter toner that came with it. had to find a youtube video show me. Turns out i was trying to install it back to front, remember when you remove the protective cap, that that part goes in head first. The instructions that it came with was no that clear in the diagram about that bit. I love this printer, simple, fast so i order 2 more toners. should last for years now. I believe the printer only has 38mbs of ram. meaning it might have problem printing large PDF files. there is an option in PDF viewers to "print as image" that should get around this problem, I have not tried this out yet, but bare that in mind. otherwise its perfect for all the simple excel and word documents i print out. there is lots of videos online showing you how to do anything with it so easy to find a solution

Early days, but I think we're going to get on reasonably well together: it has a small footprint, is quiet, and generally seems well-behaved. However, this is advertised as being a *white* printer, which was partly why I ordered it, and it most certainly is *not white*. The lighter colour of the casing is in fact a very pale grey, the colour *all* computers and printers used to be years ago and which I thought we'd seen the back of. Therefore, if you want this to fit a specific aesthetic, unfortunately you're out of luck.

I purchased a used version since I'm only occasionally using it and it worked great. Being used all the packaging had been opened and the ink cartridge was installed. It came with a UK plug. The printer has wireless but I used a USB cable, which wasn't included. The printer uses a square Type B USB connector. A CDROM driver disk was included but I downloaded the drivers from the Brother web site. They were 2014 versions which worked fine. It uses A4 sized paper as standard but it includes a plastic adapter for A5 paper which I will certainly lose. I plugged it in. I powered it up. Downloaded & installed the printer driver. Added paper to the bottom tray. Then in Windows 10 64-bit, printed a delivery note from ebay, selected the printer in print settings, and it quickly printed a nice and clean copy of the label with bar code and insert. It's a laser printer and so the print quality and speed are better than similar priced ink jets, and I expect the ink cartridge will provide more copies as well. For the price and for domestic use I can't fault it.

Print quality very good and very good price However, setting it up for wi fi operation was a nightmare and time consuming. Having to scroll through the internet for solutions gobbles up your life and your patience--until we eventually found advice that you should temporarily shut down any VPN during the install process. Following this advice the issue was immediately resolved. It is a pity that this advice wasn`t provided by the manufacturer on the documentation. Happy and relieved now.