What is the Brother HL-1110?
Many people think the only low cost printers are inkjets, but an entry-level laser printer needn't cost you more than £60. This is the price point of Brother’s HL-1110, intended as a personal laser printer for home or student.
Brother HL-1110 - Design and Features
This is a small printer – with its trays shut, its footprint is only slightly larger than an A4 sheet, so it will fit easily on a table or desk. Before printing can start, though, you have to fold down the front panel, which then becomes the paper feed tray, and fold out a two-stage output tray from the top. These trays increase the overall space the printer occupies by about a quarter.
The paper tray takes up to 150 sheets, but has no cover to protect it from dust or spills. Other manufacturers have included a clip-on cover for their entry-level laser printers and Canon even incorporated one which folded down from inside the case; a very neat solution. Not having a cover means you need to fold the front and top panels closed between uses.
The control panel, if the two, pinhead LEDs and power button warrant this term, show when the machine is active and when an error condition such as a paper jam has happened.
Brother HL-1110 - Settings and Installation
Most control is from the driver, which is a straightforward piece of software giving immediate control over aspects such as paper size and type, and print quality. There is a Print Profiles tab which gives quick access to commonly used setups, such as multiple pages per sheet and toner save.
There are settings for two-sided print and booklet print, but both these are manual, where you have to take the pages out and re-feed them to print their second sides.
The two-part cartridge slots in under the top cover and is intelligently coloured light green, so you can see at a glance where to pull it to extract it from the case. The photoconductor drum is rated at 10,000 pages, so you should be able to replace the 1,000 sheet toner cartridge 10 times before the drum also needs replacement.
