Brother HL-1435: One Big Flaw, But Still Very Good

Author's Rating:

Pros: Inexpensive, Fast, Good Greyscale, Reasonable Toner Cost, manual duplex, All-around good printer

Cons: Must buy cables separately, major EMF issues, weak manual feeder tray, scant paper documentation.

The Bottom Line: 
As long as you are not bothered by the manual-feed and EMF issues I outlined in the review, this is a cost-effective winner.

Author's Review
The Brother HL-1435 is a monochrome laser printer targeted at the home and small office markets.

I will not waste your time listing the specifications of this printer when they can be found at the official site:
http://www.brother.ca/english/products/core/product.asp?Prodid=2&features=on

In terms of toner cartridges, it uses both TN-430 (3000 page) and TN-460 (6000 page) units, which sell for about US$50 and $75 respectively. This is certainly more reasonable than the comparable Samsung printers, and also more reasonable than the toners for the HL-1435's big Brother (no pun intended,) the HL-5140. This printer is shipped with the TN-430 cartridge.

First Impressions
The HL-1435 comes in a typical big cardboard box covered with specs, a pretty picture, and the typical computer accessory trappings. Opening the box, I saw that the packaging was well-designed, with the printer well-secured in large Styrofoam holders and a cardboard section on top housing the manual, toner, and other miscellaneous items.

This printer unfortunately does not come with a USB or standard printer cable, probably both the keep the price down and because most users will only need one of them and it makes no sense to give the user something that will be useless. Nevertheless, this will add another 10-20 dollars to the cost of operating the printer.

A decently long power cable of reasonable quality is included. The plug does have a grounding prong. (This cable is 6 feet long. It is very annoying to receive 3 foot power cables.) Furthermore, it's just a standard cable on both ends that is not physically wired into the printer, so it is easy to replace with stock parts if anything happens to it. Furthermore, the printer actually does have a physical power switch, so you're not forced to have it turned 'on' all the time.

The main paper feeder tray on this printer is housed at the base of the unit and does support legal size (8.5" x 14") paper. An unfortunate side effect of this is that the tray protrudes about 3" our of the back of the printer, thus increasing its footprint and taking up valuable desk space.

This unit is Made in China, and the construction is plastic with no noticeable weaknesses. The construction is still not as solid as what is found in HP's workgroup network printers, but those are in another class and HL-1435 is certainly solid. Connections for the power, standard printer cable and USB cables are on the back and not easily accessible if the printer is already located in tight quarters.

Installation
The printer and documentation are covered with warnings that you should install the software first before plugging it in. This is pretty typical, because the average home user will not figure out where the drivers are on the CD. Expert Windows users will just plug in the USB, insert the CD and navigate in the Add New Hardware wizard through the logically labelled directories and find the driver. Thus, if you know what you're doing, the executable installer is totally extraneous and can be ignored. The CD contains software and documentation in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish, and also about 35 TrueType font files that I ignored. There is only a thin QuickStart guide, and no full paper manual.

Installation went completely smoothly and there were no issues at all.

Printing
This printer acts as expected when printing. Tell it to print and it gives you the page. I was surprised at the speed at which it spat out the page, considering I've been using a rock-solid 4 PPM HP LaserJet 5P for a good 10 years (that cost about $1000 when we purchased it.)

At 1200x600 dpi, I found that the greyscale was considerably improved compared to the 600x600 dpi HP LaserJet 5P. It was much less pixellated and far smoother. The blacks were black and the shades in between were well-balanced with very little patching. The text itself was moderately crisp, though it was still somewhat blockier than the HP5P. If you are absolutely fanatical about getting the best printed text quality, particularly in bigger fonts, this is not the printer for you. Of course, it is certainly adequate for typical home and office use.

One very disappointing element of this printer is that the shielding of its electromagnetic field is very poor. Why is this important to you? You should be aware that all laser printers give off magnetic fields when they are working. These fields can cause standard televisions, CRT monitor screens (but not LCD, Plasma, Projection or laptop screens) close to the printer to have an unstable image while the printer is working. With this specific printer, the EMF shielding is rather week, and it causes significant distortion in my Sony Multiscan CPD-G400 CRT monitor even when it is 5 feet away. The distortion from the LaserJet 5P is considerably less when that printer is 2 feet away. I believe this is because Brother probably reduced the shielding level to make the printer more affordable.

The manual-feed input for this printer is also a disappointment: There is generally a small tray that extends from the front of the printer, allowing you to manually feed alternate kinds of paper into it. With the HL-1435, there is no tray, just an opening where you slide the paper in. The lack of this feature is rather detrimental to people who like to manually feed many varieties of paper into their printer.

Conclusions

Do buy this printer if...
1. You need an inexpensive desktop printer for your home or small office.
2. You don't need colour printing.
3. You want to save on toner costs. (1.25 US cents per page with the high capacity toner)
4. You generally stick to a single paper-size for your printing.

Do not buy this printer if...
1. It will be used in close proximity to CRT TV screens or computer monitors.
2. You are fanatical about text quality.
3. You need Postscript support.
4. You need something extremely compact to fit in small desk space.
5. You use manual-feed printing a lot.

I hope this review was helpful to you, and please leave comments if you need more information or have anything else to say.