Brother HL-4570CDW

Just what we needed!

We needed a new laser printer and this fits the bill. With all the features, especially duplexing, it has really made our printing work much easier. It prints quickly and the posters and brochures we printed look great. We are really happy we bought this printer.

Good out of box experience

This printer has all of the features that we needed -- duplex, network capable, and color laser with decent reviews.

I had a good out of box experience installing the printer on my peer-to-peer network so that the printer could be shared by all family members without any particular computer being online. I'm no IT expert but everything worked the first time and that's worth something.

The machine was packaged and protected well. It took some time to carefully remove all of the packing material. I think that's good. It's a heavy printer and you don't want to damage it in shipping.

If you appreciate Borg design you'll love this printer.

It works, and that's that. I'll have more to say about toner usage later.

Kudos to Brother for a great OOBE.

ADDED 08 Sep 2011
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It's been a little while and I am still very pleased with this purchase. I do not find it to be any more of a toner hog than the HP Laserjet 5L that I replaced. I DO NOT recommend printing photos with this printer, it's not quite suited to that application in my humble opinion, I still use my HP Photosmart 8750 for that.

I suspected this would be the case and I proved it today. I have this printer connected to my wireless router with a cable. We installed the drivers today on a laptop while it was wired to the network. We chose the Wired Network option for the installer and let it proceed as normal. When the installation was completed, I removed the wire and allowed the laptop to continue accessing my wireless network. It was able to print over our wireless network to the wired printer NO PROBLEM. This is great. Now, all our house computers are guaranteed access to the shared printer which runs its own print server software.

Very, very pleased with this.

ADDED 15 Dec 2011
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It's been about 6 months and I now have some toner life information. I print regular text-based and some printing from web pages. I have the 4 computers that access this printer set for Toner Save Mode, and only 1 computer set to Not use automatic duplex. We do not print photos on this printer as a rule although there may be some minor exceptions.

Just got a Low Toner warning on the Cyan cartridge and printed off a summary of approximate remaining life:
BK - 45%
M - 30%
Y - 30%
C - 15%

These are the standard cartridges (2500 pages for Black, 1500 pages for the rest of them). They will be replaced with the extended cartridges which are a better buy.

A total of 721 pages have been printed, but about half of them are Duplex, which means, twice the toner, so for comparison purposes, think about 1100 pages worth of toner.

We all know that manufacturer numbers for toner life are in effect "inflated" since no one prints what is used for the testing and certification or we'd get the same results. If average numbers were specified, users would see both plus and minus the averages depending on their use. And the product would be forced to sell at a lower price. I'm pretty sure Everyone gets Lower numbers.

That being said, I consider the toner life to be in the ballpark, not too bad, and as I said before, commensurate with the printer that was replaced.

Cheers

Brother HL4570CDW printer

I like this printer a lot. It has the built-in Duplex and it's wireless, so we can put it anywhere. printing quality is real good. I recommend it.

A good printer

I like the size of this printer. I work out of my bedroom, so space is limited. It fits well on my dresser. The photo quality could be a little better, but I can work with it. Set-up was fairly easy. My only reservation is the price of the toner cartridges. I have read that comparatively they are cheaper, but I can't say as this is my first color laser printer. Overall, I think that I made a good investment.

So far, so GREAT!

It's a familiar story. You have a nice color laser printer and the toner carts run dry. Or maybe the transfer belt or imaging unit need replacing. And that costs more than a new printer. Except for the cost per print, I liked my Samsung ML-510. The cost to replace the transfer belt and imaging unit were just the straws that broke the camels bankbook.

My monochrome laser printer is a Brother, and it's been a workhorse for me for a good 5 or 6 years, so I looked at Brother color printers carefully. The printer price was attractive, and so was the total cost per print (I print a lot, and the cost of the image unit and transfer belt were still fresh in my mind, so I looked at the total cost for 125,000 prints.)

The printer arrived in a few days, I set it up and it was printing inside of 10 minutes. However, the colors were not very good. Too saturated and too red. I looked around on line and in the manuals and found there was an automatic color calibration system built in. I went through the keyboard menu, found the setting and used it. The prints got a LOT better.

About a week later, I got an email from Brother telling me about a firmware update. I applied it and now the color is even better.

Let's face facts, it's a color laser printer. And their color won't be as good as a good inkjet photo printer. However, if you are printing brochures, or - like me - cookbooks, the color is more than good enough.

Bottom line- the color quality is quite good, the text quality is excellent, the speed is excellent, and while some don't like the cost per print, it's better than what I was experiencing with the Samsung.

Brother HL-4570CDW Color Laser Printer

This printer is first class. It is easy to install, easy to access the toner cartridges, and easy to use.

I also have an HP-CLJ 3600n and the printing results are comparable.

All in all, well worth the money.

I purchased this printer from Amazon.

Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer with Built-In Duplex Printing and Wireless Interface

Best priced printer for its type and quality

In summary, this is a good printer for the price and quality. Following are the specifications to my statement.

Brand: Brother is a reputable company with good customer service. We already own another Brother laser printer and have been pleased with it.

Convenience: a wireless printer is convenient when you have computers in different rooms or floors so they all can print wirelessly to the same printer.

Packing: very well packed so it protects it during shipping, a positive point. Although it is probably overpacked, as it took long to take out all the tapes, security ties, etc.

Set up: easy, fast and well explained. You just put the disc in, follow the instructions and it is ready. No problems or hoops to jump. It gives you three options for set up and we used the wired ethernet connection with a Mac. Now we can print from any of our Macs that are on different floors. Note for Macs: discussion forums state Brother is the easiest to install with a Mac.

Size of the unit: medium sized for its type, but heavy, so put it on a sturdy table.

Warm up time: slow for the first time of the day, but prints fast after warm.

Speed: above average in both modes, auto-duplex and straight printing.

Quality of printing: good and sharp as long as you use the appropriate paper for the job, ie. glossy paper for colored brochures. Keep in mind that this printer is not intended to be a photo printer.

Noise: a bit noisy, not too bad though. Just keep it some feet away from your work area, or mainly from your phone conversations.

Volume: it can handle large volume of printing as stated in the product description.

Price of printer: it is reasonable priced for a mid-range laser printer for small workgroups or offices, especially when compared to HPs and Canon color laser printers in this price range, considering also the quality of the prints.

Price of toner: laser toners are always high, but the price for this Brother toner replacement is cheaper than HPs, Lexmark, and Canon.

Yield of toner: it doesn't yield as many pages as the cartridges claim. Also, the printer tells you that the toner is empty when full or still plenty left. And it won't let you continue printing (with my other Brother laser printer you can keep printing long after the printer low nottice appears). Other reviewers advice on doing a couple of toner tricks.

Nice feature: the lcd display tilts up so it is easier to read.

Great Color Laser for small businesses

I was looking into spending about $8000 for a color printer that would do everything for my flyers and proposals. The machine does just about everything I need for about $7600 less. I used some of that to buy a thermal binding machine and thermal covers. Had plenty left over to pay the salesperson who is taking out the collateral. This machine has great color and duplexing is simple. Amazon had the best price and shipped it immediately. I had it in two days. Can't say anything negative about it at this point. Cost of toner is typically high but aren't they all? Well worth the investment from my point of view. Save the $$'s and spend them elsewhere.

Great Color Laser But VERY Expensive Toner

I purchased this in November 2010 and have had for 5 months. I wanted to give it 3.5 stars, but Amazon doesn't allow half stars. While the purchase price was a VERY good value, the price of the replacement toner and insistence of the system to force you to replace the cartridge even when they clearly still contain ink is very fustrating.

PROS:
1. Reasonably priced for a wirless color laser
2. Excellent color documents
3. Relatively fast
4. Prints double-sided
5. Wi-fi

CONS:
1. VERY expensive refills. I don't print that much and all 4 cartridges have run out in 5 months. The replacement cost for the 4 cartridges is $200. Because it's a relatively new model, it doesn't appear there are options other than to buy genuine Brother Products.
2. The printer just stops working when it deems that the tonner cartridges need to be replaced. The documents I printed the day before looked great and so I can't believe all 3 color cartridges are fully depleated of toner, but Brother insists they must be replaced to get the printer to run again.
3. The pages curl up at the ends.
4. It won't print B&W or grayscale in PowerPoint 2010 even when selecting that option (Brother told me to call Microsoft and have them re-write PowerPoint software to fix this problem, which a complete blow off of a customer).
5. It works great with a PC, but won't print color photos from a Mac (they come out B&W and won't size correctly).
6. A little noisy but not too bad (don't plan to have a phone conversation via a speaker phone or headset if you're sitting within 10 feet of the printer while it's printing)

Works great for our small business.

We have been very happy with this printer. Our business prints about 2000 invoices a week and this printer handles it with no troubles. We had an HP officejet 6500 before this and it could not handle that many pages. The print quality is very good. We mostly use black and white so I can't comment on image quality. The only thing I dislike about this printer is the time it takes to warm up when you print for the 1st time of the day. Once it is warm it works great.