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PRODUCT: HP-1240 Have you ever tried to print several hundred pages on your inkjet printer? Not only does it take forever, but after a hundred pages or so, the ink starts to smear and then it runs out, forcing you to spend $20 on a new cartridge. Needing a good text printer to output my writing, and fed up with my slow, messy, and expensive inkjet, I began searching for a replacement. I settled on the new Brother HP-1240. This USB-based printer offers 600-dpi quality, a fast 12 page-per-minute engine, and full Mac OS support. Best of all, it was available for a mere $299! Installing the printer software wasn't as easy as I'd expected. The drivers on the included CD-ROM consistently gave a "can't find device" error with my setup: a PowerMac 8500 running Mac OS 8.5 and a third-party USB PCI expansion card. I easily downloaded newer drivers from Brother's website, but these didn't work any better. Attempting to install Apple's most recent USB drivers meant upgrading my system to Mac OS 8.6, which I did, and then everything worked perfectly. These problems shouldn't affect those with Macs with built-in USB running a current OS. The Brother printer driver is neither terrible nor fantastic. It offers the bare bone features you'd expect with a personal printer, with a few nice extras, such as the ability to print in "economy" mode (which prints with less toner). It lets you set the quality level of printing at Best, Normal, and Faster (which is 600, 300, or 150 dpi). There are some features of questionable utility, such as a method to output a job for double-sided printing (the printer is not a duplex device). This feature apparently outputs the odd pages first and prompts you to feed them back into the printer to print on the backs. My favorite feature of the HP-1240 is the low-power sleep mode. After several minutes of non-use the printer goes to sleep and uses just 4 watts of electricity. When you print something, the printer wakes up in less than thirty seconds and begins printing your job. Since I print only occasionally, this is a terrific feature as I never have to bother turning the printer on and off. One negative of this printer is that it only includes 2MB of RAM and you can't upgrade it. That can cause problems when you attempt to print large photographs or complex documents. However, the printer is smart and will print a page at a lower resolution if it doesn't have enough memory to print it at the resolution you requested. The more expensive Brother HP-1270 model supports 1200-dpi printing and is memory upgradeable. For most users, however, especially if you're printing mostly text, the standard 2MB is plenty. Like all non-PostScript printers, the HP-1240 relies on your Macintosh's CPU to raster pages for the printer. This means the faster your computer, the faster you can print (up to the printer's maximum engine speed of 12-pages-per-minute). My 200-mhz 604e was never able to do more than about 6 ppm at 600 dpi, even for simple text documents, but once I'd upgraded my processor to a 350-mhz G3 I was able to print closer to twelve. Photos and documents with graphics print much slower, of course, as do PDF documents. Printing in draft quality, even on a slow computer, almost instantly frees up your Macintosh. Text quality of the Brother is excellent -- on par with the 600-dpi HP 4M Plus I use at work. (For non-PostScript text, the output of the two is nearly identical.) As I bought this printer for printing out my novel, I'm impressed with the large 250-page input cassette. Many low cost lasers support only 100-page input trays, which means you're constantly adding paper. Other than my initial hiccups getting my old Mac updated to support USB, the Brother has performed flawlessly over the thousand pages or so I've printed.
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