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76 of 78 people found the following review helpful.
A good substitute for my old HP 4500 laser.
By Shock Writer
History/Experience:
This is my report after owning the Brother HL 4570 cdwt color laser printer from 4-2011 to 2-2012 about 10 months and printing 17,814 page faces using about 35 reams of paper.
I needed a replacement for my old industrial strength Hewlett Packard HP 4500 laser which cost $2,400 new. This $550 machine is lighter duty yet fine for internal business documents, some color images, and for black-&-white letters that you send out.
Toner Use:
I print about 3 reams of 20 lb white paper, 1,500 papers, a month of double sided for about 3,000 page surfaces a month (double sided) with about 40% of the total pages in color. These statistics are available on the printers webpage that will come up in your web browser if you go to the Mac OS "system preferences - printer" and find the option for printer setup "show printer webpage". They are slow in coming up. On the first page home page the mono and color counts are found.
Screen-print them, the color and mono page counts, when you put new cartridges in AND screen print them again when you replace a cartridge. Subtract the smaller number from the larger to get the number of pages of color and mono for those cartridges. My color cartridges are used up about at the same rate when using the Brother driver; the color sync driver on Mac may give a different result if it combines slightly different amounts of color to achieve a given in-between color.
The cartridges look the same with the lower capacity ones just being less full. The lesser TN-310 low capacity size toner cartridges don't have much toner in them and only last maybe 3 reams of paper 1,500 to 2,000 pages for light mixed color and black-and-white business printing in my experience. This is up to the Brother advertised specification or better.
The tn-315 high capacity toners say they give 6,000 USA letter pages black-and-white mono printing and I got that plus 15% using the mono (black and white) print mode with toner-save on about 1/2 the time it seems (I didn't count). On color they say 3,500 USA color letter pages and I got about 50% more than that when printing web pages without pictures but with color lettering WHILE USING ALSO the color toner save mode for about 80% of the prints.
If you are using the toner-save mode you will get feeling that the print quality of this printer is poor but go back to the normal coverage mode and it looks very good again.
So Brother's numbers are reasonable for average internet printing. Thank you Brother for the honesty and the fortunate fact your testing well fits my experience. Brother says they used the standard rotation of 5 standard color pages or one black and white standard page as per the ISO/IEC 19798 technical spec and this was reasonably accurate in my experience of toner usage . The old standard commonly used by printer makers before people used the internet was 5% coverage per page and was reasonably accurate for me who did mostly letters and not images. I don't know the % per page for this new specification but it does include quite a few images on the five test pages used.
The "toner save mode", under Printer Settings - Advanced, as I've said, will save some toner though I use "improve grey" on both mono and Color Settings to make it look a little better because: some lettering can look unreadable if the website or pdf has already lightened the brightness for ink jet users and if they used a dot matrix type lettering it will not be a smooth and continuous lettering but looks like a dot matrix; these two problems together make the lettering look like it is faded out and it is just not good enough for regular reading. Thus some text pages printed using toner save will have to be reprinted for reading. The "improve grey" seems to help the lettering but I have not finished my study of this and other option setting yet.
When you do print a full page of picture image color, even like the hp-4500-laserjet, it will really use up a LOT of toner. Since the toner life estimations are like for printing a 5 to 10% page coverage. So if you cover 100% of the page you will get maybe 5% to 10% of the cartridge life. Thus toner life will drop from 1,500 pages for the low capacity cartridges to 75 to 150 pages of full page color printing according to my rough estimate. So I use the toner save mode on color and black-&-white images for brochures which use a lot of color and pictures. Sometimes this is good enough and sometimes not for reading. Most web pages don't have a full page 100% image but include text that doesn't take much toner to print.
Strategy:
Some people could use a tn-315 high capacity cartridge for black-&-white and buy color cartridges with low capacity tn-310's if they print little color and use the toner save mode.
Save each mode (color or mono) and print quality option combinations that you use as a slightly different "preset" name. Then you can quickly switch printer setups by selecting the different preset when you print. It is easier to do than explain.
Duplex:
You will love double sided pages since it saves a lot of paper and makes a less heavy load to carry when printing out longer documents especially with 20lb paper. I can't live without double-sided (duplexing) anymore.
Quality:
Its image quality sharpness and color range on the printed white page are not as good as the hp-4500-laserjet but it is fine if you will take like a 10-to-15% drop in overall quality. Not a great art printer but not the worst either if you put it on Color Settings for vivid color. Also try Printer Settings - Advanced - Improve print output - improve toner fixing.
With some print-option experimenting and good paper it is fine for color quality just a little under the old HP standard which was quite high for a business printer. If a great art inkjet printer using more than three color inks gives A+ quality, and the old HP-4500-laserjet is a B+ quality for color prints using 3 color inks, then this is a C++ or B- for color prints. Fine for off-the-internet pictures and such research. Much better than my parent's ink jet that runs out of ink all the time. If you go in and play with the settings and use a photo type laser paper you can get decent prints for any low to mid and some higher quality digital cameras as someone remarked in another review.
HP no longer has a laser at this price point that reviews well. Brother in my experience is the best maker for the low cost equipment where you pay just slightly more and it works much better. This is what I call light-weight-industrial-equipment because though it is built in a light weight fashion it will turn out some high counts and quality dependably. The old HP-4500 was medium-weight-industrial quality and it cost more (and was made by Cannon for HP).
3rd Party Toner Cartridges Are Like The Wild West... dangerous.
When trying 3rd party ink from Abacus I had to do four 1 hour cleanups of inside toner sticky that got on rollers and everything else. This leaking toner caused almost every double-sided-page to bend the front corner edge on one side or both. Occasionally, pages started jamming, that is turning sideways and stopping the printer. Also a magenta, cyan, or yellow stripe or roundish splotches went down the edge of the page from the leaking toner. The main problem was leaking not the toner color itself which I liked a lot having a nice aliveness to it. But now I use the standard Brother cartridges not replacements.
Toner does not leak when putting the cartridge in or taking it out. It leaks when the machine turns the roller that is built into the cartridge and then the toner pours out everywhere! Even from printing one page sometimes! Abacus was great giving my money back - thank you Abacus supplier! After 3 weeks with a broken printer due to leaking toner, are we not in love? Due to a refund!
So I went back to standard Brother toner cartridges which now work fine.
The machine quit jamming and the edges quit bending but only after:
a complete cleaning of all rollers especially the sides of the rollers that picked up the leaking toner most. To clean the image roller drums mounted under the toner cartridges I removed the toner cartridge tray from the machine. The removal system makes you play with a lever stop-arm that blocks the tray from falling out. Hire a monkey to do this it is too strange for the human mind. Putting it back in is still stranger - hold the stop-arm up, slide the tray in just the right amount of distance, then drop the stop-arm again to let the tray go the rest of the way in. You see even in Asia they want cheaper labor so they hired an alien, one of those childish grays I'm sure, to design this. Well it does work...
Then I removed the toner cartridges from the tray. Then I used a paper towel and warm water and tried some water-ammonia spray then got scared and quit using it. The image-roller-drums about 3/4" in diameter, four of them, one for each toner, must be clean ALL THE WAY ACROSS even where the paper doesn't touch at the left and right edges for about 1/2" area to the end of the drums. I thought probably I had ruined the image drums but after printing a few pages they started producing good prints again.
IF A PAPER EDGE EVER BENDS OVER AGAIN: pull the toner tray out and clean the left and right edges of the rollers again with warm water on a paper towel then dry it (since the roller end can get sticky even though you don't see excess toner on it and the stickiness will grab the paper at the edge and bend the edge over especially with todays ultralight 20 lb papers).
After cleaning I have gone through about 5 reams (2,500 pages) with only one edge bent; I cleaned it again and have not had another in 4 reams (2,000 pages) and hope will have no more. I would say the printer does NOT have paper edge bend problems unless it leaks toner and then it is fixable without much trouble. Contrast this with my HP4500 that got an unfixable jamming problem.
When you buy a new drum tray someday this problem will quit for a while or forever probably if you use good toner. This is NOT a Brother suggested service procedure but I was desperate with my image drums putting color casts like clouds in various places on the paper. I also vacuumed it everywhere I could get a vacuum's nozzle.
TRUST:
The leaking made me distrust the machine for a while but after cleaning of the drum edges that are below the toner cartridges on the drum/toner tray it began working fine again and quit bending page ends and quit jamming. What a scare!
Trays:
The fold out manual paper feed tray is a mystery seeming to print on one side of a paper one time and the other side of the paper the next time so I have not figured it out even after numerous trys. I've done some envelopes with it one-at-a-time through the manual tray but doing so is a black art worse than rocket science between the software and printer options that need sorting out. You will loose some envelopes to the learning process and seemingly unexplainable variations that the software-hardware throw at you. If I was married I would assign this job to my wife and let her boast when she figured it out. Sometimes it pays to be humble.
Both the bottom and top tray work fine without jamming and they need to be selected by the printer driver settings. FOR THE MANUAL LOAD TRAY: Figuring out what is the top and bottom and front and end of the paper is confusing and I still put the paper in wrong sometimes. Just play with the manual tray for a while like a cat does with a ball of string and you will figure it out. Good luck!
Yes eventually it will work predictably and you will have presets that you like. Don't have a drink of go-juice before doing it; the wayfaring mind suspended in alcohol will have a hard going and might push the printer off its table top in frustration.
Hope you are bored of reading since I am burned out on writing.
Good day!
7-27-2012 UPDATE: Print drum carrier life. Replacement or not.
Great news: After 25,000 + pages, half of them color, half black-&-white, the drum unit says to replace BUT it does NOT force you to replace it! So apparently they let you keep printing until you decide the printing detail is below your standards. This is a GREAT feature since the drum gradually goes bad thus it is a judgment call as to when to replace it. My old HP would go about 15 to 50 percent longer until it was printing bad prints. A bad print is not a messy smear but instead more like a 1/32" line might be 2/32" in size causing a loss of picture detail and "fat" lettering.
10-5-2012 Update: Bent Paper Edges & How to fix them.
Started getting bent edges on right-side-leading-edge of pages again. After cleaning of image drum rollers and the belt unit it still was doing it. Finally I found that some magenta had leaked and gotten into the Fuser unit (see page 154 of the Main Users Guide for pictures). The fuser is accessed at the back cover of the unit. You pull the back over down then follow directions to flip down some small outer rollers to expose the HOT fuser rollers, two of them, lower bright orange roller and upper dark black roller. The upper one seems most hot. I turned the unit off to let it cool. The magenta toner had hardened on the upper scraping edge next to the darker fuser roller. I used a suede brush with its hard bristles and and exacto knife to loose the hardened toner that was bending the edge of the page as it came through the fuser rollers. I cleaned some toner off the lower orange fuser roller also with a paper towel. Last I blew it out with compressed air. Now I have no bent edges on the paper. Back to near perfection.
7-2013 Update: Belt Unit life
After about 40,000 pages the machine said to replace the "Belt Unit", but does Not force you to do so. This belt transfers the pages from the center inside of the printer up to the exit of the unit. When it gets old and slippery it spits pages out the front of the machine just above the upper print tray but only on long print runs as the belt gets warm. On short runs it works just fine. The fix of course is a new "Belt Unit". At 40k pages I guess this is ok economics. I'm keeping the old unit for a while since it still works except on long runs when temperatures rise.
Update: 7-2013 Toner use.
This is a good printer I'm liking it so far, 40,000 prints into its life. I do most prints on "Print Settings" "advanced" "toner save mode" and it really helps save toner - seems to last twice as long. On purposely dimmed lettering made for ink-jet use you need to avoid the "toner save mode" or it will get too light to read. Just do a normal print and the light lettering built into the page will save the toner for you.
Printer Printing Statistics:
On the printer's LCD panel & control buttons, use the "print settings" to get a three page printout of printer usage information, and the remaining life of the replaceable internal parts including toner. The IP address is also there on page three, so you can use your browser to find the printer's control page with statistics, over your household internet. See in the Users Guide "How to use Web Based Management". This only works on the ethernet connected printers. I don't know how you get to this printer control page using USB.
37 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent color laser
By S. Sax
I purchase lots of computer and office equipment and have high standards for each item I buy.
This printer has met all of my expectations. It installed easily in my Apple environment. It is acceptably fast (from either a cold or warm start), the print quality is fine for office use and consumes toner at a rate that is normal for laser printers. My machine is used everyday, throughout the day, and has never complained (as some machines tend to do) or jammed.
The build quality is good and it is not overly large. The color of the case is better than most printers and the controls are easy to understand (though having the manual around is sometimes helpful for this purpose). I do not find the machine to be overly noisy, as some reviewers do.
Love the automatic duplexing function! This function is a key difference between this printer and other color lasers in the same price range. Speaking of price, Amazon was the seller and I feel it is fairly priced.
I recommend this color laser printer without hesitation.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Good color - but too many annoinances
By HutchNY
The Good -
* Print quality is excellent. Color output is accurate and clean.
* Relatively fast for the price.
* Very professional looking, especially when printing on gloss or high quality paper.
* Smaller footprint than our previous color laser printers. Easy to maneuver.
The Not So Good -
* Noisier than the HP this replaced, but not annoying. We got used to it.
* The manual paper feed tray is cheaply added on and flimsy. We do a lot of letterhead feeds via the manual tray and it catches on the bottom every time we need to open the tray. It eventually breaks the little plastic hinges and and the manual feed tray then is replaced. Poor design.
* Envelopes get wrinkled every time, without exception. We've called customer service and they sent a tech out. Said that that's the way this machine works. For this reason alone we won't keep the machine the full 3 year cycle like we planned on.
* When out of toner of any one color, the warnings aren't obvious and the machine just stops working. You can't jiggle the toner cartridge to get more prints out of it - it's dead. If you don't have extra toner cartridges around, you're out of commission until you get new ones. You can't even print just black if a color cartridge is out.
* When doing larger print jobs (just letters, not publications), it gets really hot and toner can streak on the sheet. We have to give it a break, let it cool down before we can continue.
Overall,If your doing light printing in a home office, it will probably work fine. But in a small or medium sized office, it just isn't hardy enough. I wouldn't buy another one.
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