The Brother HL-1440 Laser Printer is a crappy, defective product that you
should not buy. Why? Because those toner cartridges that are so cheap in comparison
to the competition, they start getting crumbly well within two months—and
I print almost exclusively in Economy Mode (It does a very light, low resolution
print in this mode.) I don't do a lot of printing either—say about a
ream a month. What happens is dried ink starts building up on the edges of
the roller, mostly on the left side. It causes a smudge on the left margin
of the paper. Cleanly the roller will have no effect because it will instantly
become dirty again once you print out another page. I called Brother about
this, and they were like, Oh, yeah, well, you're out of ink. Clean the roller,
pop in a new cartridge and everything will be fine. Everything was fine except
for the fact that I couldn't afford the toner for this machine.
I learned later that I was actually not out of ink. You can get a lot more
mileage out of these toner cartridges once they start getting flaky. You just
have to put up with having the left margin of your page looking all smudgy.
It's fine for personal use, but not professional use. So what I'm doing is
I'm keeping one toner cartridge sealed in two plastic bags in the refrigerator,
to keep it from drying out. That is my good cartridge. When I have
to print something important, I use the good cartridge, put it back
in the fridge, then insert back my bad cartridge I have just started
this experiment. I don't know if it'll work in the long run.
Another problem with my Brother occurred when I just bought it. The thing
holds a lot of paper, about 500 sheets. But after you print out about 35 sheets,
the paper starts flying out all over the place. That's because the sheets
aren't aligned exactly once they're printed. I called them, and they were
like, yeah, that's normal. I kind of had the impression that the guy had just
gotten out of rehab or something. He didn't seem to have much of a clue about
anything. I later discovered that only in Economy Mode does this happen. That's
because in Economy Mode, the pages are printed so fast that the machine can't
align the pages properly.