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Brother HL-1240
 
Black & White laser printer, max. 600x600 dpi, works Mostly
Recommended Driver: hl1250 (Home page, View PPD, directly download PPD)
Generic Instructions: CUPS, no spooler
 

Miscellaneous

Printer supports PJL.
Printer supports direct text printing with the 'us-ascii' charset.

Comments

In contrary to some of the user's comments below, this printer works well with the "hl1250" driver, a driver based on "ljet4" but preceeding the job with Brother-specific PJL commands, especially the one to set the resolution as shown below.

Brother provides a driver, too, but binary-only and only for LPD/LPRng. According to the printout quality it is based on the "ljet4" Ghostscript driver. "pxlmono", "gimp-print" (600 dpi), and "hpijs-pcl5e" (600 dpi) give a better grayscale quality and all special features of the printer are accessible by PJL commands.

Old comments from users:

Roger (rogern at linuxfreemail dot com) reports that the "hl1250" driver works, but with incorrect margins.

Works great using the HP LaserJet 4/5/6 ("ljet4") driver and Ghostscript.
600dpi not supported via PCL alone, you must preface jobs with a PJL statement:

The easiest way to do this is by adding the following line to your printcap file:

:ld=\033%-12345X@PJL\r\n@PJL SET RESOLUTION=600\r\n:

Otherwise, just send the following string to the printer befor you send the output of Ghostscript:

<ESC>%-12345X@PJL SET RESOLUTION=600

as well as selecting 600 dpi from the Ghostscript command line.

This printer has 2MB memory, which cannot be extended; this may not be enough for all jobs at 600dpi. Until someone says otherwise, I want this printer to be marked imperfect because of this memory issue.

The above steps may not work if you have RedHat 6.0 or previous versions. I was able to get the printer working with an HP LaserJet driver and 300 dpi. 600dpi did not work well at all.

There's a discussion around the special driver for this printer; apparently it's got a bug of some sort. I guess the other drivers still work, but it's all a bit unclear right now.

Consumables/Refills: Toner ($50)

Drivers

The following driver(s) are known to drive this printer:

Recommended driver:

 
hl1250  (driver home page)
 
This driver is free software.
Type: Ghostscript built-in
Download:PPD file: View PPD, directly download PPD
 

Other drivers:

 
gimp-print  (driver home page)
 
This driver is obsolete. Recommended replacement driver: gutenprint
This driver is free software.
Type: CUPS Raster
 

 
gutenprint  (driver home page)
 
Top Quality Printer Drivers for inkjets, dye sublimation printers, and PCL lasers
Supplier: Gutenprint project
License: GPL (free software)
User support:Gutenprint mailing list at SourceForge (voluntary)
Color output   Type: CUPS Raster
Text:||||||||||  90Graphics:||||||||||  100System Load:Unknown
Line Art:||||||||||  90Photo:||||||||||  100Speed:||||||||||  60
Download:Driver packages: x86 32 bit: 5.2.7 (RPM for LSB 3.2) (Signed), 5.2.7 (DEB for LSB 3.2) (Signed), 5.0.1 (RPM for LSB 3.1) (Signed), 5.0.1 (DEB for LSB 3.1) (Signed), x86 64 bit: 5.2.7 (RPM for LSB 3.2) (Signed), 5.2.7 (DEB for LSB 3.2) (Signed), 5.0.1 (RPM for LSB 3.1) (Signed), 5.0.1 (DEB for LSB 3.1) (Signed) (How to install)
 

 
laserjet  (driver home page)
 
This driver is free software.
Type: Ghostscript built-in
Download:PPD file: View PPD, directly download PPD
 

 
omni  (driver home page)
 
This driver is free software.
Type: Ghostscript built-in