Brother gets the brass ring for this one, IMO!
Written: Feb 15 '05
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Pros: Sturdy, fast, efficient, quiet, with inexpensive aftermarket refills; an excellent home mono laser printer IMO!
Cons: Print quality quite acceptable to me, but perhaps not the crispest available in this range.
The Bottom Line: A quiet, fast, sturdy, and very efficient home printer with good print quality and inexpensive consumables. If you like BW laser printers, at $150 to $200 it's a fantastic deal!
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| greywoulf's Full Review: Brother HL-5140 Laser Printer |
What a sweet mono laser printer this Brother HL-5140 is! For its $150 to $198 price tag IMO it’s one of the best compact BW lasers available anywhere.
It's very fast, relatively quiet, has a nice auto power-save feature, a 250 page interior input tray, can do duplex and both-sides printing, and from clicking on Windows 98 "OK to print" to a fully finished print page (at a restart from sleep) is a mere 10 seconds!
The HL-5140 looks almost exactly like the old Okidata 810's (so much so that the design looks pirated), only it's slightly higher at 10". But this thing is like an 810 on steroids… It smoothly slides out crisp print at 21 PPM, and does quite acceptable BW graphics (at 600 DPI) too. It also has a 1200 DPI option, but this is considerably slower due to a longer start-up time; however I liked the 600 DPI for jpg’s even better than the 1200 as it has more contrast. (But let’s face it, one doesn’t really buy a mono laser printer like this for high quality graphics printing; it’s for words, reports, print articles, etc, and for these options it performs very, very well). Plus it has mucho metal parts (like its steel toner and drum holder) and it refills with a $29 plug-and-fill aftermarket kit (with no replacement chip required) that's good for 6,000 pages. And there's even good interactive software that displays small window films to show you how to fix any jams, replace cartridges, change paper options, etc.
Hard to believe it only costs $50 more than a Konica 1350w. (See my review of that little toaster elsewhere...) I would say that the Brother seems to be in an entire different class, worth IMO easily $200 more than the smaller, fragile, much less efficient Konica! The only drawbacks I see are that with a 15X15" footprint and a 10" height the HL-5140 might be a bit large for some smaller space areas, and the little Konica does have a slightly crisper print quality. But other than that I think Brother got it exactly right with this HL-5140! (And also they're now offering smaller mono lasers; if they have the quality of this thing they should be pretty good too...)
Greywoulf
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 150 (sale)
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
greywoulf
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Reviews written: 2
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