A great home office printer
Written: Mar 17 '05 (Updated Mar 18 '05)
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Pros: Excellent text, very fast, very cheap to buy and operate
Cons: Photo printing OK, but not photo quality; no networking built in
The Bottom Line: Look no further if you mainly print text...especially between 100-1000 pages per month.
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| _mgoblue_'s Full Review: Brother HL-5140 Laser Printer |
We purchased this Brother about 3 months ago and it has served us well. This unit is ideal for fast, cheap, superb text.
Text: Very crisp, even in near microscopic font sizes. No jagged edges, no visible changes in darkness, no other blemishes. Not as dark as some laser printers, but dark enough.
Graphics: Good - minimal banding, sharp, handles line art images very well.
Photographs: Fair / Good. Visible banding on some images, some grain, loss of grey separation in dark areas. This is an inexpensive laser printer, not a high end unit or an inkjet designed for graphics, so it's unrealistic to expect true black and white photo quality.
Speed: Fast. Warms up quickly and produces first page in seconds. You must use a 2.0 USB port to enjoy the maximum speed. Faster than most printers at this price of any design.
Power Consumption: A bit power hungry - the ceiling lights in my office dim during warm-up. Sleep mode works perfectly though, so the printer only warms up when required.
Networking: Nothing built in. If you can get a good price, and you ever expect to have a home wireless network, move up to the similar model with built in networking. Currently I am sharing it off of a desktop which is rather inconvenient. I have yet to try an aftermarket print server, but compatibility may be a problem.
Paper Handling: We passed labels through the paper tray without any problem, so the single sheet bypass tray can be avoided for some jobs. Paper sometimes sticks together when doing manual duplex.
Noise: Certainly won't wake the neighbours! I can't see this being a concern, though I suppose it is slightly louder than an inkjet, but similar to other lasers.
Cost: Per page, this is the least expensive of all laser printers we could find for large quantities of high quality text and graphics. Toner for this model is very easy to get at a variety of office stores and online, and is very cheap. Compared to an inkjet, this printer costs almost nothing to operate. If you do print text a lot, but also want to print colour photos, I would recommend buying both this laser for text and an inkjet for photos. The drum lasts 20,000 pages and is worth about the same as a whole new printer. If you print this much a year, a more expensive laser printer is likely more suitable. My cost equation:
Printer price in cents / Drum life cycle + Toner cartridge price in cents / # of pages output per cartridge = per page cost
You can easily sub in any printer & toner combination that you are considering. If you expect to use the printer beyond the life expectancy of the drum and the drum is very different in price from the printer, replace "drum life cycle" with "estimated total printer life expectancy in pages", and add a third clause "+ drum cost in cents/drum life cycle."
The data for this printer:
18000/20000 + 6000/6700 = 1.8 cents per page.
For an average hypothetical inkjet:
10000/20000 (just a guess of life expectancy of printer) + 5000/500 = 10.5 cents per page (black & white text).
Build quality: Good overall, power cord doesn't fit as snuggly in unit as it should.
Installation: Requires use of an install CDROM, not the built in Windows add printer wizard. Following the CDROM instructions makes installation easy enough, however, and I had no trouble on Win 98, Win XP, and Win 2000.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 179
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
_mgoblue_
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Reviews written: 8
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