Brother HL-5140 Laser Printer

Rating:
Summary: Never go back to bubble jet again...
Review: I bought this printer last minute. The printer I had before went out on me and I needed something quick. I do a fair amount of printing and this thing is awesome! Not a single glitch, setup took less than 5 min and it was ready to rock and roll. It has fair price for what it is capable of.

Rating:
Summary: Fast, inexpensive and versatile
Review: There are a ton of people out there running home businesses like me (I'm a full-time medical transcriptionist)who need the speed and economy of a B&W laser printer, but don't want or need a $500-1,000-plus "office-type" unit.

Enter the Brother HL-5140, the perfect, affordable, reliable B&W laser printer for a small business that does a lot of printing (where the cost of ink jet cartridges and slow printing can be VERY expensive).

Several years ago, typical of my venerable HP LaserJet 6P that is still working very well, HP produced great inexpensive laser printers while Brother followed their lead and made great products too.

Unfortunately, HP decided to focus on a very profitable "niche market" a couple of years ago and started making a bunch of cheap plastic printers that would have more consumer appeal when it comes to printing photos instead of continuing to make top-quality low to moderate-cost B&W laser printers.

But Brother has continued to make reliable printers that are actually made of metal -- what a concept. My Brother 5140 weighs in at about 24 pounds, it's made of metal and there's nothing flimsy about it.

So here are the pros and cons of the Brother HL-5140:

PROS:

1. Everything that Brother purports to deliver in terms of printing speed for the 5140 would appear to be accurate. This is one VERY FAST laser printer (rated at 21 ppm).

2. The best thing about the 5140 is how easy it is to install and set up. It's all completely intuitive and the enclosed installation CD makes the process quick (15 minutes or less) and simple.

3. Most people won't care about this very obvious plus, but it's VERY important to some of us old dinosaurs who still use DOS programs. So I need to employ a printer that will accept a parallel connection instead of just USB.

I'm not really a dinosaur, and I use MS Word for everything else, but I still use WordPerfect 5.1 DOS for my work. So I need a printer that will connect on a parallel port and print out my work.

The 5140 with PCL-6 emulation supports all of the latest DOS printer drivers too. No problems printing from DOS in any application.

CONS:

As I've said, the 5140 gets my top rating and it's a definite buy. But there are a couple of things you might want to be aware of:

1. I haven't tried the feature, but other reviewers have given the printer a thumbs-down in terms of its rendition of graphics. Personally, I could care less. If I need graphics I'll use my inkjet printer instead.

2. The usual printout path up to the front output tray can tend to curl the printouts a bit more than you'd like depending on temperature and humidity.

All in all, it's a terrific printer.