Brother HL-5050 Laser Printer

Rating:
Summary: Fast with Clear Print
Review: As a die-hard HP fan, (I still have my DeskJet, but my HP laser finally died) I am rather impressed with this printer. Fast and clear output - even with lots of graphics on the page. The printer was easy to set up; the drivers and software easy to install and understand.
However, the "save toner" mode is rather useless: it saves so much toner, the page cannot be read unless I adjust the default to print darker - which defeats the purpose.
This printer has a "sleep mode" that I'm not terribly fond of: there are no lights to remeind me that my printer is still, technically, "on". I forget to turn off the power, and as a cat owner, my cats step on buttons and turn my printer back on at the most inopportune times.
And I'm one of those users who like to have a printed manual in my hands to look at. The manual for this printer is on CD; which one of these days, I will print out (not in save-toner mode, though).
I have other Brother products, but this is the first Brother printer I've purchased. So far, I'm very pleased.

Rating:
Summary: Fast with Clear Print
Review: As a die-hard HP fan, (I still have my DeskJet, but my HP laser finally died) I am rather impressed with this printer. Fast and clear output - even with lots of graphics on the page. The printer was easy to set up; the drivers and software easy to install and understand.
However, the "save toner" mode is rather useless: it saves so much toner, the page cannot be read unless I adjust the default to print darker - which defeats the purpose.
This printer has a "sleep mode" that I'm not terribly fond of: there are no lights to remeind me that my printer is still, technically, "on". I forget to turn off the power, and as a cat owner, my cats step on buttons and turn my printer back on at the most inopportune times.
And I'm one of those users who like to have a printed manual in my hands to look at. The manual for this printer is on CD; which one of these days, I will print out (not in save-toner mode, though).
I have other Brother products, but this is the first Brother printer I've purchased. So far, I'm very pleased.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Buy This Printer if You Print Checks or Other Forms
Review: Don't buy the Brother HL-5050 if you need to print preprinted checks or other preprinted forms. The printer will pick up the ink from the checks or forms and transfer them back onto the form as it prints. Apparently some Brother laser printers get hotter than other brands and this heat causes the ink to transfer back onto the printed document. Some preprinted forms with a lot of text become nearly unreadable after passing through the HL-5050. The printer also curls paper more than my previous HP printers, also apparently due to this "excessive" heat. Sometimes after printing several pages, a slight burning smell comes from the printer (like your central heating system the first time you use it in the winter). I never had this problem with my old HP 4P or HP 6P.

I called Brother tech support and they were of no help whatsoever. They said the ink transfer was not a warranty issue and would not offer an exchange or a refund. They said the printer was working as designed.

The price was good, the features decent, and the speed adequate, but I would not recommend this or any other Brother printer because of this ink transfer/heat problem. We also have the network version of this same printer in another office and it has the same paper curling problem. We don't use that one for printing checks so I can't say for sure if it does the ink transfer, but my guess is that it does.

I will never buy another Brother printer. I only wish HP still made a decent quality laser printer for a small office. The HP models I looked at before buying the Brother seemed very cheaply constructed compared to my old HP 6P.

10/06/2004
UPDATE-Found a Solution to the Ink Transfer Problem

If "Media Type" is changed to "Transparencies", the ink transfer does not happen. The paper curling seems to be a little better too. Why didn't tech support tell me this? Hope this helps any of you with a similar problem.


Rating:
Summary: My second choice turned out to be #1...
Review: First I bought an HP LaserJet 1300. I liked the printer and it was fast, but my wife's business' letterhead gets printed on a slightly textured paper and I just couldn't get the LaserJet's toner to adhere well to the paper. After trying every conceivable configuration of print settings, I finally conceded defeat. So back the HP went and I skeptically went with my second choice, the Brother HL-5050... I didn't have high hopes that a cheaper printer would do the job since the HP couldn't handle it... Although it is somewhat slower than the HP (especially for graphics), it has handled everything I have thrown at it, without having to even mess with different print settings. It printed beautifully on the slightly rougher paper, something I could never coax the HP into doing... I am very happy with my "second choice" and the fact that it worked out better and yet me less is icing on the cake...

Rating:
Summary: Slow printing, and impossible to clear a jam
Review: Setup - easy

Basic Operation - fast and reasonably quiet, appears to be well built.

Printing text - excellent, as good as a much more expensive industrial hp laser printer I frequently use. Nice and dark.

Printing graphics/photos - in highest settings (1200dpi, "improved gray scaling" checked) it's good, but nothing exceptional. The output is not too dark, as is sometimes the problem with other inexpensive lasers.

Manual Duplex printing - this was at first confusing to me because I wanted to use the lower paper tray to do it all: print one side and then feed the output back again into the lower tray to print the other side (if you have more than 50 sheets you need to use the lower tray). This did not work for me until I finally hardwired the tray settings from "auto detect" to "tray 1". The manual did not mention this step. New drivers from Brother (as of January 14, 2004) did not fix this. Printing duplex from the multi-purpose tray works fine without having to hardwire the settings.

Customer support - so far not good. I went through much trepidation figuring out how to get the lower tray to work on duplex because I could not reach support people. The number always seems to be busy.

Highs - good, fast prints and reasonably quiet operation.

Lows - documentation is not completely accurate, customer support isn't good. Could use a sleep mode indicator as the previous reviewer mentioned.

Rating:
Summary: Brother HL-5050
Review: Setup - easy

Basic Operation - fast and reasonably quiet, appears to be well built.

Printing text - excellent, as good as a much more expensive industrial hp laser printer I frequently use. Nice and dark.

Printing graphics/photos - in highest settings (1200dpi, "improved gray scaling" checked) it's good, but nothing exceptional. The output is not too dark, as is sometimes the problem with other inexpensive lasers.

Manual Duplex printing - this was at first confusing to me because I wanted to use the lower paper tray to do it all: print one side and then feed the output back again into the lower tray to print the other side (if you have more than 50 sheets you need to use the lower tray). This did not work for me until I finally hardwired the tray settings from "auto detect" to "tray 1". The manual did not mention this step. New drivers from Brother (as of January 14, 2004) did not fix this. Printing duplex from the multi-purpose tray works fine without having to hardwire the settings.

Customer support - so far not good. I went through much trepidation figuring out how to get the lower tray to work on duplex because I could not reach support people. The number always seems to be busy.

Highs - good, fast prints and reasonably quiet operation.

Lows - documentation is not completely accurate, customer support isn't good. Could use a sleep mode indicator as the previous reviewer mentioned.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad but tends to overheat paper
Review: This is generally not a bad printer however it does tend to overheat paper so that it comes out curly, which is very annoying if you print large documents or want to print high quality.
The support desk said to resolve this by setting the paper type to 'transparency' for normal paper printing which indicates that this is a typical problem. It also doesnt solve it. Overall Im not very impressed with either printer or support and wouldnt get another Brother printer.

Rating:
Summary: Slow printing, and impossible to clear a jam
Review: This printer is all right, but I just had to replace it after a year due to a paper jam that I couldn't clear, and ultimately resulted in black pieces of plastic (probably a gear tearing up inside) falling out the bottom. When paper jams it is difficult to get out, and in this final case, a piece got lodged someplace I couldn't even see. I tried to take apart to see and remove the jam, but this is totally impossible as well.

The printer prints very slow if you send any major chunck of graphics to it, or use the high resolution settings. I had maximum memery too, so memory wasn't the issue.