Brother HL-5270DN Printer Review

Brother is suitably represented in a number of categories of office equipment, for example photocopiers, multifunctions as well as laser printers, both colour and monochrome. The HL-5270DN is a duplex mono laser, intended for the small workgroup with three separate methods of connection.

The HL-5270DN is a tidy, cuboid box, coloured in light and dark grey along with a concise petite control panel squashed in to the left of the output tray. The controls are effectively arranged, with a single line LCD display screen with a three colour backlight. If unavailable (warming up or turned offline) the background is orange, when working it's green and in error conditions becomes red - an ingenious bit of design.

Along with the regular menu navigation controls and large Job Start and Job Cancel buttons, there is additionally a small one, designated Reprint. This permits you to reprint the last job straight from the printer, even if it had been a multiple page print, rather than needing to go back to your desk and do it from there - a handy time-saver.

A document tray at the base of the front panel is the chief document feed and can take up to 250 sheets of common stock, whereas the multi-purpose tray which folds down from the front panel takes another 50 sheets or various special media. A third tray, that can hold 500 sheets, exists as an option.

At the rear you will find sockets for USB 2., parallel and Ethernet connections as standard - it's unusual to get all three sockets on a printer located in this category.

The drum and toner unit slides in without difficulty from the front of the printer and is a two-part system. The drum was designed to work for approximately three and seven toner cartridges, subject to whether you utilize standard or high-capacity cartridges. The toner cartridge clips in to a cradle within the drum unit. You must take out the complete unit prior to moving the printer any distance.

Software setting up is simple and Brother provides both PCL 6 and BR-Script 3 - its own PostScript 3 emulation. There is an administrative program, also, so that you can keep tabs on and control the printer across a network.

The HL-5270DN is supposedly capable of 28ppm although, as usual, this claim is fanciful. Under test we completed of the five page text print and five page text and graphic print each in 19 seconds. This gives the machine a real-world print rate of just below 16ppm; no sluggard, however , only a little above half the professed rate.

We examined the duplex print rate and achieved the 10-page, 20-side test item in 1 minute 41 seconds, a rate of close to 12 sides every minute; once again, more than fair.

Brother supplies two good quality print options: a true 1,200dpi print and another termed HQ 1200. The HQ 1200 selection uses resolution enhancement to attain a 1,200dpi-like print and for our 15 x 10cm photographic print, it completed in 14 seconds, four seconds under the complete 1,200dpi print.

Both photo prints suffered a little bit of banding about patches of sky, but in general were above average, with nice amounts of detail, notably in shadowed parts. Text and graphics turned out very well, with text appearing heavy and with minimal visible spatter. Graphics likewise suffered little from the numerous dither patterns used to generate greyscales.

Pages feeding from the printer acquired a noticeable quantity of page curl, so much so that the top page within the output tray can once in a while end up being caught by a sheet coming from the printer. The curl decreases when the pages cool, however you may have to pick a precise laser printer paper, rather than standard business stock.

Brother doesn't quote a noise level figure and this may perhaps be for the reason that HL-5270DN is relatively noisy. We tested it at highs of 63dBA, while other machines within its group may very well be 10dBA quieter.

There are two consumables: toner and the photoconductive drum. Brother HL-5270DN toner cartridges come in 3,500 and 7,000, 5 per cent cover capabilities and the drum ought to keep going for 25,000 sheets. Upkeep is simple, while a bit more fiddly than with the single-consumable printers, typified by Canon and HP. The simplier and easier the upkeep, the quicker and less expensive it'll be, not surprisingly.

The Brother HL-5270DN offers that handy Reprint button and generally is, in our judgment, a good buy.