Brother HL-5050 17 PPM 600 dpi Laser Printer

• Up to 17 ppm; first page out in 12 seconds
• HQ1200 resolution technology, up to 2,400 x 600 dpi
• 16 MB memory, upgradeable to 144 MB
• 250-sheet paper tray, 50-sheet multi-purpose tray
• USB 2.0 and parallel interfaces; PC and Mac compatible

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

For cost/benefit, I''ve been impressed with all the Brothers I''ve bought, both those for home (5050 B&W Laser and the multifunction 420CN). I also own 2 additional 5050s at my office and have had no problem with them. Suffice it to say that I''ve had precisely the opposite experience with HPs, with major, irreparable breakdowns in within 6 months of warranty expiration on each one. Plus, Brother has a neat philosophy of common sense cartridge replacement if your color HP cartridge runs out, you have to replace the whole thing for $50 or so right then. Brother, on the other hand, allows you to replace individual color cartridges (black, cyan, yellow, red) as they run out, for $10 to $15 apiece. Lots of savings. My Brother B&W lasers were cheaper than equivalent quality competing brands, so I wasn''t expecting much, but they''ve been basically flawless for 2+ years now and exceeded the rating on the toner cartridge by hundreds of pages.