Brother HL-5040 Laser Printer

Average customer rating: 4.0

The little Engine that Couldn't
Great laser printer for a great price
Only Cheap
Can't beat it for the price!
Well done!

Brother HL-5040 Laser Printer

Manufacturer: BROTHER
Product Group: CE
Binding: Electronics
ASIN: B00008AOK7

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Up to $200

Amazon.com Product Description

Winner of PC World's World Class Award and PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award, the affordable HL-5040 laser printer is the ideal printer for your office at work or your office at home. It features a fast print speed at up to 17 ppm, PCL 6 emulation, high-quality output, and excellent performance. It also features 8 MB standard memory, graphics-quality HQ1200 print resolution (up to 2,400 x 600 dpi), a convenient, 250-sheet paper tray, and PC and Mac compatibility. To grow with your needs, the printer offers the option of adding memory (136 MB via optional 100-pin DIMM), 10/100 BaseT Ethernet print server network connectivity, and a second, lower paper tray.

The HL-5040 has a single-sheet manual by-pass tray for card stock, letterhead, and envelopes. It comes with drivers for Windows 95/98/NT4.0/Me/2000/XP as well as for Macintosh USB computers (running OS 8.6 to 9.2, OS X, 10.1, and 10.2.1). The printer is backed by a one-year limited Express Exchange warranty.

Product Description

The HL-5040 laser printer is the ideal printer for your office at work or your office at home. Succeeding the award-winning HL-1440, it offers fast print speed, PCL 6 emulation, graphics quality print resolution, convenient paper handling, and the option to add memory, a 2nd lower paper tray and network connectivity. Building on a tradition of excellent customer value, the new HL-5040 delivers the performance users have come to expect from Brother laser printers.

Customer Reviews:

The little Engine that Couldn't.......2007-05-16

I bought this printer for business in the Summer of '05. For the past 2 years, this printer has been great! I use the second tray option every day, and usually print around 20 to 30 pages per day. The printer likes the paper in the secondary tray to be nice and straight. If the pages are curled even a little, the printer folds the paper and sometimes jams. It's not hard to remove the jams though. If the print job runs out of paper, adding more will auto resume the printing process. Nice!
A couple of days ago the printer light turned red indicating that one of the covers was open. Since that was not the case, I went online to see if anyone else had this problem. According to Brother, you have to preform a series of actions to correct the error. I tried several times with no luck. Now I am looking at a giant paper weight with a red light. Being 2 years old, I am surprised that this printer is still better featured than most current printers. The memory, network connectivity, and speed are all benefits that other printers have costing twice as much. This printer also plays nice with Linux machines! It's been nice Brother. Should I get you again?
-Spin Echo

Great laser printer for a great price.......2004-09-22

I've had this printer for about 10 months & use it all the time. I'm an independent notary signing agent & print mortgage documents with it several times per week. I've had an occasional paper jam, but easily cleared. As for crinkling of envelopes on manual feed, just set the guides a little farther out, so the envelope has room to flow through & no crinkles...I learned that from my office's HP 4 -- same issue there. Easy to correct. Haven't had to replace a drum yet, though I've gone through at least 3 toner cartridges already. Memory is adequate even for 100-pg pdf files.

All in all, I like this printer & I'd buy it again. I compared to HP and Minolta & felt this was the better deal for the price & features. I did purchase the optional lower paper tray, so I don't have to constantly switch everything between letter & legal when printing.

Setting up the printer was cake! Easiest component to set up yet!

Only Cheap.......2004-08-21

I must say I was disappointed about the printer. I bought one from Frys a month ago. Setup was quick and easy. Printed test page, and some word doc OK.
When I tried to print a direction from Yahoo map, it shows horizontal white bars. Try it couple times, it happened randomly.

Called support, waited for over 25 mins. Then I was asked to clean the drum unit. No help. Went to level 2 support. Rep insisted it is the connection problem.

I have to get new parallel cable, and new USB cable. Tried both. No help. It happens randomly, so don't know what it is.

Still waiting for an answer from Brother.

I am not happy with the printer.

Can't beat it for the price!.......2004-07-13

This is a terrific printer. I needed to replace my NEC 1260, which was begining to jam all the time and the cartridges were becoming very hard to find. For less than the price of a new NEC toner cartridge, I bought this printer (another site had a short-term terrific price.)

I could not be more pleased. Easy to set up, superfast printing (my old laser was 12ppm), affordable replacement cartridges, small footprint.

Well done!.......2004-06-28

I work as an independent paralegal, doing research and preparing documents to file with the Courts. I purchased this unit about 6 weeks ago because my inkjet printer was too slow and too expensive for big projects.

Like the other inexpensive Brother laser printers, this one is a very good value, and has features of more expensive printers. It does have some cheap plastic parts, but this is to be expected in this price range. Other inexpensive laser printers look feel cheap in comparison.

On the good side, the printer has the 250 page paper drawer located under the printer, where it belongs. This way, you don't have an unsightly flop [sic] of paper on the desk in front of you. It also has a front door for feeding single sheets so you don't have to open the drawer and replace the paper, reset the paper guides, and so forth, simply to print a single envelope. It also pops printed paper out of the top into a proper paper recepticle, or you can open the door at the back of the printer and let the paper feed straight through.

The printer is fast, at 17 pages per minute, and warms up fairly quickly so you don't have to wait too long for it to start. Print quality is good, and small fonts are legible with no bleeding. The grayscale for graphics is good, with nice even printing and little graininess.

The biggest problem I have with this printer is that the drum and toner cartridge are replaced separately. This is not as much a problem as an annoyance. The printer drum has to be changed every 20,000 copies or so, and costs almost as much as the printer itself. The toner is inexpensive relative to other printers, but the drum is around $100. Despite having this unusual expense every four or five toner cartridges, the per page cost is still only about 1.5 cents per copy. This is comparable to other laser printers, and is significantly cheaper than inkjet printers. In comparison to inkjet printers, this laser will pay for itself in the first 5,000 to 10,000 copies.

For a home or small office, this printer gives a lot of bang for the buck. Given the high quality of the black and white print, the low per page cost, and the speed, this printer is a steal.

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