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The printer's software does an amazing job turning colorphotos into grayscale images.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
Brother laser printer is cheap, yet produces great prints


May 1, 2005


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard

   The best things in life might be free, but all that stuff that's second best sure does cost a lot.
   Take inkjet cartridges, for example. They hold an unimaginably tiny quantity of ink -- about an ounce, an amount so puny that an eyedropper would embarrass a typical inkjet cartridge.
   And they cost so much -- an average of $30 each in many stores -- that the ink in those cartridges becomes a luxury item, far more expensive than champagne. Now that gasoline costs are at record levels, ease your mind with this thought: If you priced inkjet ink by same measure you use to buy gasoline, you'd be paying $3,840 a gallon.
   Something's gotta give. That was the first thought on my mind a few weeks ago when the inkjet printer we use for everyday printing tasks ran out of ink. The printer, an old black-and-white model, had robbed us of our pocket money for the last time. It was time for a laser printer -- for a printer that doesn't use ink and isn't registered under the Devices for Financial Dumdums Act.
   Laser printers typically cost much less to operate because laser toner cartridges last far longer than inkjet cartridges. Depending on how much you print and how picky you are about quality, a laser printer could have about one-fifth the operating cost of an inkjet printer.
   If you're an old-timer like me, you probably remember when laser printers sold for $1,200 to $1,500 and took up enough space to house a filing cabinet. But those days are gone, as I discovered when I went window shopping for a laser printer one Saturday afternoon.
   My first revelation was the price. Some laser printers are just plain cheap these days. By "cheap" I mean anything under $200. (Ask me a year from now and I'll probably tell you it's anything under $100. That's how fast prices will continue to fall.)
   My second surprise was how svelte many of them are. I didn't see any of those old-style honkin' beige boxes anywhere. Some of the latest laser printers are even smaller than my last Lexmark inkjet, the Z53, and I saw a few signs that manufacturers were choosing trendy dark gray or black colors instead of ugly beige, too.
   But performance matters more than fashion, so I went back home and shopped online. And I chose a printer that still looks like a printer, beige color and all. It's a Brother HL-5140. I bought it for about $150 from Amazon.com. The listed price at Amazon was $179.99, but a store rebate brought the price down nicely.
   The HL-5140 isn't a color laser -- it prints in black and white only -- and it doesn't have some of the features you might need in a big office, such as the ability to print on both sides of the paper automatically or the option of a giant-size paper tray. But it prints quickly and produces very sharp text.
   Just as impressive is its graphics performance, unusual for an inexpensive laser printer. The printer's software does an amazing job turning colorphotos into grayscale images. Its rendition of graphics -- charts and that sort of thing -- wasn't as good, but I'm sure most home users care more about photo quality than about how such graphics look.
   The printer is rated to produce 21 pages a minute -- an accurate rating, based on my usage -- and took only a few seconds to power itself back on after going into sleep mode. (It saves power by doing that automatically. I like that idea.) It connects by a USB cable and works with both older-style USB 1.1 computers and newer USB 2.0 models.
   The HL-5140 is designed to operate with both Windows PCs and Apple Macintoshes. Its performance on our home network was remarkable: All we had to do was plug it into the power socket and connect the USB cable into the nearest OS X Macintosh. The other OS X Mac on the network found it immediately and automatically installed the driver. Our Windows game-playing computer found the Brother printer across the network, too.