Brother HL-5040 Laser Printer

 (29 customer reviews)

I purchased my Brother HL-5040 from Amazon.com for $190.00 delivered, including the USB 2.0 cable, and the TN-530 3,000 page "starter" toner cartridge and the DR-500 drum rated for 20,000 pages. I am an English professor and generally use it for printing out my papers (15 to 30 pages) and drafts of books (up to 500 pages), and master copies of handouts and exams and the like for my classes (I have an HP DeskJet for color printing). The Brother HL-5040 printer has a nice compact footprint: there is no hideous projecting tray or paper catcher as with several of the competing models, and the output area on top holds fifty or more printed pages without spilling them. The printer is also low enough at "9.9 inches" to fit under a foot-high shelf in my work room (so it doesn't take up the valuable real-estate on the top shelf) The 12 point text (which is the standard in my field) is very sharp, and the old (circa 1880s) political cartoon images I've reproduced from...Read more

I have this printer shared between Macs and Windows machines on my home network using a print server.It's a sweet machine. Quick to warm up and fast to print. With 8 Megs of RAM, it has never given me a memory-problem. Comparable HP and QMS budget-printers that come with 2 Megs of RAM will need memory upgrades. QMS printers in this price range have only USB ports. The Brother has both USB and parallel. It's very nice having the option available and I use both the USB and parallel ports simultaneously without a problem.I love that Brother has made drivers for Mac OS 9 and OS X as well as Windows. It also emulates an HP printer. The emulation-mode was essential for me when I decided to share the printer using a 3rd party (cheap) print server. GIMP Print for OS X does not have Brother drivers, but it does have HP drivers that work very well.This printer does jam occasionally. Jams are pretty easy to clear and it has a function to re-print the last page, so I seldom lose a...Read more

I have been staring at the Brother model HL 1440 for quite some time. It was Consumer Reports number one pick. I decided to go with the HL-5040 because of the additional ram and extra fonts. When I read the owners manual it showed me that a lot of other features are built in as well. I like the fact that it prints a page so fast, and only costs 2 cents per page. My Lexmark X83 multifunction does a nice job in color but has a single page print cost of 6 cents to $1.50 when printing a full-page photograph. Now I think nothing of whipping out a 20-page document. The speed is another practical issue. At a max of 17ppm the paper is coming out so fast that one page is settling in the print tray, while another one is coming out right on top of it
To be critical of the unit is to cite the comments in C Reports, and ZD Net reviews as to the medium quality results when printing graphics. I think that is due in part to the print per page cost being the lowest out of all of the printers...Read more