» Brother HL-5040 Laser Printer

Brother HL-5040 Laser Printer Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: a struggle
Comment: This HL5040 has treated its owner roughly. PAPER: It rolls every sheet of paper it prints, from cheap to heavy-stock resume, to the point that a 10 page document will roll up against the printer and jam the pages that follow. ENVELOPES: I've never gotten a clean return address on an envelope. It has wrinkled every one I've passed through it, or it catches and prints at a 45° angle. I print labels, and generally lose one. FEED TRAY: the manual feed has trouble keeping any paper straight, and is a coin toss with envelopes. ELECTRICAL: it dims the lights when it kicks on (apartment wiring, however), and it smells hot after 5 pages. PRINT QUALITY: is quite good, especially with text. B&W photos are decent. I'm still on the original toner. JAMS: are common, regardless of paper type, and the amount in the paper tray. Some good ones wreck the paper, so it can't print on it, and the paper isn't even good for scrap.

This might be a good printer if it could input or output paper, but then I might use it more and turn it into a supernova.

Given the reviews I read from reliable sources, and the number of 5-star stickers I had to peel off the printer itself, I expected a lot more. And $200+ is enough to justify my surprise at how bad this thing is. I haven't replaced it because I don't print much, and this research ended badly. $50 is enough for good paper handling. I never actually enjoyed this printer. We've gone to Kinko's across the street for important papers instead of fighting to get that last page from this beast. This is the type of product the writers of Office Space had in mind when creating the fax machine.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: workhorse personal or small business printer
Comment: I bought this 5 years ago and print about 500 pages per month. This printer has been sturdy, fast and reliable, seems to be efficient with toner etc.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The little Engine that Couldn't
Comment: 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

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great laser printer for a great price
Comment: 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!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Only Cheap
Comment: 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.

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