Brother HL-5370DW Laser Printer

An excellent and easy to set up monochrome laser printer. It's extremely fast and offers two built-in conveniences: duplex printing and wired or wireless networking. It's priced a bit higher than some other monochrome laser printers (not to mention one or two color units) and there's not a lot to distinguish it from the ever-growing pack of low-priced laser printers. Still, the speed and ease of set up made it a pleasure to use.

With more and more monochrome laser printers hitting the market for well under $300, it's getting harder and harder to distinguish between them. The Samsung SCX-4500 is great looking and quiet; the Brother MFC-7840 is an all-in-one; and the Samsung CLP-315 is a color printer that's very competitively priced. So perhaps the only negative thing to say about the Brother HL-5370DW is that it's relatively undistinguished.

Overall it's an excellent laser printer. Print times are competitive with the MFC-7840, with first page out in less than 25 seconds when it was not warmed up. And once it gets going, it is very fast indeed. A 55-page PDF printed duplex (on both sides of the page) took just over four minutes--about 4.5 seconds per page. Brother's promotional materials say that the printer can put out as many as 32 pages per minute which would be how long this job would've taken if it were printed on only one side of the page. Duplexing is built in so there's no need for an optional duplexing unit or to flip pages.

Fonts look excellent at any size, and the large paper tray (up to 300 sheets) is a great convenience, as is the printer's relatively small footprint and weight. Brother printers are always extremely easy to set up, particularly the wired / wireless networking features. It's hard to believe that not every printer is equipped for networking, so the competition will be who can make it easiest to configure. So far, Brother has that game won.

Brother offers two types of toner cartridge. The one that comes with the unit (which retails for about $60) is its standard-yield cartridge, good for an estimated 3,000 pages. A high-yield cartridge retails for about $100 but is good for an estimated 8,000 pages. Going with a high-yield tank really drops the cost per page and means that for most people, it'll be a long time between purchases.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.