Brother HL-5240 Laser Printer

I already have two inkjet printers, but I had a need to print higher volume in black only. I am currently pursuing a doctoral degree and the amount of reading required is incredible. I find it helpful to print out many of the online articles and now I can even afford to print out all or part of the e-books.

The Brother HL-5240 is relatively compact; I was able to make space for it by a little rearranging of my computer desk. Setup was simple and quick. You should be able to make a test print within just a few minutes of opening the box. One of the features that sold me on this model was the ability to make duplex (two-sided) prints. I decided to put this to the test right away and printed out an entire e-book (around 175 pages). Paper saving alone will pay for this printer in a few months by printing two-sided.

There is a more expensive model that does automatic duplex printing (I believe it runs about $50 extra) which you may want to spring for if you do a lot in that mode. If you use the manual feature to do this, I recommend that you don't print more than 50 pages or so at a time. The printer prints all the even-numbered pages first, then you flip them over and run them back through and it prints the odd-numbered pages. This is NOT done from the magazine, but rather from the auxiliary input tray that folds down when in use, and up out of the way when it is not being used. I tried to put too many sheets in at once while putting the pages back in to print the second side, and a number of pages fed through together. This messed up the page order, though the book is still readable (I hole-punched the pages and put them in a three-ring binder.

I am on my second ream of paper and only had one glitch; a page from that long print job was stuck in the printer but no error light came on. I was going nuts trying to figure out why I kept getting an error message in the print queue until I decided to take out the toner cartridge for some reason. Once the offending piece of paper was removed, the printer worked perfectly again.

This printer is MUCH faster than an inkjet, to if you are printing high volume, it will make the job go quickly. The price per page should turn out to be considerably less than on an inkjet too. The pages have a slight tendency to curl, but nothing I can't live with. The print quality is very good for text. I have not tried it with any graphics or photos yet, as that was not the primary reason for purchasing this machine. All in all, I am happy with my purchase and would recommend this model to others.