Home > Consumer Reviews > Brother HL-5150D Monochrome Graphic Laser Printer

I am a Mac user and a scientist. In my profession, most of the papers are in the PDF format. This printer handles these documents very well. If you set the resolution to 1200 dpi, the graphics in the papers would look even more impressive and photo-like. It is small and easy to set up so it does not occupy too much desk space. It can do double sided printing without additional gears. It is slow though if your documents are of several MBs in size and contains complex pictures. I have added additional memory to rectify this. From time to time, it has problem handling web pages in Safari.

I'm impressed with the Brother HL-5150D.
I've been looking quite a while for an
inexpensive duplex laser printer. At
$222 delivered from Amazon I expected the
usual pain and suffering trying to coax
ghostscript or some holy binary-only driver
to talk to it.

I attached it via parallel/centronics port
and launched printtool under RH9 only to find
the printer wasn't listed in the Brother
menu. Thinking it was a complete long shot I
configured it as a native PS printer expecting
pages of gibberish to fill the hopper. To my
surprise the printer actually talks PS
including duplex support.

_Never_ have I had an inexpensive laser printer
so quickly and easily go from the UPS truck
to productive use under Linux.

Nice work Brother. You deserve to sell millions
of these.

*Updated Review*

I'm on a Mac (OS X 10.4) and am running the printer off of my Airport USB. No troubles at all. I did download the newest drivers off of the Brother support site before I did anything else.

Print quality has been very good. It can do 1200 dpi, but 600 dpi is just fine. The envelope feed has been flawless. I appreciate the duplexing.

I'm an independent researcher writing articles and book chapters. My print volume is not high (relative to an office), but I need good quality output. This printer fits my needs perfectly.

*6 months later...*

I like this printer even more than when I first bought it. Again, I'm not a heavy user; a page here, a few pages there, and then a 20 or 40 page document once a week. The quality is still very good. Other computers (Windows included) have no difficulty sending jobs to it. I am addicted to the duplexing capability.

This is the best duplex printer I could find for its price. Its print speed and quality are impressive. The time from cold start to first page is also quite fast.

So far the printer has worked seamlessly in my Windows XP 2.0 SP2 setup using a USB 2.0 interface. Word, acrobat reader, explorer, etc. have all worked very nicely. Printer setup interface is simple and clear.

After a quick and well documented configuration step, the printer also worked in my SuSE Linux 9.1 setup. In Linux I tested printing with acroread, a2ps, openoffice, ghostview, mozilla, evolution email client, konqueror, command shell, etc. Mozilla had a hard time chosing the correct font on a particular website (NY Times) and the printout was horrible. But this is an issue with the software as other Linux browsers did fine. Other than that I had no issues in Linux. The printer emulates postscript level 3 and does PCL6 so it is quite versatile. Overall time to first page is slower in Linux and Windows XP.

It is not a networked printer but my intent is to transform it into one should I need to connect many computers. I'll just buy a cheap 'print server' or a 'wireless print server' to do the job. Surprisingly this is cheaper and more versatile than buying the model of the printer ready for networking (HL-5170DN).

I have yet to encounter a single printer jam after over a month of usage. Toner cartridge have a very fair price per page if one shops on the internet.

I have not tested the printer with the Apple platforms.

The printer does not do color but I backed off that requirement when I saw the maintenance costs of a color printer. If you need color and duplex then look at the CLP-500 and CLP-550n by Samsung for a low priced printer.

I can only recommend this printer.

I'm no expert when it comes to image quality -- so my comments would be of little value to a "demanding" user. I've had this printer for a couple of months now -- so far, so good. It's very fast, the duplexing mechanism is very good (it has jammed once), and the quality is quite good for printing technical manuals, proofing manuscripts, etc. Setup was quick, and the setup wizard actually worked (though an experienced user could probably skip it). At this point, my only minor complaint is noise -- it tends to be a little noisy while printing, certainly not a major distraction -- but it could be problematic for someone who prefers a "silent" printer -- though the printer does put itself into a silent sleep when inactive. It ships with a drum and a "half-life" toner cartridge, so a significant portion of the purchase cost is just the consumables in the box. I think this is a newer model, so anyone who is uncomfortable with the risk of trying a new product might want to wait a while or shop for a different model.

*** UPDATE *** One year and two toner cartridges later it's still running like a champ -- hope all purchasers have the same luck.