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Brother HL-5370DW - Mono Laser Printer Review

Author Simon Williams
Published 27th May 2009
Manufacturer Brother
Price £209.48 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed £240.90 (Inc VAT)
Latest Price
Features Score 9 for Features
Print Quality Score 9 for Print Quality
Print Speed Score 10 for Print Speed
Value Score 8 for Value
Overall Score 9 for Overall
Brother HL-5370DW - Mono Laser Printer
award recommended

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Brother has a good range of mono laser printers for the high-end individual and small workgroup markets. We've already looked at the HL-5340D and the HL-5370DW, reviewed here, has a lot of the same characteristics, but adds Ethernet and Wireless connectivity.

This is a neat, squat machine in light and dark grey, with a piano-black band across the front. There's a 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom of the front panel and the front panel itself folds down to reveal a multipurpose tray, which slides and flips out to support a further 50 sheets of special media. The mechanism feels a bit flimsy, but worked well enough during testing.


Print jobs feed to a deep indentation on the top surface of the machine and to the left of this is a column of five indicator LEDs and two buttons, marked Go and Job Cancel. This is all you get as a control panel as there's no LCD display. At the back are sockets for Ethernet and parallel ports, as well as the ubiquitous USB. Networking is available as a cabled connection or wirelessly, via 802.11g Wi-Fi.

With an all-in-one printer, wireless installation is comparatively straightforward, as even the simplest machines usually have LCD displays, which can be used for simple feedback and instructions. However, this laser printer, like so many others, has just status LEDs, making set-up more complicated.

To be fair, Brother has tried to cover all the options, though all but the automatic ones are a bit convoluted. If your router supports Secure Easy Setup, Wi-Fi Protected Setup or AOSS, you can use these systems to get the necessary settings across to the printer. In other cases, things aren't as easy.

You can install using a network lead, though this needs to be connected directly to your router, or you can work from a wireless PC, as long as you don't mind changing all its wireless settings to communicate with the printer. You need to note down the original ones, so you can reset them at the end of the installation.

The printer is well catered for in terms of page description language and operating system support. It includes both PCL 6 and Postscript Level 3 in emulation and there are drivers for Windows from 2000 onwards and Mac OSX 10.3.9 and greater. There are CUPS and LPD/LPRng drivers for Linux available, too.

 

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