Brother HL-5050 Toner Cartridges

The Brother HL-5050 laser printer is designed for the home or small office user. Its solid paper capacity, excellent text quality, and support for a wide range of paper types are impressive, but below average graphics quality may disappoint some users.

The Brother HL-5050 laser printer has more paper capacity than most lasers at its price point. It can hold 250 sheets in its main drawer, with an additional 50 sheets in a multipurpose tray. The multipurpose tray also supports a wide array of media sizes and types, including transparencies, card stock, letterhead, and envelopes. The control panel is simple, with no LCD screen, and only a few status indicator lights, but it is adequate for the unit's capabilities, and the driver software handles most of the settings and options. A single cancel button is the only button on the front panel.

The unit can connect either by parallel or USB 2,0 port, and supports both Windows and Macintosh platforms. Its 16 MB of memory should be enough for most home or small office users, but the memory can be expanded to a maximum of 128 MB for more graphics-heavy printing, or for printing very large documents.

The standard laser toner cartridge has a capacity of 3,300 pages, while the high-yield printer toner cartridge has a capacity of 6,500 pages. Brother HL-5050 toner cartridges are very affordably-priced, resulting in a very low cost per page well-suited for users on a budget. When comparing a Brother toner cartridge to the competition, you will generally find Brother has some of the lowest costs per page.

Print quality is mixed. Text quality is very good, with sharp and detailed characters even at small font sizes. Graphics quality is a little below average for a laser, so users who do a lot of graphics printing may wish to look elsewhere. Print speed is around 12 pages per minute.

Overall, the Brother HL-5050 impresses with its low price, fast speeds, and excellent paper handling. Poor graphics quality is its only drawback.