Brother HL-5240 Toner Cartridges

Brother HL-5240 Printer Review

The Brother HL-5240 laser printer is designed for the small or medium office. It offers fast printing speeds and a 1200 dpi printing engine at an affordable price, with expansion options for the growing office.

Considering the quality of its printouts, fast speed, and large paper capacity, it is somewhat surprising how compact the Brother HL-5240 laser printer manages to be. The unit measures 9.7 inches by 14.6 inches by 15.1 inches and weighs only 20.9 pounds. Its short vertical height is particularly impressive, and its paper tray does not extend up from the unit, so it doesn't take up more space. Despite its size, it doesn't skimp on paper capacity, with a 250-sheet standard tray and a 50-sheet multipurpose tray included. Even more impressive, it can support up to two additional 250-sheet trays for a total of 800 sheets maximum paper capacity. This expandability makes it a great choice for a small office planning to grow in size in the future.

The unit includes a 266 mhz processor, but only 16 MB of RAM. While this will be enough for a single user, or a few shared users, the amount of memory may need to be upgraded as more users share the printer. The unit can support up to 512 MB of RAM, and it has one slot available, allowing you to use the existing memory even after upgrading. No ethernet port is included, but sharing it across a network is fairly easy with either a host computer or a print server.

Print speed is a very fast 30 pages per minute, which is very impressive for its price. Print quality is sharp and detailed, owing to the HL-5240's 1200 dpi printing engine, double the 600 dpi engine of some of its competition, such as Brother TN360 toner. Text is particularly sharp and readable even at small font sizes. Graphics quality is above average for a laser model, but suffers from some of the common flaws apparent in all lasers.

Brother HL-5240 toner cartridges are some of the more inexpensive toner cartridges. Unfortunately, black is the only color available, so for more colorful options a different machine will be needed. There are two different options to choose from when buying toners. The standard laser toner cartridge has a capacity of 3,500 pages and is a sufficient page yield to get. However, the high-yield printer toner cartridge has a capacity of 7,000 pages and will cost the users less per page. This can save the user a lot of money over the long run.

Overall, the Brother HL-5240 is a very impressive machine. Its speed and quality are top-notch, especially for the price. Plan to upgrade the memory as more users are added.