Brother HL-5250DN Toner Cartridges

Brother HL-5250DN Printer Review

The Brother HL-5250DN is a monochrome laser printer designed for the home or small office user. It is priced for the small office, but has the capacity and speed to keep up with a lot of users, and the expandability to keep growing.

Compact laser printers are fairly common but most compact laser printers sacrifice many things for their compact size. The HL-5250DN, on the other hand, sacrifices little to nothing, as it has fast speeds, great print quality, and a fairly large paper capacity. The printer measures 9.7 inches by 14.6 inches by 15.1 inches (HWD) and weighs 21.6. With its short vertical height, it could even be placed on a wide shelf.

Not only does the HL-5250DN hit all the major features, but it manages to pack in some nice extras as well. The "DN" model, the most popular, includes both automatic duplexing (two-sided printing) and a built-in ethernet port. Duplex printing can be enabled as the default mode for the printer, which can conserve paper and thereby reduce operating costs considerably. With the built-in ethernet port, it is very easy to share the HL-5250DN across a network of users. The printer has a paper capacity of 250 sheet in its main tray and 50 sheets in its multipurpose tray, but this capacity can be expanded by adding up to two 250-sheet trays for an additional 500 sheets of capacity. This will be especially appealing to small offices expecting to grow in the future.

Print quality is very good. Text is sharp and detailed, and readable even at very small font sizes. Graphics and photo quality is somewhat inconsistent, but passable. Print speed is an impressive 30 pages per minute, which should be quite fast enough even for an office full of users.

Brother HL-5250DN toner cartridges come in two sizes. The standard toner cartridge, much like the very similar relative Brother HL-5240 toner, has a moderate capacity of 3,500 pages while the more economical high-yield laser printer toner cartridge has a capacity of 7,000 pages. Choosing to use the high yield Brother HL-5250DN toner cartridge is a good decision in the long run, since it brings down the printer's cost per page.

Overall, the Brother HL-5250DN manages to hit every major point with flying colors, and does it all at an affordable price. Lackluster graphics quality may be a concern, but only for users who plan to do a lot of it.