HP 5L Printer Review
The HP LaserJet 5L is a monochrome laser printer designed for the home or small office user. Its excellent print quality doesn't quite make up for its slow speeds and limited memory. Lack of a USB port is also inconvenient.
The HP 5L can't exactly be considered compact in design, but it's not particularly bulky, either. Measuring 8.9 inches by 13.2 inches by 12.3 inches (HWD) and weighing 17 pounds with the HP toner, it will still fit into fairly small offices quite easily.
The LaserJet 5L's affordable price is appealing, but HP seems to have cut just a few too many corners to accomplish its price. Paper capacity is only 100 sheets in a single drawer. With many competing units offering 250 sheets or more for a similar price, this is disappointing. The printer has only a parallel port for connection, which means most users will need a convertor to USB or ethernet with most modern computers. The 5L is a discontinued model and new similar version would be the HP 2500 toner printer.
The HP LaserJet 5L has a 24 MHz processor and 1 MB of RAM, which can be upgraded to 9 MB. This is enough memory for text, but users who do graphics-intensive printing will find this fairly limiting, as large documents will print very slowly.
Each HP LaserJet 5L toner cartridge has a capacity of 2,500 pages. HP 5L toner cartridges are affordably-priced, and users can get even more out of each HP 5L toner cartridge by using the printer's EcoSave mode. Replacing the HP LaserJet 5L toner cartridge is more complicated than it should be, but the instructions are clear.
Print speed is very slow, at only 4 pages per minute. Text quality is the HP 5L's main attribute. Text is very sharp and clear, even at small font sizes. Graphics quality is decent, but graphics documents print very slowly due to limited memory.
Overall, the HP LaserJet 5L has excellent text quality, but its slow speeds and limited connectivity options make it a poor choice compared to competing printers, which offer much more for the price.
