Stephen Withers27 February 2008, 10:14 PM
Brother’s HL-5270DN is a networkable 1,200dpi mono laser printer suited to small office or workgroup use thanks to an Ethernet interface as well as the usual parallel and USB ports.
The duplexer is a welcome inclusion in these waste-sensitive times.
The silver and grey finish fits in with PCs from the two big vendors. It wasn’t appropriate to torture-test the review sample to see if it could withstand rough handling, but the case didn’t feel especially robust. The HL-5270DN’s dimensions are much as you’d expect for an A4 printer, and the noise levels are subjectively typical for a small laser.
Setup is straightforward, with Flash animations showing what goes where, although the printed Quick Setup Guide has many screen images that are too small and too grey to be easily read. Unlike its Windows counterpart, the Mac OS X installer requires users to manually add a printer — fortunately, Bonjour sees the device. Furthermore, the Mac had to be restarted after installation. A Linux CUPS driver is available for download.
Nominal print speed is 28ppm. We recorded 21 seconds click-to-drop (including warmup) for the first A4 page, with the second page emerging consistent with the rated speed. If you currently use multipart forms in an impact printer, the HL-5270DN’s carbon copy feature automatically prints up to eight copies of each page, with independent control of the paper source for each. Page images (eg. footers, watermarks or logos) can be stored as macros and used to identify each copy. This and other features can be controlled remotely via a web interface. We’d be happy to have this one in our office.