Product Reviews

You can now buy a mono laser printer from just £80 or spend well over £1,000 on workhorses like the HP 4350dtn, depending on your requirements. The Brother HL-5250DN is designed for medium-sized workgroups that need to print regularly and offers a decent range of features, speed and quality.

The HL-5250DN's quoted print speed is 29ppm and, true to its word, it soared through every one of our tests at almost exactly that. Our 50-page text document printed in one minute, 55 seconds, and even our complicated 24-page DTP document printed at the same rate. Our 12-page Excel document actually printed a little faster, at 31ppm. The HL-5250DN's 32MB of onboard RAM helps with more complicated jobs and means there should never be a huge line of people waiting to collect their prints.

The HL-5250DN will print at resolutions up to 1,200dpi, but our tests revealed little quality difference between 1,200 and 600dpi. Our test photo prints were standard mono laser fare - respectable, with only slight banding, but not good enough to be used for external communications. Our business graphics printed with recognisable dithering, but it wasn't bad enough to obscure overlying text. Plain black text itself printed well, although close-up scrutiny revealed edges of letters

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to be slightly soft. Larger fonts and plain black areas of the page were more problematic, as the toner distribution tended to be uneven, giving large black areas a slightly distracting texture.

The HL-5250DN includes a duplex unit for automatically printing on both sides of a page, but this is more for convenience and paper-saving than quicker printing. Printing our 50-page plain text document in duplex mode more than halved the print rate to 13ppm, but it's a useful option if you're in the middle of an economy drive or need double-sided documents.

The integrated networking is a boon too. There's an integrated web server within the HL-5250DN: just enter its IP address into a browser and you can adjust image quality settings, duplex settings and power-saving modes remotely. You can also keep tabs on things like the status of the consumables and how much paper is left in the tray. Brother also includes its BRAdmin software, allowing you to keep tabs on the printer without using a web browser. The Driver Deployment wizard will allow the network administrator to create an installer for the HL-5250DN - just install it on each PC that's going to use the printer and you're away.

There are only two consumables to replace on the HL-5250DN: the drum unit and the toner cartridge. We recommend the high-capacity toner cartridge, which will print 7,000 pages, giving a combined cost per page of just 0.99p.

All told, the HL-5250DN is a desirable piece of kit for those looking to add a network printer to a workgroup. It's quick enough to keep 20 or so people happy, while the network software is easy enough to use that you won't need dedicated technical support to get it working. Add to this the duplexer and the low cost per page, as well as the low overall cost of the unit, and the HL-5250DN is a sensible purchase for most offices.