Brother HL-5340D

Brother's HL-5240 walked away with the overall award last time we had a round-up of lasers in the PC Pro Labs, and its successor is just as impressive in its own way.

First, it's cost effective to run. After 10,000 pages, the cost is low at just £280 exc VAT. In the long run it works out around the middle of the pack - roughly on par with the Konica Minolta PagePro 5650EN, but not quite as cheap to run as the Xerox, Kyocera and Dell. This is largely due to the cheap high-yield 8,000-page toner cartridges, which cost a reasonable £100 exc VAT.

Output quality is simply outstanding. Its 1,200 x 1,200dpi print engine produced excellent results in our tests, scoring nine out of ten in all four categories: photographs were smooth and banding-free, gradients smooth, text characters clean and well formed, and blacks were deep and dark.

It's reasonably well equipped on the features front, but not quite the best. There's no networking facility, but you do get a duplexer for automatic double-sided printing, input capacity is a decent 300 sheets and output is a solid 150 too, albeit not among the best. Its monthly duty cycle of 20,000 shows it should be capable of coping in a demanding office environment, however, and the three-year on-site warranty is one of the most generous in this Labs.

There's no doubt that the Brother HL-5340D is a very good printer, but unfortunately, it can't quite match its predecessor. We're talking fractions here, but its speed (an overall average of 27ppm) isn't quite up with the leaders, and the fact that it can't quite match the best here for features means it just misses out.

Author: Jonathan Bray