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Size counts: The recently face-lifted HL 5140 Printer by Brother is small in size but definitely not small in performance. The unit measures a mere 15×15x10 inches and 15 pounds, making easy to fit in even the smallest of home or office.

Unbelievable value: The going rate on the printer is plus minus US$200. However, if you want all those optional extra’s to make your printer fancy, you will have to dig deep in your pockets as the accessories such as memory, additional paper tray’s and network requirements, per individual items costs almost twice the price of the printer itself.

Control Panel: The printer comes with a nifty and easy to understand control panel. Toner, Drum and Paper status is indicated by lights and 2 buttons are also situated on top of the unit to Cancel Print and the other Go, for waking the system from sleep mode or print continuation after errors and jams.

Paper types and sizes: The Brother HL 5140 Printer is a super speedy piece of equipment with amazing 21 pages per minute capacity, ideal for multi-taskers who have lots more to do than sit around and wait for printing to finish. Almost all paper types are compatible with this printer including Letter, transparencies, envelopes, labels and plain paper types. Envelopes and transparency as well as single paper prints will unfortunately have to be hand fed. Letter sizes supported are executive, legal and letter as well as A4, A5 and A6. The sheet output tray has 150 page capacity and sheet main tray with 250 page capacity. Optional 250 page tray is available at cost nearly as much as the price of the printer. A disadvantage is the printers tendency for paper jams specifically with standard 8.5×11 multipurpose.

Graphic tests: The printer boasts with 2 400×600 dpi maximum print resolutions. However in terms of graphics, the Brother HL 5140 Printer, uses the Brother HL 5140 Toner and is very average as gradients contained horizontal and vertical banding flaws and deep shadow reproduction on photographs is terrible. The printer is not recommended for photo printing. Uneven print quality seems to be the a feature of this printer. Text printing, however is crisp and impeccable, easily legible, bold characters without any jagged edges and character outline is very good both in plain and italic format even with low almost microscopic, two point font size.

Available memory: The printer comes standard with 16 MB’s memory. SD-RAM memory adding options up to 144 MB is available via third party suppliers as Brother does not sell memory. Upgrading with more memory is recommended for small network runners who have possible large print jobs.

More technical details: The printer has 133 MHz processor with 16 MB RAM standard with expansion possibilities of 144 MB’s. The printer is Personal Computer, Apple Mac and Linux compatible. Interfaces employed are Parallel and USB with wireless and Ethernet optional extra. Your minimum system requirements are Microsoft DOS, Windows 1995, 1998, 2000, NT4.0, Millennium and XP as well as Linux and Apple Mac OS and x 10.1