Compact: The recently revamped HL 5140 Printer by Brother is user friendly, cute and incredibly compact at 15×15x10 inches and 15 pounds. This laser printer is ideal for home and office use where space is limited and with quality still remaining important.

Well Priced: The price of the printer itself is unbeatable at about US$200. The expense problems arise when you want to buy optional extra’s for the printer for example more memory, a second paper tray or networking equipment.

Easy-to-understand controls: The printer control panel is extremely user friendly with just two buttons, one to Cancel Print and Go, to restart the continuous flow of printing after error or jam. Drum, Paper and Toner status is indicated by three lights situated on top of the printer.

Paper: The printer comes standard with a sheet output and main tray. With 150 and 250 capacities respectively. Another 250 page tray is available with cost of a couple of US$ less than you initially paid for the printer, really not a good investment at all. Rather buy another printer for that price than a single printer part. Multi-taskers will fall in love with this impressive 21 page per minute producer, giving him or her more time to do other things than to wait for a printer to finish a printing job. The printer accepts almost any size paper including legal, exec, letter, A4, A5 and A6. A variety of paper types can used including Letter, Transparencies, labels, envelope and plain paper. However single paper printing, large quantity envelope and transparency printing will have to be fed to printer by hand. The printer has an awful disadvantage in terms of paper jam tendency’s. To fix the jam can take hours of effort as the whole printer needs to be dismantled.

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.

Printer Memory: 16 MB’s memory comes standard with the printer. This may be too little for large printing jobs and networking with another 144 MB memory available to fill by means of SD RAM’s sold by 3rd party vendors.

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.