Review: Brother HL-5280DW laser printer

The product name may be a bit of a mouthful, but the Brother HL-5280DW is a very compact business-class laser with a range of advanced features, including support for both wired and wireless networking.

The HL-5280DW sits at the top of the recently released HL-5200 series and is well suited to life as a small-business or workgroup printer.

It has a 250-sheet A4 paper tray located in the bottom of the unit to which two more trays can be added, bringing capacity up to 750 sheets. Plus there’s the usual foldout feeder for card, transparencies and envelopes and a built-in duplexer for double-side printing.

Running costs, of course, are just as big an issue as the purchase price, so a new 7,000-page toner has been introduced on this model which, together with a separate drum unit, brings print costs down to a claimed 1.2p (inc VAT) per copy.

It’s no slouch, with a 28ppm laser engine, a fast (266MHz) Risc processor and 32MB of onboard memory, expandable up to 544MB using standard Dimms.

For most small-business applications, however, the standard configuration will be more than adequate, with PCL and Postscript 3 (BR-Script) emulations both provided as standard.

Drivers for use with Windows, Apple Mac and Linux PCs are also available with support for a range of advanced features, including N-up booklets, poster stitching and watermark printing.

On the connectivity front, you’re almost spoilt for choice. As well as USB and parallel ports, for example, there’s a 10/100Mbits/sec wired Ethernet interface and a 54Mbits/sec wireless controller also built in as standard.

The wireless interface can be used with both 802.11b and 802.11g networks to either connect the printer to an existing Lan or, in ad-hoc mode, to allow wireless clients to print directly to the Brother laser on a peer-to-peer basis.

The necessary print server emulators are all built in.

There’s also support for just about any network, printing or management protocol you care to name; everything from standard Windows SMB printing through to Cups (the Common Unix Printing System) and IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), with a comprehensive setup wizard plus an integrated web-management interface to further help tweak the settings.

Using these, it took less than five minutes to hook the Brother laser onto our test network and use it both over the wired Lan and on a secure WPA-encrypted 802.11g link.

Support for SNMP management is also provided and a copy of Brother’s own Windows print-management console (BR Admin) is thrown in for good measure.

Another big benefit with this printer is a general lack of noise, added to which there’s none of that annoying ozone smell you seem to get from some lasers, making the HL-5280DW a very easy printer to live with.

It’s also very quick, warming up from standby in just under 10 seconds to deliver top-quality output at an impressive rate.

Indeed, the only niggle we had was with the duplexer which, like others we’ve tested, tends to grab back each page and print the other side regardless of whether there’s anything on it.

Speed will depend on what you’re printing and its resolution, with a slightly slower 1,200dpi on offer if the default 600dpi fails to impress. Either way, quality is excellent on this fast, fully featured, yet affordable small-business laser.