Brother HL-5130 review

Verdict:

Review Date: 23 Jul 2004

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The HL-5130 has the kind of businesslike design we'd expect from Brother but comes at a low price that's well within reach of home buyers.

The boxy design means that paper lands flat in the output tray, which helps to prevent paper becoming curled, although the printer does curl paper slightly as it prints and, as a result, loading printed paper back into the input cassette for manual duplexing caused it to jam more often than not. We had similar problems with the manual feed slot, which chewed up even fresh sheets of paper with alarming regularity.

The 17ppm quoted speed is modest by today's standards, but the HL-5130 lived up to it, outputting text prints at 16.8ppm and complex graphics at 15.5ppm. Both results are above average in this group. Switching from the standard 600dpi to HQ1200 (2,400x600dpi) had no effect on text print speed, but neither did it improve quality noticeably. However, text quality was already extremely high. The black text documents produced by the other printers were fairly indistinguishable, but the HL-5130's output was distinctly sharper.

Graphics printing at 600dpi revealed smooth gradients with little sign of the banding suffered by many of the other printers on test. Sadly, greyscales were far from accurate, which tended to make photos look unrealistic. Switching to HQ1200 improved the smoothness, but prints became too dark and took three times as long to appear.

The HL-51130 narrowly misses out on a Best Buy award. It is not as fast as the Oki B4250 but it is £47 cheaper, and if you use its high-capacity toner cartridges its running costs are equally low. It produces the best text prints and, while its photographic output is inferior to that of the Oki, its smooth prints make it better for business graphics.

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