Brother HL-5130 review

Brother's HL-5130 is a fairly standard-looking printer.

Its chassis is the platinum-grey of so many computer products, there's a hollow in the top for collecting prints, a paper tray at the base, and so on. Like all the printers in this group test, it's small enough to sit on a desk without demanding too much space. It's essentially silent when not in use, but it does kick into relatively noisy life when printing. Fortunately, this calms down very quickly afterwards.

When printing in its standard resolution (referred to as 'fine' in the Print dialog settings), the output was competent but not excellent. Images were crisp, but shadows were dull and tones were slightly posterised. This was due to the halftone dot size the printer used, which was a little smaller than is normal, with its 600dpi line resolution.

It came in a close second in the speed stakes when printing the PDF layouts, something non-PostScript printers generally race through. However, when we asked it to do this at its best-quality output, the 'super fine' HQ1200 output option, its 8MB of memory failed to cope with the task and produced a 'print overrun' error page instead of the bottom part of the test page. What it did manage to print looked pretty good, although the halftone dot size was down to the point where we could see a slight posterising effect in continuous-tone images. If you only mean to print office-style documents - that is word processing, spreadsheets and so on - this printer will be fine, but larger graphics, especially when printing with higher output quality settings, will give it problems.

The Brother printer's manual-feed tray is a fairly large, fold-down shelf with width adjusters to guide different media widths. This felt a little on the wobbly side when we first opened it, but it did prove to be sturdy enough when put to use. When printing on envelopes, this printer did produce a very small amount of smudging at the far end of the output where the paper layers were slightly thicker. Fortunately, this wasn't in an area that would normally be printed. We were pleased to see it handled the envelopes without fuss either way up, demonstrating reasonably robust paper-handling abilities.

All in all, the Brother HL-5130 didn't shine. It handled the less demanding tasks perfectly well but struggled with producing graphics-rich pages at higher-quality levels. Because of this, it simply failed to excite us.