Brother HL-5340D High Speed Laser Printer with Duplex

First off, at the current price (199), buy the Brother HL-5370DW Laser Printer with Wireless Networking and Duplex instead. It is the same printer at the same price with one added feature: wireless. When I bought my printer, it was on sale for 130. Anyway, this review should apply equally to the HL-5370DW.Need I say the printer is great? I needed to print 600 pages the first time I used it, and it spit them out like bugs bunny with turrets. The duplex feature saved me a lot of paper!Second, I don't think this is mentioned anywhere so I'll point out that the printer comes with a FULL TN620 toner and drum. This means you will get up to 3,000 pages before even buying your first toner!Set up was a breeze. You don't even need to run the included CD. Just connect the printer, Microsoft's found hardware set up will quickly find the driver for you. run the set up and install!Troubleshooting Advice #1: As another reviewer noted, however, using 3 hole pre-punched paper caused jam after jam until I figured out how to fix it: tape the paper guider thingees on the top of the printer (the two dangling pieces on top of the printer just above the roller over the output tray - sorry for the dearth of technical knowledge). I think its supposed to prevent paper curl, but all it does is cause paper jams! Unfortunately, it cannot be easily removed without breaking it off so I just lifted it up using tape (I just used the blue tape that came with the printer) and presto, no more paper jams! This is a nice alternative to simply not using prepunched paper as the other reviewer suggested. I'd rather leave some tape on my printer than have to manually punch holes in 500 sheets!Troubleshooting Advice #2: Every time I started my computer 8 pages spit out of the printer with the error message 'USBCBIOS'. If anyone else has this problem, it is because you are using an outdated USB 1.0 printer cable. There is an easy fix: use a USB 2.0 printer cable. By the way, the only CON with this printer is that a USB cable is not included in the box. But like most people, I have a million of these things lying around anyway.So, overall, saves time and money. Worth every penny!

I bought this printer because I'm a very low volume print user. It seemed like almost every time I went to use my ink jet, I would have to buy a new ink cartridge because the old one had dried out. Not to mention the annoyance of not being able to print if a color was out, even though I rarely cared about color.This printer is fantastic. It is fast and the duplex printing works well. Some people have mentioned that they have had trouble with curling in the duplex mode. I haven't seen that at all. I use 24lb Staples brand laser printer paper, and it works really well. The paper feels heavier than regular paper does, so that probably keeps it from curling.I have had it for over a year and a half now, and it has been glorious not having to buy toner or worry about if it will print. It is much less fiddly than my ink jet was. I can just turn it on and start printing, and everything works. No long warm up times, no extensive automatic head cleaning (I used to wait longer for my ink jet printer to turn on than it took to print the one or two pages I wanted to print!).I actually print more with this printer than I did with my old ink jet because it is so fast and hassle free. If I need to print something in color (once in a year and a half), I just take it to the nearest office supply store on a USB flash drive, and they print it right off. That is a little bit of a hassle, but the crisp gray scale the printer makes by default is fine for almost everything.I did notice that if I wanted to print something I had scanned as a high resolution graphic into a PDF (that is what my scanner software outputs), that the printer was not able to do that by default. The scan was of a diagram on graph paper for a construction waiver request to my HOA. The printer truncated the image at various places down the page, depending on the resolution (300dpi was fine, I don't remember about 600, but 1200 and 1600dpi were right out). That may be a limitation of how PDFs work and are sent to the printer, though. I vaguely recall something to that effect from the distant past.I was able to buy an additional 256mb of memory for it from Crucial (CT971692 , found from their memory compatibility search) for about 40 dollars. I could have also fixed the problem by scanning at lower resolution, but what fun is that? The upgrade was trivial to install (there is a plastic door on the side - open it up and snap the module in) and fixed the problem.I only paid about one-hundred and twenty dollars for the printer, and the one-hundred and sixty dollar total compares very favorably to the cost of an inkjet with comparable print quality (though it would still be much slower and fussier) and the at-least-one ink cartridge I would have had to have bought by now. I am not aware if the default amount of RAM would have been an issue for anything else, since I upgraded the RAM the second week I had the printer. :)The only down side is that the power-on current draw is pretty high. It trips my UPS every time you turn it on, and every time it wakes up from sleep. Once it starts printing, it is fine, but if you have a heavily loaded circuit, be aware that it might be a problem. I have never tripped the circuit breaker, but I don't have a high load on it either (just the computer, two monitors, network switch, alarm clock and cordless telephone).

We bought this printer because our other Brother laser printer (2140, also a really good printer) does not conviently support DOS appliactions, and it does not have serial port connectivity. We use the 5340D it in our home office for just about everything, yet we do also have a color printer as needs arise. The 5340D does support DOS and has both USB and serial port connectivity, and the duplex feature is just a convient bonus. The chassis is a little bit taller than the 2140, but that is not a problem for us. The ease and quality of specialty printing, being envelopes, or odd sized paper, or unique paper is very good! For a pretty straight forward black and white laser printer we couldn't be happier with the unit, it's functionality, and the price! Very highly recommened!!

Your records will show the model of the first Brother printer I purchased from you. I was quite pleased with that one - it's speed and the quality of the copies. However, after awhile even though I changed the toner - more than once of course - the copies were spotty. I figured I would change the printer; that's when I purchased the HL-5340D. Well, the copies coming from that printer were spotty and when the HL-650 toner which was purchased recently was installed, the same problem persists in addition to the harsh, grating sound mentioned above.

Have four of these in service. Fast, duplex, long lasting toner (+ you can use the electrical tape mod - google it).UPDATE: Two of these devices started developing issues including not feeding paper from the manual tray properly as well as exhibiting black dots when printing. Brother support was not helpful.