Brother HL-5050 17 PPM 600 dpi Laser Printer

by Brother

Product Details

Product Manual [2.73mb PDF]

• Item Weight: 32 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 32 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00008AOK8
• Item model number: HL-5050
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 12, 2003

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The HL-5050 laser printer is a flexible, expandable printer for your home, office, or small connected workgroup. With fast print speeds, graphics-quality printing, upgradeable memory, and outstanding user support, the HL-5050 sets a new standard for quality monochrome printing--the perfect balance of performance, flexibility and value.

The HL-5050 can handle virtually any media via its 250-sheet paper tray and 50-sheet multi-purpose tray. The multi-purpose tray accommodates card stock, letterhead, and envelopes. The printer delivers its highest-quality output (HQ1200, up to 2,400 x 600 dpi) at up to 17 pages per minute--its fastest print speed. With its fast print speed, 16 MB memory (expandable to 144 MB), PCL6 and BR-Script3 (PostScript3) compatibility, and great print quality, this printer delivers both performance and productivity.

A convenient job-cancel button to make unwanted print jobs disappear easily, and the printer's "first-page out" speed falls under 12 seconds. The unit offers the option to add a second 250-sheet lower paper tray to expand the paper input capacity to a total of 500 sheets. Its standard-yield toner cartridge offers up to 3,300-page capacity and the high-yield toner cartridge offers up to 6,500-page capacity. The drum is rated at up to 20,000 pages.

The printer comes with USB and parallel interfaces and standard Windows drivers, as well as drivers for Mac OS X (10.1 and higher) and Mac OS 8.6 to 9.2. An optional external 10/100 BaseT Ethernet print server is available. Brother provides toll-free technical support, a one-year limited warranty, and the online Brother Solutions Center.

Product Description

17 PPM 16 MB MEMORY

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brother HL-5050, January 14, 2004

By 

Mark A. Stettler (Hillsboro, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brother HL-5050 17 PPM 600 dpi Laser Printer (Office Product)

Setup - easy

Basic Operation - fast and reasonably quiet, appears to be well built.

Printing text - excellent, as good as a much more expensive industrial hp laser printer I frequently use. Nice and dark.

Printing graphics/photos - in highest settings (1200dpi, "improved gray scaling" checked) it's good, but nothing exceptional. The output is not too dark, as is sometimes the problem with other inexpensive lasers.

Manual Duplex printing - this was at first confusing to me because I wanted to use the lower paper tray to do it all: print one side and then feed the output back again into the lower tray to print the other side (if you have more than 50 sheets you need to use the lower tray). This did not work for me until I finally hardwired the tray settings from "auto detect" to "tray 1". The manual did not mention this step. New drivers from Brother (as of January 14, 2004) did not fix this. Printing duplex from the multi-purpose tray works fine without having to hardwire the settings.

Customer support - so far not good. I went through much trepidation figuring out how to get the lower tray to work on duplex because I could not reach support people. The number always seems to be busy.

Highs - good, fast prints and reasonably quiet operation.

Lows - documentation is not completely accurate, customer support isn't good. Could use a sleep mode indicator as the previous reviewer mentioned.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fast with Clear Print, October 14, 2003

By 

Frustrated in the Kitchen (Lander, WY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brother HL-5050 17 PPM 600 dpi Laser Printer (Office Product)

As a die-hard HP fan, (I still have my DeskJet, but my HP laser finally died) I am rather impressed with this printer. Fast and clear output - even with lots of graphics on the page. The printer was easy to set up; the drivers and software easy to install and understand.
However, the "save toner" mode is rather useless: it saves so much toner, the page cannot be read unless I adjust the default to print darker - which defeats the purpose.
This printer has a "sleep mode" that I'm not terribly fond of: there are no lights to remeind me that my printer is still, technically, "on". I forget to turn off the power, and as a cat owner, my cats step on buttons and turn my printer back on at the most inopportune times.
And I'm one of those users who like to have a printed manual in my hands to look at. The manual for this printer is on CD; which one of these days, I will print out (not in save-toner mode, though).
I have other Brother products, but this is the first Brother printer I've purchased. So far, I'm very pleased.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Don't Buy This Printer if You Print Checks or Other Forms, September 8, 2004

By 

Small Office User - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brother HL-5050 17 PPM 600 dpi Laser Printer (Office Product)

Don't buy the Brother HL-5050 if you need to print preprinted checks or other preprinted forms. The printer will pick up the ink from the checks or forms and transfer them back onto the form as it prints. Apparently some Brother laser printers get hotter than other brands and this heat causes the ink to transfer back onto the printed document. Some preprinted forms with a lot of text become nearly unreadable after passing through the HL-5050. The printer also curls paper more than my previous HP printers, also apparently due to this "excessive" heat. Sometimes after printing several pages, a slight burning smell comes from the printer (like your central heating system the first time you use it in the winter). I never had this problem with my old HP 4P or HP 6P.

I called Brother tech support and they were of no help whatsoever. They said the ink transfer was not a warranty issue and would not offer an exchange or a refund. They said the printer was working as designed.

The price was good, the features decent, and the speed adequate, but I would not recommend this or any other Brother printer because of this ink transfer/heat problem. We also have the network version of this same printer in another office and it has the same paper curling problem. We don't use that one for printing checks so I can't say for sure if it does the ink transfer, but my guess is that it does.

I will never buy another Brother printer. I only wish HP still made a decent quality laser printer for a small office. The HP models I looked at before buying the Brother seemed very cheaply constructed compared to my old HP 6P.

10/06/2004

UPDATE-Found a Solution to the Ink Transfer Problem

If "Media Type" is changed to "Transparencies", the ink transfer does not happen. The paper curling seems to be a little better too. Why didn't tech support tell me this? Hope this helps any of you with a similar problem.