Customer Reviews

Brother HL-5370DWT Laser Printer with Wireless Networking, Duplex and Dual Paper Trays

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've been using HP stuff since the first scientific calculator, the HP-32, that came out in 1973. It used to be rock solid, designed by engineers to be used by engineers. Sadly, it's now cheap junk. The scanners in HP's all-in-one's seemed designed to fail in the thirteenth month after purchase.

Some of HP's recent printers do not even implement their own Printer Control Language properly (HP PCL).

This Brother printer works. It implements PCL5 correctly, as well as its emulation of PostScript. I've networked computers for fifteen years, so setup went very easily. The hardest part was hauling the CD-ROM to the various computers on the network, since Windows did not have the driver built in. A no-brainer.

The supplies work out to 1.4 cents a page (toner and drum). Hard to beat that.

I'm an IT Administrator.
Between this printer (HL-5370) and its VERY similar predecessor (HL-5250), our company has about 25 printers. We've had very few mechanical problems in the last few years. If you download the printer driver from their web site [...] then you can get a very small driver that installs NOTHING else, just the basic driver - No bloatware.


For normal/casual users, the printer and driver are very easy to setup.


However, TechnoGeeks like me, can also mange the printers through a web/HTML interface and BROTHER's BRAdmin software with which you can set the printers to send you email alerts for various events like "Drum Near end of LIfe" or "Low Toner"


These printers official life span span is 100,000 pages. After that, the fuser has to be replaced at a cost of 60%-80% of the price of a new printer. You can however continue using the printer beyond the 100,000 page mark. The printer in my office, has already passed the 100,000 mark and is working fine.

BROTHER's Tech. Support is abysmal, so it's a good thing these printers are more reliable than most.

This printer is a bargain for the price. Print speed is OK, a little slow to warm up. Print quality is excellent. The duplex feature and ability to hold a full reem of paper is nice. Set up for a network printer was difficult. Tried the wireless set up and it was impossible. To be fair, it may be that our wireless SSID is not broadcast as a security measure. Gave up trying to network the printer through a wireless connection and went to a wired connection. It took some doing but I finally got it to show up on the network. Network connection instructions were poor at best. This is a noisy printer.

I purchased this printer on recommendation from my accountant friend who runs several companies. He's told me about the thrashing his people give this unit and now I can agree as well!! My wife is a teacher - where the copiers are ALWAYS BROKEN. In order to get her printed materials to her high school class - she needed dependable technology - and because WE pay for these printing costs (What - you didn't know that teachers have to do that these days - cheap school districts!!!) we needed a technology that was fast and resonably priced - at about 1.5 cents a print - you can't get even buy poor smuges copies for that price - these printouts are awesome. NOW - my only re-thought would have been to get the same unit with the optional scanner functions. Other than that price - and this unit is the GOLD STANDARD for what printing is suppose to be all about.

Couldn't be any happier -

It was time for a modern printer. I wanted to have duplex (both side) printing, a B/W laser, and hardware that would work on my LAN. As you know, there are many printers in the market that meet those specs.

I did go shopping and was impressed with the "heft" of the Brother I have had if for about one month, and went through about 1,00 sheets of paper. All looks good. The duplexing works just great. Time will tell. However the Brother hardware just feels and looks more solid than other brands, HP, for example.

I did add a memory (512 MB) card, because lots of my printing has graphics. There is a small plastic door on the left side. It took about 10 seconds to install the memory. Snap out the cover, seat the memory and push it backward, put the cover back. The printer immediately recognized the memory. Could not be easier.

I got a good price, free shipping.

Noise: This is not a "silent" printer, but the noise is not excessive. You can hear paper moving, and some parts turning. It just sounds like a laser printer, certainly not a loud laser printer. My printer is close to my desk. I have no trouble talking on the phone while the printer is chugging.


Toner: It is clear that Brother is counting on selling toner to make up for the, well, amazing selling price. (They certainly are not making much on selling the printer.) However, there are alternatives. I just ordered a "high capacity" cartridge for $28. If that does 10 reams of paper, 5000 sheets, the toner cost one half of one cent/page. I am getting paper for about that as well. So this printer costs about one cent/page, paper plus toner. Now if you are duplexing, you pay twice as much for the toner (two-sided printing) but half as much for the paper. Same number. There is no way that other printers can compete.

Print Quality: The demo page is interesting. It shows printing of some very thin lines. I first thought it was not really printing that well. However, when you look at the thickness of the lines and realize they are clear and distinct, this demo is showing how well it works, not the other conclusion. Of course it is all either black or white. Very high quality printing. If you are running a stable of laser printers, you can save a bunch of cash with this hardware.

Set up: The packing was high tech. Getting it from the box to the shelf took about 5 minutes or so. I am using a Mac (Snow Leopard), and did not mess with the CD supplied by Brother. I went to their website, a very well done website, and downloaded the driver. Done. I was printing in about 10 minutes after I opened the box. Getting the duplex working properly took some time. Mainly you need to tell the printer how you want the second side to look. (If you have a stapled copy, it might make sense to have the back "upside down", so that when you flip the first page up, the flip side is readable.) In any event, the software was very Mac friendly, and fully compatible with the latest Mac OS. I also have an old G-4 Mac set up for the grandkids and visitors. I did the same thing on that machine: went to Brother.com, downloaded the software, and that older computer prints like a champ.

Internet vs wireless: As you can understand when you think about the Printing process, you need to tell the printer is you want to use Cat-5 or wireless. You can pick one or the other. You cannot pick "both". Because I am wired for CAT-5, I went for the network connection. I have not tried the wireless link. However, that is always an option.

We based this purchase on the wonderful track record with our last Brother laser printer. We expected it to be a little noisy (it is much quieter than the last model). We use this printer daily for direct mail, and quality is very important to us. Unfortunately, the printer bends and adds creases to our letterhead envelopes so that they look like they've come out of a bad ironing press. It doesn't matter which tray we use for the envelopes--always the same result. These envelopes are just nice #10 paper stock, and we have never had a problem with them in any of our printers before. We can't use this printer for the purpose for which it was purchased.

Instead of telling you how we like this, let me put into a specific comparative context as we are from.

We have always used multifunction laser printers in the past. Each time when we needed to get a new printer, we debated over whether to stay with a multifunction or go with a dedicated printer plus a scanner. But every time we decided to go with the multifunction, until this time. We finally took a different route with this printer and Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500. A $675 combo, but we couldn't be happier with the choice. Here are some of the highlights.

(1) With the scanner and the printer being two separate units, you no longer worry about the issue of one bad part bringing down the entire machine. This actually happened every time in our case. The auto feeder of the multifunction would start to malfunctioning, and we were forced to abandon an otherwise fine printer.

(2) The availability of a second tray in addition to the primary tray and multipurpose tray is a great plus for any office. The typical scenario, when you print a report, you may sometimes want the first page to be using the official letterhead paper, and the rest on regular paper. The three tray combination is perfect for this. The first page comes from one tray, the body comes from the second tray, while the envelope is printed using the multipurpose tray, all semi-automatic without any hassle. In addition, if you handling multiple paper format such as US paper size and international A4 size, you can't exaggerate how helpful a multiple tray combination is. We never carefully thought about this detail (a rather large detail that is), but once we realize this, we can't believe that we lived with a printer that didn't have this capability (to be fair, I think some multifunctionals may have this ability).

(3) Much more compact and lighter than the multifunction. And looks much better as well, especially without the auto feeder on top of the printer.

(4) Not having a totally useless fax is a plus for us. We nearly never use fax anymore, and when we do, we use an Internet fax service. For this reason, the fax part of the multifunction has always been a distraction, to say the least. Because the Fax panel tends to occupy the most prominent and biggest portion of the user interface, it is not a small issue. And if you are a minimalist like some of us, merely realizing that you got a big useless chunk in your machine feels unhealthy.

(5) Perhaps the biggest advantage in our case is that we now have the beautiful Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500, which itself is a phenomenal office tool, putting any multifunctional to shame in the scanning department.

(6) The separate scanner plus the printer together actually works very well as a copier. This was one of the biggest concerns some had with going with separates, but it turned out not be a problem at all. The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 has a "Scan to Print" function that scans directly to the printer. It feels seamless, with an extra benefit of having a digital backup. However, because the separate document scanner does not have a flat bed, you cannot scan from book pages. I don't think there is even a workaround for this. For us it is not a problem because we only scan from loose paper documents. But it could be a problem for you.

Concerning the several complaints others raised about this printer, our experience is as follows:

(1) It isn't the quietest printer, but this is a lot quieter than the Brother multifunctional we had previously. One of things that this printer does much more reasonably than the multifunctional we had is that it turns to a quite sleep mode fairly shortly after you are done printing. The brother multifunction we had world stay in a very noisy mode for at least 15 min. Compared to that one, this printer is decidedly quiet.

(2) Envelopes do get pressed hard, but we didn't experience any creases. Please note that there is a back door which you can open so that the envelopes would come from there straight without being curved and turned back to the front. But even when we used the front outlet, the envelopes are OK (but not perfect because they do have an appearance of being pressed very hard).

(3) The printing of the first page isn't instant, but then again I have not seen a printer that starts up instantly. This one is fairly quick to warm up. It takes about 10 seconds to wake up and warm up and another 10 seconds to print the first page, and after that about 2-3 seconds per page. I think this is quite decent.

(4) We didn't try wireless network, but the wired network was absolutely easy. The network cable connects the printer to the router instead of a USB cable, and printer is on the network already without requiring any effort. You just need to install the driver on each PC you use to access the printer. I'll say it feels As simple as, if not even easier, than a USB set up.

(5) Adding the bottom tray caused a bit pause in our case as we thought it would be just as simple as placing the printer on top of the bottom tray, but it turned out that after you have assembled the two pieces physically (quite simple to do), you need to "add" the bottom tray in the software as well. A one-time exercise and quite simple once you realize it, but not a very intuitive one at all.

We bought it Black Friday, it was delivered the next Friday. We added it to our network of 6 computers of various types from laptops to desktops to servers, Win XP 32 bit and Win 7 64 bit.

The installation of drivers was easy. You can have Windows 7 autodetect the printer, it installs a default driver that works but is missing options such as the ability to set the paper size for each paper tray. So, although it's easier to use the Windows drivers, it's worth loading the drivers from CD that comes with the printer. Those let you do things like use legal paper in the first tray (our most common paper type) and normal letter size in the secondary tray.

Printing is fast, and noisy compared to our Brother DCP7040. We now use the 7040 for scanning and photocopies, and the 5370 for our printing of legal contracts because those need mixed size paper. That works fine, but it's noticeably slower whenever it changes paper types.

We hooked it up to our wired network, and that connection has been working for the last 2 or 3 days. So far we have done about 2,000 pages of printing on it without a hitch. We read comments at another site regarding this printer stating there were issues with the wired LAN connection dropping a lot. So far, we have had no issue at all.

What we find odd is that the third paper tray is about $200, and buying this printer with 2 paper trays was $250 with shipping. If we need that other paper tray, I think we will pay the extra $50 for a fourth tray, and get a free printer. :)

EDIT: One more thing that might be useful to people here. We bought one of the no-name brand TN-650 toner cartridges, and wanted to track the number of copies it makes. To print out the settings (including pages printed), press the Go button on the printer three times within two seconds. That way you can track how many pages each cartridge gives you. It even shows the page count when you changed the cartridge so there is no guessing.

I had to ask customer support at Brother for this info, the said it was in the printer driver and manual. It isn't on the print driver page under Windows 7, but it is in the manual but you have to know where to get it since it isn't linked to (you have to find it under Print Settings Page in the index, which isn't linked to in by the main Control Panel Buttons page under which it exists.

Customer service was fast though, even on December 24!

Great Printer. My husband and I bought it for school projects. It's easy to set up and fast. I haven't had any problems with it.

This is the second Brother printer I am returning within the last two months, because it simply cannot handle duplex printing without constant paper jams. This surprised me because my old Brother printer was so good at it. Curious, I took out the new printers' duplex trays, and compared them to the old printer's tray. The rollers that pull the paper back into the printer for the second pass through the printer have been shifted in both of the new models. Perhaps this is why the paper goes awry on the way back into the printer, and then jams. I have tried various paper stocks and now two different models of Brother (HL-5370 as well as a new MFC printer), but the results of my attempts to use the duplex function -- I am very sad to report -- are the same. If you want duplex printing, I recommend avoiding Brother printers until they fix what seems to be a major flaw in their current duplex tray.