Labs

The Brother HL-5150D is a typically compact USB laser printer, and is visually identical to the platinum-plastic HL-5130 model. However, a few things make this different from its sibling. First, the engine is rated at 20 pages per minute, a little faster than its brother. It's a PostScript printer, designed, in theory, to turn out pages using the same kind of imaging engine as bigger, more expensive laser printers and high-end RIPs. Finally, it includes duplex printing - that is, the ability to print on both sides of the page.

This last feature is likely to be of particular interest to businesses, as it can save a significant amount of paper and make documents look that much more professional. Duplex printing is switched on with the Two Sided Printing option in the Layout panel of the standard Print dialog. With this

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clicked, a page will come out part of the way before being sucked back in again for printing on the second side. All this model lacks for full approval in workgroup environments is built-in networking support, although this feature is available in the slightly more expensive HL-5150DN.

Text and line art quality proved to be extremely good - sharp and clean, with no sign of smudging or haziness even on cheap photocopier paper. Sadly, the PostScript RIP was rather disappointing. It took an extremely long time to print our layout test, a document containing a vector EPS and a couple of Tiffs. It even failed completely when set to higher output resolutions, almost certainly due to its standard 16MB of RAM being insufficient for the task. On a more positive note, its paper handling was fine, even in our envelope-printing tests. In these, it managed clean edge-to-edge prints on standard self-adhesive DL envelopes without any smudging.

All in all, this printer handled itself fairly well for general work. Its PostScript processing engine wasn't particularly fast at handling more complex documents, but that's not particularly surprising given its low cost. Its problems with more complex jobs would be helped somewhat with more RAM, but that would push its total cost higher. We'd consider the Brother HL-5150D for business-style office work but not for graphics use, despite the PostScript-driven print engine.