Labs

The Brother HL-5240 is the newest model in our group. It felt the most insubstantial of the six printers we tested, although the external case isn't necessarily a reflection on the internal build quality. There's no manual-feed slot, so you have to use the main paper tray for custom sheets and envelopes, adjusting the media guides as necessary.

Visually, it's certainly no award-winner, but its sober case design is at least smart and its boxy shape is practical in a regular office environment; you just have to be careful not to block up the cooling vents.

Although there's a network card available for the HL-5240 (for roughly £150), the model we tested was one of the USB-only devices in our group. Rather than trading on any special connectivity features, the HL-5240 uses its high speed as one of its selling points.

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With an engine speed of 28 pages per minute, this was the fastest-rated printer in the group. Of course, there's a lot more to what makes a printer feel fast or slow, but a speedy engine can make a significant difference - and it did here. Our 10-page test was finished in just over half a minute, bearing out the general engine speed claims. Moreover, the handling of graphics-rich pages was also very efficient.

The actual quality of the graphics-rich pages wasn't quite so impressive. The blacks were very slightly pale at its default setting, leading to a slightly weak impression. The halftone dot size was also slightly coarser than some of the competition's, simply because it had defaulted to 600dpi rather than its maximum of 1200dpi. The options in the Print dialog enable you to select 1200dpi, and results with this were better: the halftone was finer and the blacks were rendered slightly more solidly. However, we did get alerts that the resolution of the output was 'adapted' because there wasn't enough RAM in the printer to render the page image at that size. This is an issue because the Brother HL-5240 is equipped with a PostScript interpreter, and these can need substantial amounts of RAM when dealing with more complex pages and producing high-resolution output. The Brother HL-5240's approach is far better than getting a PostScript 'stack overflow' error, but you should consider expanding its RAM.