Brother - HL-5340d Black-and-White Laser Printer

I've had this printer for a few months now. Been impressed with other Brother products but this one falls short. I wanted a simple, compact laser printer that could do duplex (two-sided) printing. The 5340D provides fine print quality reasonably fast and quiet, but take the warnings from the other reviewers seriously when they say it warps paper and crinkles envelopes - I thought they were just being fussy. Nope. This machine really does have those problems - big time. The paper curling is significant. And no, it's not the paper (I've tried different brands and weights). This issue can be a real headache if you decide to manual feed a printed page (for example when you want two-sided printing but from two different documents or web sites). The printed page is so warped that its difficult to insert into the manual feeder and it sometimes causes a jam. I've had several lasers but I have never seen a printer cause such extreme curling. And the the way it mangles envelopes is simply unacceptable. They come out curled (of course) with major wrinkles. The machine must put off too much heat because the envelopes are somewhat sealed and need to be opened quickly before the glue dries them permanently shut. I know there is a back exit that may avoid this problem, but like most owners, my printer is placed close to a wall so its really not convenient or even feasible to open a back door periodically. Simply put, Brother really shouldn't claim this printer can handle envelopes. So now ya know. My advice - if you want a duplex printer that can handle envelopes too, wait for Brother to fix these flaws with their next version.

I bought this printer a couple of months ago on sale from another retailer for 179 bucks. Now Best buy has it for even less. I have not had one problem with this printer. It is very fast. I bought it because the gold tanks (ink tanks) on my inkjet are very expensive. 80 bucks for ink for about 300 pages. So now I use this for documents, web pages and that type of thing that doesn't require a nice color picture. I use the inkjet to do photographs. Love the duplex feature, prints one side, spits it almost all the way out, draws it back in and does the back side. For the price I doubt if you can get an equivelant printer with the same features and performance.

Prints pretty quickly and quality is great. I have been having an issue with pages sticking together when printing in manual duplex, but other than that I am very happy with this printer. Love Brother products.

Gets the job done fast - review instructions for settings for thin paper printing - to reduce paper curl. Also has 'toner saver' mode and other options. Prints reg paper and special sizes using the multi purpose tray (hidden) - I used this printer at work for a couple of years and didn't know half the features until I read the instructions - and now I purchased one for myself and I'm not disappointed.

The best thing about this printer is that it prints two-sided. But, like its predecessors, it still wrinkles envelopes even with the back door open and the blue levers down. The worst thing about this unit, though, is that it takes forever to print the first page (20-30 seconds). I don't do all that much printing, but I have done some calculation and determined that, over the course of a year, I will waste more than one full business day waiting for the printer to print.

I don't know if it my paper, or what, but the printer has trouble moving it. Although, if I send paper through the manual tray it works fine, and seems to trigger it to behave better for awhile.