Brother HL-5470DW review

Most of the printers we review are designed for reasonably light use in the home or a study, but Brother’s HL-5470DW wireless network mono laser is aimed at small businesses or a small workgroup in a larger business. As such it’s faster than an entry-level mono laser printer, with a claimed print speed of 38 pages per minute. It’s also rugged; Brother claims it’ll print up to 50,000 pages in a month if the need arises, although the recommended duty is a more pedestrian 3,500.

Other features help make the HL-5470DW a genuine option for business use. There’s a backlit LCD display that’s useful when setting the printer up, while network management features include a web admin interface, a network management tool and a program to help automate driver installations – perfect for rolling it out to a large group of users.

Network admins will like the web management interface

Like other Brother laser printers, consumables for the HL-5470DW comprise a separate toner and drum. The supplied drum is good for a full 30,000 pages, but the starter toner will cover only 3,000 or so. Fortunately there’s a 12,000-page high-capacity replacement that should make replacements infrequent. It also helps to keep print costs down to just under 1.2p per page, which is competitive, if not class-leading.

This printer is small enough to be unpacked by one person. Setting it up is simple, but we found it a little tedious having to wait for the single-line display to scroll through multiple options. Once joined to our wireless network it produced a single network status sheet that would have been more useful had it included an IP address; while Brother’s easy installer didn’t need the IP address when setting up the printer, it would help troubleshoot when problems arise.

In use the HL-5470DW is comfortably as fast as Brother says it is. While it recorded just under 30ppm on our text test, which includes the time taken to prepare the print job, once it started printing it actually reached 39.5ppm. It was a similar story with our mixed graphics test, the complexity of which caused only one tiny mid-job hesitation. In contrast, we were slightly disappointed by the printer’s leisurely 14-second time to first page, although this did remain constant whether it was warm from a previous job or stone cold after a couple of hours’ sleep. It was also slow to print photos at the maximum 1,200 dots-per-inch resolution, but at the default 600dpi they were produced much more quickly.

Brother’s print driver is clear and easy to use

We’ve no complaints about this printer’s excellent black text quality, but it’s not the best mono laser for business graphics or photos. Even at its top resolution, graphics exhibited some fine banding and comparatively crude half-toning in which there were visible patterns. The printer’s paper-handling is good, however: both paper trays clearly indicate the correct alignment, and envelopes were printed perfectly. Overall this is a good printer, but the Samsung ML-3710ND is at least its equal. Samsung’s printer is also cheaper to buy and run, so it remains our choice in this class.