Brother Monochrome Laser Printer, HL-L5100DN, Duplex Two-Sided Printing, Ethernet Network Interface, Mobile Printing, Amazon Dash Replenishment Ready

Brother used to be a crappy brand but they cleaned up their act. They have received Most Reliable rating in PC Magazine for several years in a row. All I had to do was plug it in and Windows 10 loaded the drivers in seconds and I was off and printing. It runs very quiet compared to the HP I retired. Is fast and has all the needed features of a small office and at a price that is modest. Highly recommended!

This is the 7th Brother printer that we have in our office. Previously I have used HP, Lexmark, Dell, Ricoh and Canon printers. In my, in my experience Brother are the most reliable and trouble free printers. After about 4 - 5 years, they start giving you error messages like replace parts, replace drum etc. That is usually the time to replace the printer. At 42 ppm, this is a fast and 250 page capacity printer. Print quality is not the best but decent and acceptable. Cost of printing per page is low. Brother toners are generally lot more expensive and on Amazon, you can find cheaper toners and ink from other aftermarket manufacturers. The high capacity 8000 pages Brother TN850 toner for this printer is currently priced $108 at Amazon, which translates to 1.35 cents per page and if you buy after market toner, it will be even less expensive. The printer is easy to set up. Wired network connection is trouble free. I have not used this printer with wireless setup but based on my past experience, wireless connections are not as stable and off and on you may have to re-establish WiFi connection again or reset the network connection. You can also print from your mobile device. An optional second tray can be attached. Changing settings from small monochrome screen is not easy but lot of the settings can be changed from web page using the printers IP address. In my experience, Brothers technical support is not that good, their tech support reps are not knowledgeable and well trained about products. This is a fast and reasonably priced printer for a small office.

Im using this as a desktop printer in a Mac/PC/Linux corporate environment with other all-in-one printers/copiers and color laser printers on my network. Print speed is fast, but as with just about all laser printers with higher page-per-minute printing capability, you trade a bit of print quality for speed. The print quality is fine and comparable to most faster monochrome laser printers, but doesnt match the near typeset quality of a Canon Imageclass D1650 down the hall. However, the cost per page of this printer is about half of the Canon, so for most business documents, this Brother printer is a good balance of toner cost, print quality, and speed. I have had several other Brother laser printers and they all were good quality and lasted for quite a few years. But if youre looking for the best print quality, check out Canon printers. I have a Lexmark monochrome all-in-one, two HP color laser printers, an HP monochrome all-in-one, and a couple of small Brother desktop printers, and all work well, but the Brother printers are tried and true workhorses for 95% of our printing. Lexmarks interface is overly complicated, the HP all-in-one print queue gets stuck sometimes, and the printing cost of the HP color lasers is high enough to avoid printing all but color documents with them. The up front cost of the Brother HL-L5100DN is low and the long-term cost is also on the lower end for monochrome laser printers.

This is my fourth Brother laser printer. All these printers do their job well, rarely calling attention to themselves. It doesnt get much better than that. Paper jams are very rare and the duplex mechanism works well. Envelopes feed through well. Text is uniformly sharp and clear (I always use the highest quality setting). I dont have much experience with the fancy features of the software such as Air Print. But the basic software works flawlessly. I am suspicious of the word Business in the name of this product. The implication is that the printer is built tough to survive use by indifferent or careless people. Well, thats my interpretation anyway. This printer is certainly of a high quality, but the plastic parts are thin and bendy. I expect my Brother printer to last forever. In a business environment, I am not so sure.

but this is the second one I bought, I have two now. It is a good printer hands down. Havent tried the wifi, assuming it has it, but I didnt buy it for that, I have two to ethernet, works perfect.

I purchased the HL-L5100DN laser printer in 2020 with high expectations since my 2 previous laser printers had each performed for 10+ years (earlier HP, and a Brother HL-5250DN). 5 Stars initially with great expectations 4 Stars when I realized it shipped with a starter toner cartridge, and I had to purchase a replacement which added $100+ to the expected cost. 3 Stars when I started experiencing problems printing envelopes and small page sizes. The text would rub off the envelope. The problem occurred with the Windows 7 driver and the Ubuntu (Linux) driver. 2 Stars when I had to replace the drum because of repeating periodic missing print areas on the page. Cleaning the drum did not resolve the issue. 1 Star when recently the paper creased when printing duplex which I do often. I tried all of the troubleshooting suggestions in the manual and online for the 3 problem. I had a chat session with Brother support and tried to find a solution to the 2 problems: envelop printing and duplex paper creasing. No new insight or solution. Printer is out of warranty. Take to a authorized service center. Likely repair cost maybe $155 fuser and $55 duplexer.

Hopefully this Brother laser printer will be as good as the last one I owned that lasted over 10 years and something like 200k+ pages. Good print quality and speed for the price.

The unit is fairly noisy as it prints in duplex, whipping the paper in and out of the output slot. But it prints fast, and very well. I often print 400-page novel manuscripts at one shot, taking only several minutes to do the job.

Nice printer. Using v4Ink for toner saves a lot of money and works well. It has gotten to the point were the most expedient thing to do when you have a printer issue is simply replace it which is how I got this one. So far it is doing well in a tough environment.

Like their other printers (and all-in-ones), Brother has been relatively Linux friendly for some time. Brother provides driver support for rpm and deb based distributions. They even provide a script to help you install things. Naturally, the script failed in my case. I went ahead and installed the deb files, anyway, and my printer was installed. I used the ubiquitous system-config-printer program to set up the printer. It located the printer and offered various options for connecting. I purchased this printer to replace another failed Brother printer I had purchased a couple of years ago (a 5450DN). This one, the 5100DN, let me set the IP address to a fixed address from the printer console itself. I did not have to find the printer, and then log in via the printers Web server to set the IP address. Further, when downloading the driver, I received a pop-up telling me that there was an important firmware update for the printer. Once the printer was set up, I logged into the new printers Web server and found another new feature, the firmware update button. I clicked it. A couple of minutes later I could log in again and I had the updated firmware. So, this printer is user friendlier than the last one. The old printer didnt have the best paper handling. To be blunt, it would jam more often than I would like. This one hasnt jammed, yet. Another aspect I like: The 5100 prints better. The 5450 printed too dark at 600 and 1200 dpi. This one is somewhat dark at 1200, but 600 is fine. No insane amounts of Gamma correction applied to each image if you want to print. If you run Linux, and live within easy wire distance to your router, this is a very good printer. 12 December 2016 update: The thing still hasnt jammed. Im raising this to five stars.