DCP-L5500DN
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Brother products have been changing the way people work, and play, for years. Our reliable, high-quality, feature-rich printers, scanners, labelers, and more are hard at work in homes everywhere. Whatever your need, Brother products are always "At your side."
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rareoopdvds on Amazon
7 years ago
05/26/2016, 13:51 PM
A potential workhorse of a printer with some things missing
I owned a Brother laser printer for about 10 years between 2005 and 2015 before I switched over to a smaller, more compact HP laser printer. I enjoyed the HP and does what it should and the wifi connection is simple and fast, which is the main reason I changed over. Then I was offered this printer. I really like Brother and the print quality, so I was excited to receive this.
This is a big printer, weighing around 40 pounds. It is an office printer, not really a desktop printer. While, again, the print quality is what I expect from it, and it prints quick and the touch screen menu is easy to navigate, I do have some negatives about this unit. One of the things I scratch my head about is that this is a relatively big machine and designed for office use, such as printing or copying lots of paper. However, the tray cannot hold a full ream. It holds maybe half that. I dont know why with all the space it appears to have, it cannot hold an entire ream of 500 sheets.
The second and more troublesome part is that this machine is not equipped with wifi. There are ways to set it up with a network, but how in this day and age would you not include a wifi? Is it that hard? My last Brother printer, as I mentioned, had a similar set up. Is this just an issue with Brother? I have not looked into other printers and can't imagine they are ignoring wifi connection on their printers in favor of networking. Needless to say, I read other reviews where they got it going, but its not a touch of a button like the HP.
So for ease of setup, having a USB line is not terrible, however, I like the convenience of the wifi to just print from wherever I might be in the house and just go to the printer instead of being near the printer.
I should add that, from what I can tell, the copier works nice. If you have highlighted stuff on the original, it will come out in the default setting. However, you can lighten the density and the highlight will disappear. The black is not a rich black, but again, you can change the richness level in the settings. All in all, it is a good copier, but I am not sure this is the one you want. The price is high, I am not sure what the intro toner yields, but it specifies what a new toner would output. The wifi is one major consideration and of course the quantity of paper I think would be something to consider, depending on your paper usage. I give it 4 stars mainly for the sharpness and quickness of the print. The lack of wifi is not enough to give it a mediocre review, however, definitely could have been 5-star.
Nanciejeanne on Amazon
7 years ago
05/22/2016, 11:02 AM
Great for the right demographic!
,My husband has a small business. I mean...really small. There is no IT team or even IT person. The staff is pretty technologically literate, so they usually can work together with things and get them working. For them, this is a wonderful printer/copier. They have a similar small copier/scanner, but it is color. Color is very nice, but the toner for it gets expensive, especially if things are fine in black and white. Plus, with that one, if any of the colors are empty, you can't print at all, even in black and white.
This is a great item for them at a price point for a small business. It would work well for a home, but is really a little more product than most (not all) homes would need. I suppose if you have a busy home business or hobby that requires lots of copies, it would work very well for that, too.
It is not wireless, which is odd. I mean, even consumer level laser printers for around 100 bucks have wireless capabilities. I have to say though, our last home printer was wireless, and we often have trouble printing from phones/tablets or computers recently added to the network, and other times, it needs to be re-added or just won't respond, so a wire is a more fool-proof solution. It seems like they could have had some sort of port/dongle thing that you could add-on wireless to for a few dollars more. They do have add-on paper trays, so they were thinking of upgrades, just not wireless ones. For our application, though, the ethernet was fine. As long as you can get it on your network, you are good...it was actually very easy.
It isn't tiny and not light, but for a product like this, it is expected. You aren't going to just stick this on the corner of someone's desk unless they have a really big desk! It also is kind of noisy, so having it right at someone's work station might bother them. It holds a half ream of paper, with optional add ons for bigger quantities. I kinda wish it held a whole ream as that is easy to fill, and really doesn't seem like it would have taken up that much more space.
Overall the copies it produces are very nice. You can get regular or high-yield toner replacements for this. Amazon even has this product on their list for "dash" replacement. That is where you sign up and the printer tells you account when you are running low on toner, and amazon will ship it to you automatically. That is very nice...one of the best applications of the Dash buttons I have seen.
I gave this item 5 stars because it is the right product for our particular needs. If you need a fax machine or a color printer or some feature that isn't on this printer, of course it won't be perfect for you. But for what it is designed for and for the features it does have, it does them very well.
Busy Executive on Amazon
7 years ago
05/21/2016, 11:51 AM
Great business printer/copier
I have one of the larger Brother color laser printers in my office and have been very impressed with it, so I was eager to try the DCPL5500DN - and I'm not disappointed. It's easy to setup on a network with nothing more than a simple Ethernet cable, works with everything from Windows and Mac computers to iPhones and iPads, and it produces high quality output.
Construction quality is good and this would definitely be at home in any small business. The network features make it easy to share among an office full of people, even without being attached to any sort of print server. There are many business-oriented features, for instance the ability to authenticate users against your LDAP or Active Directory server. This gives you a way to have secure printing while everyone uses their normal Windows login credentials - very convenient, and the sort of feature not typically found on consumer-grade products.
The copy function works well and includes a reasonable dual sided option. In addition to copying, you can also copy to a memory stick or directly to your computer if you have the correct configuration. You can also copy to online sites such as Dropbox, which I find to be very convenient...no scanning the document, sending it to a computer and then storing in Dropbox - it all happens right in the printer. You can even configure it for operation with Google Cloud Print, meaning that you can print documents from anywhere through Google's service.
The print speed is good, especially with larger documents. It takes a moment to get warmed up, so those one pagers tend to seem slow, but once it's going, it runs at high speed. Cost of supplies is about average for this type of printer, but way less than a color or inkjet would be. The paper supply out of the box holds 250 sheets and to me, this is a little small for an office printer. The good news is that there are expansion paper trays available that get you up to about 1300 pages capacity.
About the only complaint is that it tends to be rather loud when printing, so you'll want to position it somewhere that doesn't put it too close to people.
Definitely worth a look if you're shopping for a quality business printer at an amazingly low price.
Jill Hart on Amazon
7 years ago
05/17/2016, 14:42 PM
This printer is awesome! It was SUPER easy to set up - ...
This printer is awesome! It was SUPER easy to set up - I had it out of the box, set up, and printing within about 10 minutes, if that. I love that it scans and copies as well as prints and it holds a ton of paper, so you don't need to add more often. It's a solid unit, definitely made for business - quite a bit bigger than Brother's home office line. I appreciate the color screen and its ease of use as well. Very happy with this printer, as I have been with the other Brother printers we'd have in the past. They make a GREAT product!
J. Tant on Amazon
7 years ago
05/06/2016, 09:53 AM
A decent *printer*, some handicaps on the rest of it
First, it's important to note something - this is a business printer, intended for business use. You can tell by the promo pictures because everyone using the printer is wearing business attire. And that's the key thing to keep in mind, because while setup is relatively simple the underlying assumption behind the documentation and such is that you have one of your IT people setting this up for you. And even granting that this printer is aimed at a business audience and won't have the same feature set as a consumer-oriented printer does, I have to point out that it's fairly basic even for a business printer.
So to spare you the need to comb through the ad copy, try to find a PDF of the manual online, and pore through the description, let me briefly say what this printer will NOT do. It is NOT a color printer OR scanner. It will NOT support faxing, either via the printer itself or through a PC application. It does NOT have WiFi. And most troubling of all (for me): it will NOT support two sided scanning/copying through the automatic document feeder..
It's not a *bad* printer - print quality is actually quite nice and it does print very fast. It does support two sided printing as well, and it handles such jobs gracefully. I like that it has multiple options for paper sizes/types, and using the secondary tray for envelopes worked acceptably well. However, if you're looking to do more than just very basic copying, well, this isn't your guy. Cooling my ardor somewhat, alas, is the construction. The printer itself looks like business, but in actual use there are some parts that feel a little fragile. Lifting the lid to the scanner window made me fear more than once that the lid was just going to come right off. There are also various fold-out paper guides and things that, well, just feel a little on the tinny side.
There are some added features though. While it doesn't have WiFi, it does have an Ethernet port and adding it to the network was really quite simple. Assuming you grant your printer Internet access, it will offer built-in cloud drive support for major providers. For example, I use Microsoft's One Drive, and there's a built in app in the printer where I can access that drive, select a document, and print it without going anywhere near a computer. This is handy for, say, setting up a shared resource among different departments/locations, and instead of emailing files around they can simply be printed from that resource.
It also handles mobile devices gracefully. It's AirPrint enabled, so iOS users on the same network can print directly to the printer. There is also a scan-to app where one can scan a document on the printer from/to a mobile device running the required Brother app. Again, this helps save effort, meaning you don't need to scan the document to a computer and email it to yourself.
So some of the value-add features help mitigate the biggest shortcoming of this device: the inability to do two-sided copying via the automatic document feeder. Oh, you can PRINT two-sided, but if you want to do two-sided COPYING you must manually scan the front and back of each page. There is a business term for this kind of requirement: PITA (Pain In The ....). For documents with two or three pages is bad enough, any more and you'll be saying to yourself "Oh, Brother." This functionality is available in the next model up from this printer, but honestly...even my old(er) AIO printer can perform two sided scanning from the ADF.
Another shortcoming is the lack of WiFi. Frankly, at this price point I believe WiFi should be an expected and standard feature. True, this is a business-oriented printer with a different pricing strategy, but if the focus of the printer is to enable the productivity of a mobile workforce (as the added functionality of AirPrint and cloud printing necessarily implies), then not having WiFi capability becomes simply baffling.
So as a home printer this is extremely basic and many of the added features will simply be left unused (secure printing, cloud printing, etc). As a business printer it has at least one serious handicap, which is the single-sided ADF. For extremely basic use though, I can't fault this printer too much. It prints and scans quickly and quietly, quality is good, and it handles a variety of printing media like letter, legal, envelopes, etc. So on balance I like it as a printer for routine jobs, I LOVE it for the cloud printing, but as a copier I'm really not very impressed. Since my use case prints documents more than copies them, I'm getting Four Star Fuzzies with it.