Hrafnkell Haraldsson on Amazon 7 years ago
05/17/2016, 01:12 AM
Best Black & White Printer I have used!
First I just have to say that Laser printers are so much nicer than ink jet printers in quality and speed.
This Brother DCP-L5600DN laser printer is no exception. It is a BEAST: It stands 18" tell, and it is 14" wide and 15" deep at the base. It is quick, efficient and, moreover (with one proviso noted below) easy to setup.
It comes with a CD Rom with Utilities and Drivers or you can download them if your computer doesn't have a disk drive. There is a fairly useful User's Guide that also comes, printed out, with the printer, which I highly recommend users read before trying to figure out how to do any of the more complicated functions of the printer like faxing or scanning.
One proviso: Just installing the software isn't as intuitive as I thought. I had to hunt around for the right piece of software to do the scanning, but the User's Guide actually explains that it is the ControlCenter4 software that runs all those features. Once that was figured out, everything else was very intuitive and straight forward.
I love the fact that the document feeder holds such a large capacity and that the glass is legal size and not just letter size, so you can scan and print larger documents if you need to (just use the extended paper tray to feed in the legal size paper instead of the drawer.)
I do wish it had wifi capability - it has to be hooked up to an Ethernet cable - but that literally is the only thing that is keeping me from giving it 5 stars. Otherwise it works really great. It's even sleek and lovely to look at. It isn't as large as the box it comes in makes it seem, which is good because it fits on our existing printer stand without any trouble. It's not overly heavy either, even though once again the box it comes in is mighty hefty.
I would completely recommend this black and white laser printer to friends who have in-home offices, small offices or workgroups that need printers that are fast and low maintenance. The toner cartridges aren't even that more expensive than buying a full set of black and color cartridges for an ink jet and the laser toner cartridges last longer (around 3,000 pages).
Update: After moving and having the printer in storage for 7 weeks, the re-setup was quick, simple and easy. It requires a network cable but I plugged it into a WiFi Range Extender so it hooked up to my wireless network. It took only moments for the computers to recognize the printer and the printer to recognize the network. Everything prints as expected even from stand-by mode. This printer is fast and efficient. Just keep in mind it is only Black & White.