Design

The Brother HL-5270DN uses a squat design that looks a lot like a home printer until you stack it onto the paper trays, at which point it looks like your standard office cube. It has rounded corners, basic styling cues, and the common business white with dark grey colour scheme. What stands out most about the HL-5270DN is its high-quality 3-colour LCD panel. It looks great and is very readable, which is important because you navigate the entire menu system via the LCD and some arrow buttons. One issue with the compact design is access to the Brother HL-5270DN toner cartridge. This model also supports toner drums, and these are far easier to work with since they slide in.

Advantages

The biggest advantage to the Brother HL-5270DN is its compact and lightweight nature. Many small offices struggle with space, and it's not easy to find compact printers that actually deliver professional quality and speed. This one does. It doesn't come cheap, but we do sell high-yield Brother HL-5270DN toner cartridges and drums that help to offset upfront cost. The HL-5270DN is also a fully functional print server, and if you don't like the on-board control panel, you can access the entire system via the network management tool. Finally, the HL-5270DN is exceptionally quiet, especially in standby mode where you'll barely realize it's on.

Disadvantages

The biggest drawback is that in terms of performance and quality, the Brother HL-5270DN simply doesn't blow you away at this price point. So if space and size aren't vital priorities, then many other printers in this price range offer far more function, such as copy, scan and fax. Alternatively, you could step down in price and get similar performance and quality in only a slightly larger and heavier package. Lastly, you have to remove the cartridge or drum in order to move this printer, so while it's highly compact it is not highly portable.