Oh Brother! Brother HL-5370DW printer worth keeping?

October 20, 2018 8:26 AM

We have a Brother HL-5370DW printer at work that has needed a new drum for ages. Currently it sits under someone's desk and isn't used. Should we plunk out the money to do this and start using it?

Extenuating circumstances: we have an HP all in one printer-scanner-copier but it doesn't print envelopes well (they end up partially sealed closed and are poorly printer) and it has nicely expensive toner cartridges.

Does it make sense to rehab the old Brother laser printer to use for day to day things and printing envelopes? Or is there a relatively cheap b&w laser printer option that we should invest in instead?

posted by sciencegeek to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

You can get a new toner/drum cartridge set on eBay for like $20-30, and that's a nice printer otherwise. I'd definitely go with that option. A decent new printer is going to be $100+.
posted by Slinga at 9:23 AM on October 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yes, get the toner/drum package. The Brother is reliable and cheap to operate, especially compared to any H-P inkjet.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 9:57 AM on October 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I find Brother laserprinters to be quite worthwhile to try to keep working, especially one like that 5370 (the 'for office use' range). And I don't particularly like working on printers.

And I don't expect a $100 B/W laser to be as robust as that one either.
posted by Stoneshop at 9:57 AM on October 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

My Brother office printers are always asking for a new drum, but unless your printer was making poor quality prints, or it had stopped working until it got a new drum, you may be good to go. I have had a spare, new drum ready for literal years, but the printer is still working just fine, so I haven't put the new drum in yet. These are workhorse printers.
posted by quince at 10:42 AM on October 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'd rehab it. They're ultra-reliable, in my experience.
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 10:58 AM on October 20, 2018

Don't do it with a Brother drum unit. I had this exact printer at office. Ran it for a year with the drum warning and it was fine. Finally stopped working. We spent $140 on a genuine brother drum. The printer had an electrical malfunction a month later.

If you want to try a $30 drum go for it - but I would have been better off putting the $140 towards a new printer for about $200.
posted by sol at 11:28 AM on October 20, 2018

Does the printer still print? If so, use the drum reset cheatcode:

1. Make sure that the machine is turned on.
2. Open the front cover.
3. Press and hold down Go for about 4 seconds until all the LEDs light up. Once all four LEDs are lit, release Go.
4. Close the front cover.
5. Make sure that the Drum LED is now off.

posted by gregr at 1:26 PM on October 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

Yes, if you can get an after-market drum kit and it still makes clean prints. We've had this printer for years, and it's outlasted everything else, despite its lightness. Its only downsides are lack of wifi faster that B, fiddliness in getting it to rejoin a wireless network, and no direct-from-phone printing. These are more than offset by cheap per-page costs, good output quality, and supporting both PCL and PostScript. Most new printers (even HP) are in proprietary driver hell, with different models requiring their own weird drivers because they've all gone to the cheapest control electronics.

If you're feeling super-nerdy about this refurb, for under $5 you can add a memory board that makes thing accept and spool jobs like a proper office printer should. The board (details in the online manual, possibly on the self-test page too) is old enough you might need to go to a recycler to pick one up but makes a huge difference to how well the machine works.
posted by scruss at 8:51 AM on October 21, 2018