- home
- reviews
- news
- downloads
- cnet tv
On TV.com: THE GIRLS NEXT DOOR photos
- log in
- join CNET
- welcome,
- my profile
- log out

Brother HL-6050D

More on this product: review; specifications; compare; shop

Print
E-mail
Share

CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
Detailed editors' rating

Average user rating:
Write your own review

Product summary

The good: Speedy; two-sided printing; ample paper capacity; expandable memory; Windows, Mac, and DOS compatible.

The bad The bad: Drab design and fair graphics quality.

The bottom line: The HL-6050D is a reasonably priced option for a growing business.

Specifications: Printer Type: Workgroup printer - Laser - Monochrome; Max media size: Legal (8.5 in x 14 in), A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in); Connectivity technology: Wired; See full specs

Price range: $189.95 - $425.49

See all products in the Brother HL-6050 printer series

CNET editors' review

Reviewed by: Jeffrey Fuchs
Edited by: Elsa Wenzel
Reviewed on: 02/14/2005

The Brother HL-6050D, built for a small to medium-size office, hurries to print your laser pages, holds one ream of paper, makes double-sided prints, and offers a model with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. It provides twice the paper capacity and prints better text than the similarly priced Lexmark E332n, which also lacks two-sided printing. Still, you can get many of those features cheaper with the HP LaserJet 1320. And we're surprised that this $550 laser printer doesn't clearly explain an installation tip that helps you easily improve the quality of the graphics, which were so-so at the default settings.

The boxy Brother HL-6050D weighs nearly 46 pounds and stands just more than a foot tall by 15.4 inches wide and 16.7 inches deep. Its putty-colored plastic with navy blue logo trim is about as bland as printer design gets. The curved top output tray holds a roomy 250 sheets facedown, or 50 sheets faceup, however--convenient when you do a lot of printing. A 15-line LCD glows, traffic-light style: green for go, orange to show it's busy, or bright red for a problem. A target-style menu controller includes a data light to indicate print job status, as well as buttons to reprint the last document, cancel a job, or change menu choices and pause the printer.

The HL-6050D's cover pops open easily so that you can change the toner cartridge and print drum. Happily, there's a full-size toner cartridge rated to last 7,500 text pages. Replacement cartridges cost about $100, giving you a nice, low cost per page of about 1.3 cents--nearly a penny below average.

This printer's generous 500-sheet main paper tray holds letter or legal-size papers, and a business on the make can add an additional 500-sheet tray for $250. Just inside the front cover, the 100-sheet multipurpose tray accepts handfed heavy, fragile, or specialty papers, and you can open a straight paper path in the back of the printer.

The HL-6050D is powered by a 200MHz processor, and you can expand the 32MB of memory up to 160MB to better handle a heavy network work flow.

The Brother HL-6050D turned in a lickety-split performance on CNET Labs' laser speed tests. It produced more than 18 pages per minute (ppm) of text and almost 17.5ppm on graphics, beating out many printers in its class and price range.

The HL-6050D's normal, 600dpi text-output quality looked good, but just barely. The letters in CNET Labs' text document were clear and readable but appeared dark gray rather than solid black. The graphics output, tested at default settings, was fair; our test document came out looking like a bad photocopy job. Areas of fine detail were mottled with clearly visible dots, and arbitrary vertical lines appeared within gradients and in dark areas. Line art looked fine, but even when we bumped up the resolution to 1,200dpi and printed again, the gradients were still unsatisfactory.

See more CNET content tagged:: Brother,; laser,; printer,; tray,; HP LaserJet

User reviews

Write your own review Be the first one to review Brother HL-6050D and share your experience with the CNET community!

Submit your review

Brother HL-6050D

1. Rate this product:: (Mouse over the stars to rate this product and click to set your rating.)
2. One-line summary:(Summarize your review in one line. 10 characters minimum; required.): 0 of 55 characters
3. Pros:(Tell us what you like about this product. 10 characters minimum; required.): 0 of 250 characters
4. Cons:(Tell us what you don't like about this product. 10 characters minimum; required.): 0 of 250 characters
Bottom-line summary:(Explain to us in detail why you like or dislike the product, focusing your comments on the product's features and functionality, and your experience using the product. This field is optional.): 0 of 5000 characters; Submit