(Expo booth 1749) today introduced a new line of personal laser printers with "business class features." The HL-5000 Series (HL-5040, HL-5050 and HL-5070N) replaces the existing HL-1400 Series printers with improved performance (up to 17ppm printing), higher print resolution (up to 2400x600dpi), improved paper handling, enhanced and expandable memory, interactive help and online user support. The HL-5040, HL-5050 and HL-5070N will have estimated street prices of $300, $350 and $500, respectively, and are expected to ship in late February 2003.

Each of the new units offer a print speed of up to 17 pages per minute - 2 pages per minute faster than the models they replace and among the fastest print speeds in their class. In addition, the units boast a first-page out speed of less than 12 seconds. Along with the faster print speeds, all three printers now offer up to 2400x600dpi print quality.

The HL-5040 now includes a single-sheet manual by-pass tray for handling card stock, letterhead and envelopes as well as the option to add a second 250-sheet lower paper tray to expand the paper input capacity to a total of 500 sheets. In addition, the HL-5050 and HL-5070N now offer a fold-down 50-sheet multi-purpose tray for handling custom media, increasing the capacity of the HL-5050 and HL-5070N to 300 sheets, a 50-sheet improvement over the previous models.

All three printers offer significantly higher standard and expandable memory than the preceding printer series. The entry-level, HL-5040, comes standard with 8MB of memory that can be expanded up to 136MB using industry standard DIMM, while the HL-5050 and HL-5070N both come standard with 16MB memory--twice that of the units they replace--and can be expanded up to 144MB.

PCL6 emulation is standard on all three printers with BR-Script 3 (PostScript 3 emulation), IBM Proprinter and Epson FX emulations standard for both the HL-5050 and HL-5070N. The HL-5000 Series includes standard USB 2.0 and Parallel interfaces, along with all of the necessary drivers for each model. An optional external 10/100 BaseT Ethernet print server is available for the HL-5040 and HL-5050, and the HL-5070N comes standard with a built-in 10/100 BaseT Ethernet print server.

The HL-5070N is also one of the first printers to support Apple's new technology, "Rendezvous," which can recognize each other when they are on the same network.

by MacNN Staff