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A cheap colour laser that infringes ever more on consumer inkjet territory
The HL-4040CN is one of a new range of colour lasers from Brother that are all, for the first time, powered by its own printer engine.
To show Brother means business, the price undercuts many others at just £352. This pulls it ever closer to home users and the unusual inclusion of a USB port for connecting Pictbridge digital cameras and memory sticks underlines these ambitions. An Ethernet port, which comes with SSL encryption, and a USB port for connecting directly to a PC, round up the connectivity.
Print resolution can be set to 600x600dpi or 2,400x600dpi. In our tests, text quality was solid but detailed photos lacked punch. There was also some banding in photos and all printouts were slightly curled at the edges.
The printer performed reasonably well in our speed tests, outgunning cheaper mono laser printers but lagging behind more expensive models. While many printers tend to fall short of their quoted print speeds, we found the Brother HL4040CN exceeded its 20ppm (pages per minute) rating.
When printing in mono, it achieved 23.80ppm and 20.35ppm on standard and best-quality settings respectively. It was a similar story for our colour and text PDFs - the speed faulted only on full-page photos, resulting in a lethargic 3ppm pace.
The printer uses a four-cartridge system, comprised of black, cyan, magenta and yellow toners. Black toner lasting 2,500 pages costs £38 with the other three cartridges costing £50 for 1,500 pages each. Based on five per cent coverage, printing costs 1.6p per text page and 3.4p per colour page, which compares favourably with inkjets and colour lasers.
The drum is an additional replacement, costing £110 per 17,000 pages, but this is still reasonable for domestic levels of use.
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Our verdict
Pros: Reasonably priced; good text quality; acceptable picture prints Cons: Paper curled at edges; noisy when printing Overall: The HL-4040CN produces reliable results and is a tempting upgrade for high-volume inkjet users
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Nice looking printer
I am the first to say I am not a computer expert, so I thought I would have problems... and I did. This is my first Laser Jet printer. I have always used an Epson Ink Jet Printer. With the Epson, I can print anything. Just click on contol, print and enter, and you got a print. No such luck with the Brother 4040CN Printer. First of all, I can not print a Word Document, like I can with Epson, nor can I print from ACDSee. I get a message that says to save a *.xps format. When I click on 'save' nothing happens. I have a new 3 month old computer with a Vista operating system So I look for customer support. Try and find that is also not an easy task, and I never did find any help. Just for comparison, I should tell you about the customer support for my HP Laptop. If you have a problem, you can get into a chat session with a technician in customer support, and solve the problem in real time. With the Brother 4040 CN printer, good luck to you if you can find where customer support even exists. So now I have a very nice new Laser Brother printer that only prints out a test page. Fortunately I kept my Epson printer so I can still print anything and everything. I researched for two months trying to buy a good quality printer, and I must say, there is a lot of useless information out there. The botom line I was looking for was, and is, what is an economical printer to have. I am sick and tired of being manipulated by Internet people that spin stories about products. The Brother 4040 printer has an automatic reprint of the last job. Who really cares about 'that'. I agree that it is a nice funtion, if you need that, but I really, just want to know how to make it work. "The control panel's LCD is great, as it can tilt 0 to 90 degrees, glows green when things are normal and red when things go awry, and communicates in plain English." That's not exactly true also. Well, it DOES tilt to 90 degrees, but I have to ask you, is THAT what you are REALLY looking for in a printer, a 90 degree tilt? I really just want an 'economical to operate' printer. Everyone knows printer companies make their fortunes on ink or toner, and so they deep discount their printers. Finally, I took a chance and decided on the Brother 4040 CN Laser Jet printer, only because it was new and even though I could not get any real information about it, I bought it anyway. It prints many pages a minute, is a little noisy, and uses 550 watts of power to operate, it weighs about 30 Kg, and other details, that matter little. Included in the hardware package when you buy the computer is a connection wire that has a USB connector on one end, and another end that does not connect to the printer. The printer has a USB connection inlet. But the wire supplied does not hae a USB connection on both ends. Probably if I was a super detective I could really find out what I am looking for. But I did not. I found out everything else, but not a comparison cost to operate. But I bought it anyway, installed the software in my computer, and that was the end of my forward progress. It does not print anything for me beyond the test page. So, it is NOT so easy to set up as all the reviews suggested, and also not so easy to find support. I am sure some skilled computer navigator will criticize me for my lack of knowledge, and my reply would be, write a better detailed installation direction for people like me. So, until I find more information, I will continue to use my Epson ink jet printer. With the Epson, just click on 'control'and 'p' and 'enter' and you have a nice print. The Brother 4040CN printer does however, look nice.
Posted by Paul Grenkow, 15 Oct 2008