Brother Color Laser Printer – Brother HL-4040CN

Because color laser printers are becoming more and more affordable, companies are all jumping onto the bandwagon, including Brother with its very own HL-4040CN. The HL-4040CN is a single-function color laser printer that is best for office use.

The design of the HL-4040CN isn’t exactly dazzling, but it gets the job done. It is boxy and looks like your ordinary printer. It measures 12.5 x 16.5 x 18.7 inches (HWD) and weighs a considerable 64 pounds. While you can move it on your own, you wouldn’t want to do it on a regular basis. The connector ports, which include the USB as well as Ethernet, are placed at the back of the printer together with the power port. Another USB port can be found in front of the unit. The paper tray of the HL-4040CN can hold a maximum of 250 sheets of paper. The maximum media size is a Legal or 8.5 x 14-inch paper. The manual input tray, on the other hand, can hold a maximum of 50 sheets. Currently, Brother does not offer any second input tray to expand the capacity.

Due to the basic nature of the Brother’s HL-4040CN, the control panel is equally basic. You get the usual four multidirectional buttons, the reprint button and the direct print button. To give you a quick view on the status of the printing as well as the levels of the toner, it comes with a two-line text swivel LCD. It is network ready, giving you the option to directly connect it to any network via the Ethernet port. It has a 300MHz processor as well as a 64MB of onboard memory.

The Brother HL-4040CN comes equipped with the standard toner cartridges. The black cartridge can print approximately 2,500 prints and the three-color cartridge can print up to 1,500 prints. The monthly duty cycle of the HL-4040CN is pegged at 35,000 pages, making it an ideal printer for a small office. If you want to reduce printing cost, you can activate the Toner Saver mode, though you’d notice the decrease in the print quality. If you’re looking for a duplexer, the HL-4040CN doesn’t have one. However, the drivers of the HL-4040CN assist you to do so manually.

Speed-wise, the HL-4040CN is no speed demon. On black text, it can print 15.66 pages per minute. It garnered 13.77 and 14.83 ppm on color text and color graphics respectively. Quality is quite good, with black text being dark, clean and sharp. The color graphics showed good color blending with little banding on the grayscale. If quality comes first before speed, the Brother HL-4040CN might just be the color laser printer for you.