Brother has lately revamped its range of laser printers and all-in-ones. The HL-4040CN fits in as being a high-end personal or even medium-level workgroup colour laser printer, with a couple of handy extras.
The HL-4040CN is large and square cut, yet retains a modern look and feel with inset panels of dark blue and silver. The control panel is at the left-hand side and features a two-line by 16-character LCD display, with a coloured backlight. This shows green, yellow or red in order to show a variety of status conditions.
A blue panel swings down from the front of the unit to supply a 50-sheet multi-purpose tray and then under this is the 250-sheet main paper feed. It is a bit unsatisfactory that there isn't any optional extra tray to improve the full capacity of the unit. There isn't any optionally available duplexer, either.
The control panel includes a couple of additional buttons, plus the normal menu-navigation square. In reality, the four buttons inside the square happen to be somewhat strangely allocated, while you proceed through menu choices while using up and down keys, go upwards a level using the left-hand key and return using the right-hand one. There are actually advantages in sticking with the traditional approach.
Two brand new keys link with additional features of the printer. Reprint automatically reruns the last project which had been delivered to the device, and this is really a major timesaver, specially if the printer is utilized inside an office. Security is preserved since you can send any kind of job with a password, which happens to be necessary for a reprint from the printer. Direct Print combines using the USB socket on the front of the HL-4040CN to deliver prints from a USB drive as well as a PictBridge camera.
This printer uses exactly the same colour laser engine as Brother's DCP-9040CN All-in-One.
For a colour laser printer, the HL-4040CN is actually extremely simple to set up. Draw down the front cover, pull out the tray storing the four Brother HL-4040CN toner cartridges and each of them falls straight into position.
There is not a great deal of software provided with the machine. The driver includes support for watermarks and multiple pages per sheet, but not overprinting.
The HL-4040CN took 22 seconds in order to print our five-page monochrome text document, comparable to a speed of 13.6ppm. Even though that isn't close to the rated 20ppm, it's better than some colour laser printers we tested not too long ago. The text and colour graphics pages needed 32 seconds to finish, a speed of 9.4ppm, however the printer's again rated at 20ppm. These statistics mean this Brother machine isn't especially rapid for its class.
Print quality is actually varied. Black text is cleanly printed without any apparent malformations of characters or lines. Colour graphics are likewise good, with lines coming out sleek and also clear, even though there's a slight banding in certain areas of colour fill. Photo output is not really so fantastic, with a relatively modest range limiting the accuracy of colour performance.
You can observe the difference between the default 600dpi of the printer's Normal mode in addition to the 1,200dpi of its Fine mode. Whilst Fine mode reproduces shaded colour, for example areas of sky, much better than Normal mode, it does not perform so effectively with darker detail, within shadowed areas.
There are definite good and bad points to the HL-4040CN. The reprint along with direct print functions are things we have long looked for on business printers, as they are easy to put into action and very helpful to the customer. However, its lack of expandability as well as just average print quality count against the machine. It ought to be on your shortlist, however only along with representatives of its main rivals.
Brother toner cartridges can be found here.
Theodore Beach is a member of the Cartridge Concept team which specialises in printer cartridges.
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