subject: Brother HL-4040CN Cartridge Review [print this page] Brother has lately revamped its selection of laser printers and all-in-ones. The HL-4040CN fits in as a general high-end personal or even medium-level workgroup colour laser printer, having a number of useful extras.
The HL-4040CN is substantial and moreover square cut, yet keeps a contemporary appearance with inset panels of dark blue and silver. The control panel is placed to the left-hand side and features a two-line by 16-character LCD display, with a coloured backlight. This exhibits green, yellow or red in order to show various status scenarios.
A blue panel swings down from the front of the unit to deliver a 50-sheet multi-purpose tray and additionally beneath this is the 250-sheet main paper feed. It is a bit unsatisfactory that there is no additional supplementary tray to improve the capacity of the printer. There is no discretionary duplexer, either.
The control panel includes some extra buttons, along with the usual menu-navigation square. Actually, the four buttons within the square happen to be somewhat strangely allotted, while you move through menu choices while using up and down keys, go up a level while using left-hand key and return using the right-hand one. There are actually merits in staying with the conventional method.
Two new keys link with added features on the printer. Reprint automatically reruns the last piece of work that was delivered to the machine, and this is really a major timesaver, especially if the printer is commonly employed within an office. Security is preserved since you can send any kind of job with a password, and that is necessary for a reprint from the unit. Direct Print works using the USB socket on the front of the HL-4040CN to provide prints from a USB drive as well as a PictBridge camera.
This printer makes use of the identical colour laser engine as Brother's DCP-9040CN All-in-One.
For a colour laser printer, the HL-4040CN is actually extremely straightforward to setup. Take down the front cover, slide out the tray containing the four Brother HL-4040CN toner cartridges and each one falls into place.
There's not a great deal of software provided with the model. The driver contains support for watermarks as well as multiple pages per sheet, although not overprinting.
The HL-4040CN needed 22 seconds to successfully print our five-page mono text document, equal to a rate of 13.6ppm. Despite the fact that that isn't near the rated 20ppm, it's much better than several colour laser printers we tested not too long ago. The text and colour graphics pages required 32 seconds in order to complete, a speed of 9.4ppm, although the printer's once again rated at 20ppm. These statistics show that this Brother machine isn't extremely quick with regard to its class.
Print quality is actually variable. Black text is precisely printed with no noticeable malformations of characters or lines. Colour pictures are also very good, with lines coming out sleek and also clear, although there is a little banding in a few areas of colour fill. Photo output is not really so fantastic, with a comparatively minimal range limiting the precision of colour interpretation.
You can see the variation between the default 600dpi of the printer's Normal mode in addition to the 1,200dpi of its Fine mode. While Fine mode reproduces shaded colour, for instance regions of sky, better than Normal mode, it does not do so well with darker detail, within shadowed areas.
You will find certain negative and positive points to the HL-4040CN. The reprint along with direct print functions are tasks we've long looked for on business printers, as they are simple to implement and incredibly helpful to the consumer. However, its scarcity of expandability and just average print quality count against the device. It must be on your shortlist, yet only together with representatives of its main competitors.
