Brother HL-3040CN toner cartridges and drum units

The Brother HL3040CN colour laser printer uses four individual colour toner cartridges and drum units, all are listed here at discount prices along with the waste toner unit.

Brother HL-3040CN Printer Review

The Brother HL-3040CN colour printer is the very first time Brother has employed a strip of LEDs as opposed to a laser to get a page image to the drum. This means less moving parts, which should really extend the printer's life.

In contrast to the majority of entry-level colour lasers, it is a single-pass model, that includes four separate drums with respect to black, cyan, magenta as well as yellow toner. This enables it to create colour prints as swiftly as it does mono ones. Additionally , it leads to a reasonable degree of bulk, however the 409 x 466mm footprint is fairly small and its height of 250mm is actually considerably less imposing than a good number. Paper within the output tray doesn't rest flat, though, which in turn exacerbates the curling effects that happens when the unit warms up the paper.

Both USB and Ethernet ports are supplied. Configuring settings on the front panel is actually fiddly, but there is at the same time a web-based interface. This includes network settings as well as toner and drum meters, however it's not possible to control use centered on IP address. A Secure Printing choice in the print driver permits a print job to be prescribed a four-digit password, whereupon it is only printed after the password is entered on the printer itself. However, the 32MB memory capacity indicates it will store just a sole graphics-heavy DTP page or perhaps four pages of text.

The cost of £189 is fine for a colour LED model, but the advantage is sacrificed because of big operating expenses; 14.6p per mixed colour page is two times what we would be expecting from a colour device, as well as three times higher than a business inkjet. At the least it outpaces inkjet equipment, for mono prints at 13ppm plus colour prints at 12.2ppm. Nevertheless, a lot of colour lasers at this particular cost offer 18ppm for mono prints.

The machine dealt with the print quality tests sufficiently making use of the Brother HL3040CN printer toner cartridges, and excelled at producing really small text which in turn was always clearly legible. Nevertheless, photos were definitely under saturated compared to the best colour lasers at this cost, plus graduated fills had banding. There was also evidence of dithering within pictures as well as block-colour graphics. Upping the print quality from Normal to Fine - which increased the image resolution from 600dpi to 600x2, 400dpi - lowered the visibility of the dither. Nevertheless, with merely 32MB of RAM, quite a few graphics-heavy pages declined to print at Fine quality. We advise fitting an extra 512MB DIMM module, however it is a wee bit of a nuisance plus a suitable module costs a further £60.

This machine does absolutely nothing badly, nevertheless in a lot of aspects - effectiveness, print quality, paper handling and especially running expenses - it is not up to the same standards as the best of its competition. Epson's Aculaser C2800N is bigger however is really a vastly better model.