Brother HL-4040CN toner cartridges

The Brother HL4040CN is shipped with standard TN130 toner cartridges which have a low capacity, Cartridge Concept offer these cartridges at a discount but advise purchase of the TN135 toner Cartridges which offer better value.

We are pleased to now offer compatible TN135 cartridges for even greater savings without any loss of quality.

Brother HL-4040CN Printer Review

Brother has lately renewed its selection 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, that has a few helpful extras.

The HL-4040CN is big as well as being square cut, yet retains a modern appearance with inset panels of dark blue and silver. The control panel is placed on the left-hand side and includes a two-line by 16-character Liquid crystal display, which has a coloured backlight. This exhibits green, yellow or red in order to show various status conditions.

A blue panel swings down from the front of the unit to provide a 50-sheet multi-purpose tray and then below this is the 250-sheet main paper feed. It is a bit frustrating that there's no optional supplementary tray to improve the full capacity of the printer. There is no discretionary duplexer, either.

The control panel contains a couple of more buttons, along with the typical menu-navigation square. Actually, the four buttons within the square are actually somewhat strangely allotted, as you proceed through menu choices using the up and down keys, go upwards a level while using left-hand key and go back with the right-hand one. There are actually advantages in staying with the traditional method.

Two new keys link with additional functions in the printer. Reprint automatically reruns the last job that had been pumped to the device, which in turn can be a big timesaver, particularly if the printer is commonly employed within an office. Security is preserved since you may send any job with a password, and that is needed for a reprint from the unit. Direct Print works while using the USB socket on the front of the HL-4040CN to supply prints from a USB drive and a PictBridge camera.

This unit uses the same colour laser engine as Brother's DCP-9040CN All-in-One.

For a colour laser printer, the HL-4040CN is actually especially straightforward to set up. Pull down the front cover, slide out the tray storing the four Brother HL4040CN printer toner cartridges and each of them drops 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 mono text document, comparable to a speed of 13.6ppm. Even though that isn't near the rated 20ppm, it's better than a number of colour laser printers we tested not too long ago. The text and colour graphics pages required 32 seconds to finish, a speed of 9.4ppm, however the printer's once more rated at 20ppm. These statistics mean this Brother unit isn't particularly 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 little banding in certain parts of colour fill. Photographic output is not really so fantastic, with a relatively modest range restricting 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, in shadowed areas.

There are definite good and bad points to the HL-4040CN. The reprint along with direct print functions are things we've long looked for on business printers, since they are straightforward to put into action and very helpful to the user. However, its lack of expandability as well as just average print quality count against the machine. It ought to be on your shortlist, but only along with representatives of its main rivals.