Brother HL-4040CN review

Brother's compact HL-4040CN is a single-pass colour laser printer with a 300MHz processor, 64MB of RAM and both USB Hi-Speed and 10/100 Ethernet ports.

It has a two-line LCD screen, and eight buttons that allow you to control the printer and navigate through various menus. A direct printing port means you can print PDF, TIFF, and JPEG files directly from a USB flash drive with the same options that are available when you print from a PC. A web-based management tool is included to control network printing and a custom driver supports PCL6 emulation.

The printer was simple to set up. Four toner cartridges slotted into the preinstalled drum unit, and the sturdy removable paper tray was easy to load. Both network and USB drivers installed without a problem.

The HL-4040CN's paper tray can hold 250 sheets of standard copier paper. It also has a multipurpose tray, which can take specialist paper up to 163gsm. There's no draft mode, so we performed both our draft and normal print speed tests at the printer's 'normal' quality setting, which did well both for speed and quality.

Our mono text print test produced clear, crisp letter-quality text at normal settings. At fine quality, text is slightly darker and better defined. We were impressed by the quality of images printed in mono mode, which were sharp and had smooth shading. However, we encountered problems when we tried to print greyscale images in colour or auto modes. Our high-resolution greyscale test photo acquired a red cast, while our greyscale shading tests came out in several rainbow tints when we printed them as part of a mixed colour document.

The printer performed better with blocks of solid colour, producing dense, sharp prints. Colour prints of photos showed slight horizontal banding, but colours were largely accurate, although some had a faint yellow cast which made flesh tones look slightly jaundiced. There's a 'vivid' colour setting available, but this oversaturates images, leaving them with an unnatural appearance.

Toner cartridges for the HL-4040CN are available in standard and high capacities, and the printer is economical to run if you buy the larger size. Unfortunately, this economy doesn't apply to some of the other consumables. An £86 belt unit must be replaced every 50,000 pages, while a £112 drum unit lasts for only 17,000 pages. This is less than half the life of drum units for the Konica Minolta 2400W (Labs, Shopper May 2007), which last for around 45,000 pages.

The HL-4040CN would be a good choice as a networked printer in a small office, although the cost of consumables other than toner is expensive. It's well suited to fast text printing and is capable of producing good results on mixed-colour documents, as long as they don't include complex greyscale images.