Brother HL-4040CN review

Brother's HL-4040 received four stars in What's New, Shopper 238, when it was launched last year.

Since then it has established itself as a reliable workgroup printer for small offices. It looks less bulky than the large Lexmark and Epson printers here, but weighs about the same and takes up slightly more space on a desk due to its larger footprint.

Appearance isn't a major concern when it comes to selecting an office printer, but the HL-4040CN is also available in blue, which is a welcome deviation from standard grey or beige plastic. This is the only printer here with a PictBridge port, which is useful for printing PDF documents directly from a USB flash drive.

Its web interface feels clunky and, unlike most of the printers here, it doesn't seem to reproduce all the options present on the printer's mono LCD screen. However, it's fairly functional and allows you to configure the printer's default options for networking, paper size and secure document management. For the brave, there's even a command line that you can access via the main browser interface.

This is one of the most expensive printers here, but it performed well and is affordable to run. It's reasonably quick, with a mono print speed of 17ppm and a fast 14.8ppm for colour printing. It has the joint-cheapest mono print costs at just 0.9p per page, and colour prints are affordable at 6.2p per page.

Prints suffered from almost no curling. Both photographic and illustrated images were clear and accurately coloured, although some skin tones looked a little jaundiced at default settings. There is a Vivid colour mode, but this resulted in severe over-saturation. Text was clearly legible at even tiny font sizes and 5pt lettering was virtually flawless at the 2,400dpi enhanced Fine quality.

The HL-4040CN is still an excellent printer, but at this price it can no longer compete with other similarly specified colour lasers such as Epson's Aculaser C2800N. For this reason, it scores only three stars here.