Brother HL-1040 review

It's amazing what mileage you can get out of one plastic case, as long as the innards beneath evolve.

A case in point is Brother's HL series of laser printers, of which the HL-1040 is the latest 10ppm 600dpi addition.

Its layout and design follow the rest of the HL series printers, with the paper bin (200 sheets of A4) atop the machine at the rear, with a forward envelope/letterhead single feed slot attached. The paper path is nominally straight to a front eject/catching tray that folds down from the top of the machine. Alternatively, you can simply allow the output to spill onto your desktop. In all respects, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was its slower sibling - the HL-820 Controls are minimal - the only two are the power switch at the back left of the machine and a single multifunction button at the front right top. This single button cancels printing once it's started, wakes the printer up if it's asleep, and, if the data lamp is on, performs a form feed function. Finally, although the printer can recover from errors automatically, this wonderbutton can be used to clear really stubborn ones.

Initial setup is easy. The supplied starter drum/toner unit - toner (2,400 pages' worth) is available separately from the drum unit, at £14.50 (£17) - simply slots into the printer from the front. An auto-starting CD delivers the drivers to the PC - 36-speed CD-ROM owners should see the whole process completed in around the time it takes to make a coffee.

The driver set includes everything you need, including manual duplexing alongside a useful multi-page-per-sheet function as well as toner-saving options. Under Windows 98, it looks and feels part of the operating system, and is simple to use. Default settings are sensible and give good quality output.

Print quality is the be all and end all of a laser printer. Without colour to make a document look interesting, output from a mono laser printer has got to be crisp and the blacks have to be black. The HL-1040 scores well on print density, its blacks being very black indeed, and textual output at 600 true dots per inch is very well formed, with very little evidence of stepping on curves, unless you view a print under a high-power loupe. Our tests include a section for reversed graphics: thin white lines against a completely black background. The very narrowest (around 0.001 of an inch) are swamped by the black. We suspect, though, that some fiddling with the print density controls will eventually fine-tune the toner lay-down to obviate this minor niggle.

Graphical output, particularly on photographic subjects, is excellent. There is some small evidence of 'tartanning' on large areas of dark shades, a function, no doubt, of the dithering algorithm Brother has used, but this effect is only very slight, and probably not noticeable unless you are specifically looking for it. A bonus to outputting is the driver's ability to put multiple pages on one page - up to four miniatures on A4 - which makes it a lot less expensive to produce draft output before the final document is printed in its entirety.

Like its siblings in the HL stable, the 1040 is the kind of printer you wouldn't mind using for heavier printing duties. If you need multiple document copies at a good rate, it scores well, averaging less than 15 seconds to first output and living up to its 10ppm subsequent copy rate. It is, at a list price of £279 (£327), good value for money and comes recommended.