Brother HL-2040 review

Brother's HL-2040 is similar to the HL-2030, which we reviewed in Labs, Shopper July 2005.

The HL-2040 is a little more expensive than the HL-2030, but it has a faster print speed and a parallel port. It's a remarkably squat printer, but it has a fully enclosed 250-sheet paper cassette. The single-sheet feeder has no markings for envelope orientation, and the printer creased envelope corners in our tests.

Most of the printers in this test come with a starter toner that won't last as long as the replacements you'll buy when it's empty. The HL-2040 arrives with a full-capacity 2,500-sheet toner, so it can print around five times as many pages as the Lexmark E120n before you'll need to fit a replacement. The HL-2040 uses a separate drum with a comparatively short life of 12,000 pages. Even so, it's unlikely that most home users will need to replace it.

You have to fit the printer's consumables before it's ready to print, but this is quickly accomplished. When we first switched on the printer, it gave off a mild plasticky smell, which caused us to remove the consumables and double-check for any packing material we'd missed. However, everything seemed to be in order and the smell quickly disappeared.

This isn't the noisiest printer on test, but the whine of its cooling fan is fairly annoying. Paper passes around an Sshaped path through the printer body, and seems to make more noise than within the other printers. We noticed that printed pages had curled along its length, but not enough to cause paper-feed problems during manual duplexing.

The HL-2040 is quite quick, but it slowed down when printing our photo tests at its top-quality setting. It ran out of memory when printing our two-page 10x8" photo test, but recovered well. It completed the job at a reduced resolution and printed an error sheet that explained the problem.