The Brother HL-4040CN is a mid-level color laser printer that is robust enough to serve as a workgroup printer for small and medium businesses, and affordable enough for home and home office use.
Network-ready out of the box, the Brother HL-4040CN is as easy to set up as it is to use. Its secure printing feature will be of particular interest to business users, and its handy reprint feature will appeal to just about everyone.
- Good text output quality.
- Easy reprint option.
- Secure printing option.
- USB and Ethernet ports.
- PictBridge-compatible USB port.
- Replacement toner can be expensive.
- Color output is only average.
- Some images are subject to banding.
- Mac, Windows, and Linux compatible
- Up to 2400x600 dpi print resolution
- 250-sheet input tray
- 150-sheet output tray
- 64 MB RAM, expandable to 512 MB
- Up to 35,000 pages per month
- One-year warranty
The Brother HL-4040CN is a hard-working color laser printer that won’t keep you waiting for your print jobs. As is true of most printers, the HL-4040CN can’t quite live up to the manufacturer’s specs (in this case, a rating of 21 ppm for both color and monochrome documents), but it’s surprisingly fast.
Text quality is usually a top concern for a business printer. Black text is readable down to fairly small font sizes, although after a certain point, it gets a little fuzzy. Color text output is also generally good, although again, smaller fonts are subject to jaggies and some color banding.
The output quality of color photos and other color images isn’t quite as satisfactory. Color is relatively accurate, but larger images and broad areas of color are subject to banding. Grayscale photo printing fares much better, with little or no banding. Overall print quality is fine for in-house use, but not good enough for client handouts or marketing materials, about what you’d expect from a color laser printer in this price range.
The Brother HL-4040CN has USB and Ethernet ports, so you won’t need to buy an adapter or a print server, and you shouldn’t need any technical help setting it up. A front-mounted USB port is available for printing directly from PictBridge-compatible digital cameras and USB Flash drives. When you plug a USB device into the port, its contents will display on a small LCD panel. You can use the scroll buttons on the panel to find, select, and print a file, without using your computer.
Two unusual features are the reprint and security options. You can print additional copies of the last job sent to the printer by pressing the reprint button. If you’re printing sensitive documents, you can issue a four-digit security code. Without the code, no one can use the reprint feature to reprint the documents.
