Brother HL-4040CN Printer Review

Brother’s HL-4040CN printer was designed for small offices and home users. I tested out the Brother printer this weekend, and here is what I found:

Overall, the HL-4040CN printer has great print quality, decent speed, and plenty of useful features. The printer prints at about 21 ppm black, and a little bit slower ppm for color (it says 21ppm for color, but it’s probably more like 18-19 ppm). Black text was generally very crisp and color output was good, although there was a bit of yellowish, grainy, color-banding on large color images. I would say the quality is perfect for home users and office use, but not quite at the standard required to send out print materials to clients.

The Brother HL-4040CN is network-ready and offers additional features such as reprint and secure print, direct-print, USB port for cameras and flash drives, and has a great LCD control panel with basic functionality. The Reprint and Direct Print buttons allow you to print without touching your computer, which can be handy. The Brother printer also has a 250-sheet paper tray and a 50-sheet manual input tray, although the later is unmarked and hard to find. The high-yield toner cartridges are economical, but for a home user, it is a bit pricey to replace its four laser toner cartridges – It all depends on how much you print and what types of documents you print whether this printer is a great deal for you or not.

For its $350-$400 price range, the Brother HL-4040CN printer is a great deal for home users and small offices due to its easy and convenient features, great print quality and decent speed. Because of the quality of its average color imaging, it’s not the best match for users who need color images with excellent print quality.

How does a Laser Printer Work?

Courtesy of IBM Inc.

There are many different types of printers out there on the market, all with a different method to printing. Most people can guess how an inkjet printer prints due to the name it’s given, but do you know how a laser printer prints? How does a laser beam print text and images on a sheet of paper? It’s actually quiet interesting (at least I think so) and is based off some simple scientific principles – definitely worth taking a look.

Find out how a laser printer works and the history of a laser printer. The first laser printer can be credited to IBM. IBM built the first commercial implementation of a laser printer with the IBM model 3800 in 1975.