Brother Hl-2040 Printer Review - Best Personal Black & White Laser Printer

The Brother HL-2040 is an affordable, speedy, B&W laser printer for soho or home use. Ideal for personal use, it featured as a print speed of up to 20 ppm with really good text printing quality.

Brother HL-2040 is included with 8MB of standard memory, a maximum 2400 x 600 dpi resolution, and GDI (Graphics Device Interface) printer emulation. To connect to your PC, the HL-2040 uses USB 2.0 and Parallel interfaces. The HL-2040 is compatible with operating systems Windows & MAC.

Advertised as a compact laser printer, HL-2040 is one of the tiniest laser printers we've seen. It is lightweight, with two-tone dark and light gray plastic making it much more attractive than the traditional putty color scheme. With measurements of 6.5 x 14.6 x 14.2 inches (HxWxD), it weighs less than 17 pounds loaded with toner and paper. Its primary paper tray holds letter- or legal-size paper. You feed envelopes, card stock, transparencies, and label sheets one by one into the manual feed slot in front. On best, you'll find the output tray holds 100 sheets, tilted to hold the pages on leading, next to the control panel.

The control panel is easy but functional, with only a single 'Go' button and four LED lights. The light is to alert you of status or difficulties, for instance, low toner warnings and error messages. Luckily, setting up the HL-2040 is uncomplicated. Inside printed quick-setup information, directions are well laid out and easy to follow; there's also a user manual along with a flash movie guide on CD-ROM.

If you have anything to criticize about the device, it's the toner cartridge that comes inside the box. The starter cartridge can only print about 1500 pages. Thankfully, for that replacement, Brother TN-350 toner cartridge, is having the capacity for around 2500 pages, and you can get a compatible one at about $20 only on laptoptraveller.com. The text print output is outstanding for that cost of this laser printer. You possibly can also enable the toner-saver mode to reduce the price if needed. The Brother DR350 drum unit works with the TN350 toner cartridge (sold separately) to offer clean, sharp prints on your Brother HL-2040 laser printers. An outstanding existence span of about 12000 pages may be expected from this dedicated drum unit.

The cost-effective, lightweight, and compact printer, Brother HL-2040, is wonderful for home or small business use. The cost-per-page is far lower than an inkjet for monochrome printing. In case you want to add the HL-2040 to a home network, Ethernet and wireless print servers are available as choices.