Personal laser printers are slowly becoming more affordable, therefore more popular for use in the home. While at the moment the technology is only really suited to document printing, image reproduction can be surprisingly good. The Brother HL-2040 monochrome is one such printer.
The printer is a nice compact unit, that is easy to install and configure. The toner slots right into place and the paper tray is easy to load and feeds well. Drivers are straightforward and will have you running in no time at all. The printer supports PCL and Postscript so will work with Windows, Mac or Linux computers with the right drivers. The CD contains those for Windows and Mac, with the Linux versions available on the Brother website.
The controls are about as simple as they can get. There is a big, round Go button, and various LEDs for the states of toner, paper, drum and ready status. These lights change color from green to yellow or red depending on what’s happening, which makes them very easy to understand.
The only thing the package lacks is networking. There is no built in Ethernet, it is an optional add-on that costs a bit more, but is well worth considering if you have a home network. If you want to go one step further there is also the option to go wireless with a wireless adapter, complete with print server.
Print quality is excellent for text and okay for images. Text was finely details with straight edges, even when printing at 3pt. Image quality was reasonable, certainly good enough for basic office needs. The grayscale had a tendency to mix the grays and some large shaded areas looked a little fuzzy, but the detail was still there and the picture perfectly understandable.
It prints at a respectable 16 pages per minute and is quite quiet when it’s working. This is ideal if working from home, as office machines always seem louder than they actually are.
Consumable prices are reasonable, with a toner lasting for around 2500 pages, and a drum which is good for 20000. As this is aimed at the low workload users, these should last quite a while.
Seeing as this is pointed firmly at home users who print a lot of documents, this is a well priced device. The Brother brand is reliable and trustworthy and there is no reason why the HL-2040 should be any different.
