Brother HL-3040CN review

The Brother HL-3040CN color printer is the first time Brother has used LED strips instead of lasers to paint page images on drums. This means fewer moving parts, which should extend the existence of the printer.

Unlike most entry-level color lasers, this is a single-pass machine equipped with four different drums concerning black, cyan, magenta, and yellow toner. This allows it to make color prints as fast as monoprints. Besides, this leads to a reasonable mass level, but the 409 x 466mm footprint is quite small, and the height of 250mm is less impressive than many. However, the paper in the output tray is uneven, which in turn exacerbates the curling effect that occurs when the printer heats the paper.

Both USB and Ethernet ports included. Configuring settings from the front panel is complicated, but there is also a web-based interface. This comes with network settings plus toner and drum meters, although it is not possible to limit usage depending on the IP address. The Safe Printing option allows print jobs to be assigned a four-digit password, only printing after the password has typed on the printer. However, 32MB of memory means that it can store only DTP pages that weigh alone or four pages of text.

Costs £ 189 is suitable for the color LED printer, but the benefits wasted because of the high operating costs; 14.6p per page mixed colors is double what we would anticipate from a color laser, as well as three times bigger than an inkjet business. At least that exceeds inkjet equipment, for monoprints at 13ppm and color prints at 12.2ppm. However, many color lasers at this special price offer 18ppm for monoprints.

This tool handles our print quality assessment successfully with Brother HL3040CN printer toner cartridges and excels at producing tiny text that can always read clearly. Even so, the photos are undersaturated when compared to the best color lasers at this cost, coupled with experienced pass filling. There are also signs of dithering in photographs as well as color-block graphics. Improving print quality from Normal to Fine – which improves quality from 600dpi to 600×2, 400dpi – reduces the visibility of bumps. However, with only 32MB of RAM, many pages with heavy graphics refuse to print at Good quality. We recommend adding a 512MB DIMM module, but it’s a bit troublesome, plus an appropriate module costs an additional £ 60.

This printer does nothing terrible, but in many aspects – overall performance, print quality, paper handling, and mainly operating costs – this printer does not meet the same standards as its best competitors. C2800N Epson Aculaser is a bigger but much better engine.