Laser Printers

Brother’s HL-5040 Laser Printer is the successor of the HL-1440 model with a lot of enhancements such as, improved expandability options, add-on paper trays and super-fast printing speeds. The HL-5040 Laser Printer had proven to be a great SOHO printer with its good deal of improvements in all the areas.

Boxy Design:

The design of the Brother HL-5040 Laser Printer looks similar to its predecessor with a boxy appearance. It has been designed logically with a formal look that is essential for an office. It has all of its paper trays tucked neatly inside its body. And the printer takes up only a 15- by 15-inch square on your desktop which is less than most ink jets need after you add room for paper to exit. The only obvious corner-cutting is the use of status lights for the control panel, instead of an LCD menu, but these are clearly labelled. You will also find a Job Cancel button.

Easy set-up:

The set up of the printer is extremely easy which consists of installing the toner cartridge, loading paper, running the installation program, and following the directions on screen.A very handy quick start pamphlet that is provided along with the printer gives you simple and well understandable instructions. For a lot more of details, the CD that is provided, gives you pictorial and motion representations on plugging in, loading the papers, clearing paper jams and a lot of maintenance tips. The CD also provides you a wealthy user guide and a lot of information on the company and some technical support too.

Driver menu:

The HL-5040’s main print screen menu has been organised into three main tabs such as, Basic, Advanced and Support. The parameters of the paper source and size are set using the Basic tab, the advanced tab allows you to adjust the print quality, manual duplexing and also to set the sleep time. The support tab, as the name suggests, takes you to the Brother’s main website, and also to the test pages for the laser printer’s settings and fonts. Though the drivers look a bit clumsy, they are easy to understand and navigate. The drivers are also of a great help to you via their Interactive Help Window which is an animated flash tutorial that helps you to fix problems like low toner levels or paper jams.

Features:

Coming to the features, the Brother HL-5040 Monochrome Laser Printer has an average set of them, not competitive enough to beat the other laser printers of the same time and price range. The input tray of HL-5040 has a capacity of 250 sheets and it also has a single sheet manual bypass tray which is used for printing envelops and heavier papers. If that seems to be not enough for you, you can also choose to add-on an additional input tray for some extra pounds. Whereas, its competitor, the Minolta PagePro 1250E, allows you to add-on an input tray of capacity 500 sheets, face up output tray as well as an attachment for copying and scanning for a much lesser cost than what Brother demands for its 250 sheets input tray. The PagPro also offers many print languages but Brother has only the PCL 6 emulation.

Brother HL-5040 Duplex Laser Printer allows networking with its 10/100 BaseT Ethernet print server. It has an internal memory of 16MB which double than that of its predecessor and PostScript Emulation 3 too. If you sense that the laser of your office requires more functionalities, you can also try Brother’s another higher end model of the same sequel, the HL-5070N which offers you all of these functionalities along with built-in networking too.

Compatibility:

The media types supported by Brother HL-5040 are, bond papers, envelops, labels, plain papers and transparencies. The media sizes supported includes A4 (210 x 297 mm) and Legal (216 x 356 mm, 8.5 x 14″).

Brother HL-5040 is compatible with both the Windows and Mac Operating Systems.

Performance:

One of the main reasons why you should consider buying Brother HL-5040 Laser Printer is its printing speed which is very impressive. It printed the graphics at the speed of 12.5 pages per minute which is equal to that of a hi-end printer that costs you a grand and is faster than any other printer in its price range. For normal text prints, it prints 17ppm which is 2 pages per minute faster than the previous models. In addition, the printer boasts a first-page out speed of less than 12 seconds. The printer’s processor speed is, 133MHz. The HL-5040′s highest resolution is 600 by 2,400 dpi, which is a close visual match to 1,200-by-1,200. The print quality can be said as good but not excellent. All the texts were crisp and clear, but this fact degraded as the size of the font is reduced. Yet, this quality is perfectly fine for an average office printer.  The graphics printing was not that good but line drawing and images looked great being accurate, detailed and with ample contrast. The shading and gradient parts suffered too. Banding could be seen in gradients. The ink consumption of Brother HL-5040 is in par with its competitors. We would advice you use an high-yield cartridge which will give you more number of copies at a lesser cost than the normal toner cartridge.

Warranty and support:

The Brother HL-5040 Laser Printer comes with one year warranty and the warranty period can be extended for another one or two years with some extra pounds. You can rely on the website as it offers you a range of drivers, manuals, trouble shooting FAQs and there is also a customer education centre that offers you a great deal of information in depth on managing your printer and networking.

Verdict:

Some of the other small office laser printers such as Minolta PagePro 1250E are offering you more functionalities in the same price that are office friendly with the same amount of expandability options too. When it comes to the design,  Brother HL-5040 looks much better, consuming lesser space. If you find that the above mentioned features are sufficient for you and impressed with its print speed, then Brother HL-5040 Laser Printer will not disappoint you.

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Brother HL-5040 Laser Printer  – Technical Specifications, Features

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