Brother HL 3040 Printer Review

This is a budget range printer aimed at individual users and small organisations who print in colour on an ad-hoc basis. Brother have tried to make this a hard working printer of choice for those departments who need a reliable and economical colour laser printer but do not wish to compromise on print quality. The Brother HL 3040 delivers on all of those fronts and you will receive excellent looking colour and black and white prints. This is one stylish desktop machine and will fit right into any smart office environment.

The usability of this machine is fantastic. Designed with LED technology inside, the printer will be noticeably faster than some of the traditional laser machine competition. The Brother 3040 toner bundled with the printer when you buy it, is easy to install. The toner is a drum and toner combination although you can buy the toner independently from the drums thereafter, with Brother HL 3040 toner available in capacities of 1,400 pages for the cyan, magenta and yellow and then 2,200 page yield for the black. Brother are extremely environmentally conscious and report their machines and components are free of any toxic products and have a productive recycling site based in Wales and all toners can be sent there for free.

For the low budget price, there is a lot on offer in terms of functionality. The printer takes very little time to set up onto your network and computer and the installation CD has some useful features on it including booklet printing, header and footer tool, print restriction functionality and poster printing. Both PC and Mac platforms are catered for and the printer can be linked up with USB cabling. The print restriction tool is very handy for those offices who need to keep control of colour printing costs and a designated administrator can decide who to apply this to. There is also another security feature, called secure print which allows information which is extremely confidential to be sent to the printer to print, whilst spooling it inside the machine until the user enters a pin number on the printer panel, to authorise physical printing of the document.

The Brother HL-3040 can handle paper weight ranges up to 163g and can print onto envelopes, labels and recycled paper. The print speeds are the same for both colour and black and white and average around 16 pages per minute. The paper tray is a handy 250 sheets which is larger than your average base printer and with the ability to change the printer to n-up print settings which allows you to place multiple prints on the same page, paper savings can be even greater.

If you are going to push this printer and print large scale graphics, there is an option to take this printer from 32MB to 544MB, which we would definitely recommend.

Printer Overview
Printer Type: Colour LED Printer
Dimensions (w x d x h): 409 mm x 466 mm x 250 mm weight: 19.0kg
Memory: 32 MB – 544MB
Print Resolution: 2400 x 600 dpi
Print Speed (Colour): 16 pages per minute
Connectivity: Hi-speed USB 2.0
Paper Capacity: 250 sheets – input; 100 sheets – output