Customer Reviews

Brother HL-4040cdn Color Laser Printer with Duplex and Networking

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

This printer will tell you when you are out of toners and need new ones. And when you are out with just one of the color toner, this printer will not allow you to print anything until you replace it with the new toner.

So here is how to override these problem, and you decide when the toner needs to be changed... and not the printer.

1. Slide out the toner trays and put a piece of black electrical tape over the sensors on each color toner. This will make the print think that it has full toner.

2. If you already see "Replace Toner" messages, just RESET it by opening the front COVER and pressing CANCEL and REPRINT together. Scroll up and down to reset desired toner.

3. If you think you have more life and juice left on its drum and laser parts, just reset it and forget it! Open the COVER, and hold down GO and hit UP (+) button. Scroll through the menu to select and reset!!!!

After the "replace toner" message, I reset the counter, and I have printed over 2000 more pages on a same cartridge. But be aware! You will start to see some "sprinkles of toners" on your pages as they are way over used.

I researched and found that cartridges for this machine are a lot cheaper than those for HP's and the toner that comes with the printer has a page yield of 1500 color and 2500 b&w. The Hp's came with toner that had only 750 page yield then you had to pay approx $140 for the toner cartridges for replacement when with this one you can purchase toner cartridges for right around $70 which is half the price with more page yield. So far I have printed 450 pages on the starter cartridges and the toner amount has not lowered and the print quality is excellent!

I purchased the Brother HL-4040CDN in June 09, after reading all the reviews I could find. Some people mentioned a problem printing envelopes but I thought that was just a random problem;but soon found that every envelope I printed was creased and wrinkled. I tried every Printer Properties option - envelope type, paper type, thicker paper, etc. I researched all the Brother website troubleshooting help for printer, paper feeding and envelope issues, and tried it all. Nothing worked. Then, I went to Solution Center, FAQs: "envelopes wrinkle and crease" I found this one thing that helped tremendously. Very insignificantly listed as the last option: Open the back door of the printer and move the Envelope levers down, these are two grey levers next to the green levers on the fuser unit. Make sure to leave the grey levers down for envelope printing only. When done printing envelopes return the grey lever to the original position or UP position for use with regular paper.

It is very inconvenient to open the back door and move the grey levers every time I need to print an envelope, so I have found that leaving the grey levers down has not caused a problem printing on paper.

Hope this helps someone. It sure helped me, and would have saved me lots of time and envelopes.

first, everybody else is right: great solid construction, prints fast after initial warm up, toner cartridge price is reasonable. The initial cartridges that come with it seem to be lasting OK. Price is right.

I'm just going to list some downsides here:
1)plan are doing an setup of about a half hour to 45 minutes, it involves a lot of unpacking, inserting components, and removing shipping pins and installing software. No big deal there.

2)the colors printed are not going to be exactly what you envisioned, a graphic of a nice red stop sign is going to more of a pastel, maybe even purplish, a green will be muddy, the only primary color that will be close is yellow. I know this is a product of CMYK printing, but keep this is mind if you're doing brochures.

3)pages have a heavy curl to them after printing. Not really a problem with standard paper, but if you're using card stock (like I use for door hangers), you have to go to the effort of trying to uncurl them before reinserting them back in the tray to print the other side, otherwise you're looking at a paper jam. This wasn't an issue with my older b/w laser, so I was totally surprised by this.

again: great printer, good price (although I bought it from amazon at $275 and now it's at $359, not sure what happened there) just be aware of the issues I had

I needed a laser printer to create DVD album covers, which often includes graphics and high quality photos. Overall this was a great printer but it didn't have the print quality I needed. It was easy to set up on my Mac and relatively quick to print something. My main problem with this printer was the print quality for pictures. I ended up taking the Brother 4040cdn back and getting a HP CP2025. The HP CP2025 isn't as fast as the Brother 404cdn but the print quality blows it away.

Also, the Brother 4040cdn created pressed lines into my presentation paper from the rollers used to pull the paper through the printer, also something that I couldn't accept. Regular printer paper seemed to be come through with no lines.

This Brother Color printer HL-4040CDN is definitely worth it's price. The built quality and setup is very easy and the toners are really big so I hope not to spend too much on toners for colors. It replaced my often problematic HP color printer.

Pros:
- Features for printing (vivid, normal), Mono, Color, duplex, network and more.
- Price per page on color printing
- Easy Setup
- Ease of usage

Cons:
- Weight of printer
- footprint is enormous
- The 64MB initial memory was not enough memory, I had to purchase another 512MB to be able to even apply the Brother patch firmware. So consider to spend another $50 or so for memory.

Overall, I see this printer to last a very long time. I did research others like Lexmark, HP (CP2025CDN.. toners were super small and toner cost is way to expensive), Samsung (really good on price but questionable on reliability).

I don't recommend wireless network since the signal maybe weak and you can't print. Ethernet networking for printer is better.

***UPDATE***
It's been well over a year and I love this baby! We are nearing 40,000 pages printed and I couldn't be happier!



Well I've had this printer for almost a month and I've printed just over 11,850 pages, about 11,500 ran through the duplexer. I can not say enough about this machine.

A MUST for those who print great deal of text. It replaced an old Canon F80, old but tried and true and worked for over 3 years! Although this machine is not an all in one, it makes it worth the added cost of another machine when you figure the amazing cost of printing. I am paying just under $0.01 per page, with the OEM high yield black toner from a local supply house at a very good price! We tried using generic toner but only printed about 2000 sheets before needing a replacement. Don't waste your time with generic toner on this machine. I use it on our network and it connects as easy as pie to both my XP (SP2) machines as well as my iMac (10.5.7)

It would have gotten 5 stars if it wasn't for the paper handling options. The paper tray could be a bit larger, it only holds around 200 sheets, and if you plan on printing more than 115 pages then you'd better start catching the sheets as it comes out of the printer, (it only has room for so much before it starts pushing the existing prints onto the floor!!!) It is also a bit loud when printing. You can still carry on a conversation, but their is no question about the humming fan and drums spinning in the machine under the desk!!!

An additional paper tray would be nice for this machine, as well as better printing option when printing on harder card stock or envelopes. When I print on either of those two I get creases from the rollers (a very unprofessional look.)

I am still in the market for another All-In-One to take care of my copy and fax needs, but for now I am extremely satisfied with this purchase.

It's only been one day (actually 5 hours) since i've had this printer but man oh man am I impressed. This is a fantastic laser printer for its cost. Setup was a breeze, took about 5 minutes. The driver only takes another 5 minutes to install. After that you are up and printing. The built in duplexer is amazing. I was curious to just exactly how it works, and now I know. When you select double sided printing, you see the page print and slide out into the tray but then at the very last second, it SUCKS BACK IN! HAHA! I know! Its electronic wizardry at its best! It prints on the front, then sucks it in, flips it over, prints on the 2nd side, and voila you are done. Completely automatic and magical. Im a college student and most of our textbooks are online this semester. It's the dirty publishers preventing us from reselling our books after the semester, but I digress........ I have to print out full chapters of books at a time. With the duplexer, a 30 page printout becomes a 15 page print out. Saves the environment by using less paper, takes up less space in my binder, and looks freaking cool too!

I have a Mac and had no problems installing it. I also installed it on Windows XP and it works perfectly on both systems. I don't have vista so i can't vouch for that. But honestly if you have Vista, then you are an idiot anyway so it doesn't matter if the driver works or not.

The print quality on black and white (i will be using it for this purpose mostly typing up papers and such) is fantastic. Crisp and clean. You can adjust what DPI it prints at. The color prints come out fantastic for a laser printer. Let's face it people, were obviously not dealing with a photo printer here. If you're planning on using it for that, this definitely isn't for you. But as far as doing color text and flyers and ads, or inserting images into documents or printing out webpages and stuff, this is perfect. Just dont expect it to look like something from a photo lab because it definitely isn't.

To the people who said the page curling bothers you.... are you guys being serious? It shouldn't even be considered a "curl". The page is slightly rounded but its absolutely not CURLED. It goes away after a few minutes. Anytime you heat paper and twist it, its gonna get a little curvy but its not a big deal. Stop complaining about useless things and admit this printer kicks major a$$ !

Update: 1 year later, this printer still rules. Very reliable, and the toner still shows 99% full. We will have electronic paper by the time it runs out! Granted I use it mostly for household printing, and a few business documents, but I would have spent at least $50 on inkjet cartridges by now.

I don't know about you, but I got really tired of inkjet printers. The software that came with it never seemed to work, and if that wasn't the problem, the dang thing was out of ink. So I had to run to the store to spend another $45 on cartridges. I swore never to buy another inkjet.
Then I stumbled on this sweet laser printer on sale at Office Max/Depot/Staples/whatever. It was almost an impulse buy, and I was out the door for about $305. It turned out to be the best impulse buy I ever made, and I've had no regrets.

Reasons why this printer is better than your inkjet:
-It's a real office grade printer. No jams, crisp text, prints both sides, really fast. Once it warms up, the pages just fly out.

-The software just works. Install the driver, plug it into the network, start printing. Er, especially if you have a mac.

-Cheaper in the long run. No, really. The toner cartridges might be a little spendy, but the included cartridges are supposedly good for your first 1,500-2,500 pages. How many pages do you really get out of your inkjet cartridges? 50-100? Also, you'll keep this printer about 2-3 times longer than any inkjet. Oh, and the duplexing thing, i.e. printing both sides of the page, saves money and trees, so you got the eco thing goin' for ya.

-The toner is water resistant, unlike inkjets. No smudges, no drying, no rainy day disasters.

I will say that the photo quality isn't quite the same as an inkjet photo printer. But, it's good enough that I would still hang it on the wall. Also, the thing takes a fair amount of space. If you live in a small apartment, you might have a hard time finding a place for a laser printer.

Very happy with this. Amazon had a $120 instant rebate on this making it $293 shipped next day air. Not bad for a 74lb box.

Vista drivers were included and setup was a snap. Black text is sharp and crisp, with better photos than I expected - just set the print preferences -> Advanced to 2400 dpi mode (in Windows, not on the printer itself).

It did miss out some lines on a small graph, but this is also corrected by the "improve thin lines" option in the printer driver.

Overall a bargin with the rebate - pretty much the same price as the toner.