Bought it Yesterday.
Pros:
Fairly clear instructions for setup. Linux support. Drivers support manual duplexing. Decent photos. Solid construction.
Cons:
Costly toner. Size and weight. Curls paper.
The Bottom Line:
A good choice for a home office workhorse. It does curl paper though. Toner may be expensive.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
I bought a new HL-4040CN yesterday and set it up on a dual-boot Windows XP/Ubuntu machine to replace a 16 year old Epson AL1500 that finally died.
The instructions were excellent. Follow them! They lead you through removal of all the clips and covers used to protect the machine during shipping, and printing of a test page before you hook up the printer to your network or computer. When the test page prints, you know that the printer itself works.
To set it up under Ubuntu, follow the instructions on the solutions.brother.com web site. You must create some directories etc. before installing the .deb driver package. I installed this as a generic PCL 6 printer under CUPS, and connected it via USB, so I cannot address using it as a "real network printer".
The printer itself is big and heavy. (65 lbs) The chassis is metal, not plastic, so I think it will last. It is meant to be a workhorse.
The printer driver supports manual duplexing of small numbers of pages The printer itself leaves a small border blank around the paper margins using letter width paper. This is described in the complete manual provided on the CD-ROM. If you need "bleed" edges, the printer will not do that. Use a paper cutter and settle for slightly smaller pictures. Once paper leaves the printer it has a definite but tolerable curl.
Photo reproduction is decent to my untutored eye. I did notice some banding, but I did not find it horribly offensive. Remember, this is a small office workhorse. If you want gorgeous reproduction of highly saturated colors, go elsewhere.
Windows setup was easy. Just stick the CD-ROM in the drive and follow the directions. Then read the 202-page exhaustive PDF manual.
The LCD display is nicely backlit, so the printer is easy to use in a dimly-lit room. It flashes red when there is a problem, and the problem is described on the display - nicer than HP's blinking LED's
So basically this printer hits the mark. A big caveat will be toner prices. To replace all the toner cartridges costs about as much as a new printer! It would have been nice of Brother to include high-yield cartridges. As it is, once toner needs replacing, owners of this printer will be heading out to buy a new printer, which may not be a Brother. The longer Brother can keep this from happening, the better - for both of us.
Here's to the next 16 years!
