brother HL-3040CN Digital Color LED Printer with Networking

Pros: It prints quickly and the quality is comparable to high-end laser printers that are much more expensive.

The printer is pretty quiet, and goes to sleep and wakes quickly.

I mainly print, scientific journal articles, many of which contain color images. For my purposes, it prints wonderfully. Full page color images print quickly and with good quality.

Cons: This printer does not have an automatic duplexer.

On OS X Lion, it takes a bit of menu jockeying to enable toner save mode. To enable this, from the print dialog, select Print Settings, expand Advanced, Select Toner Save Mode, and then click to enable Toner Save Mode.

Other Thoughts: I have no regrets about buying this printer. It replaced an HP inkjet that was slow, costly, and had a low print quality. I would recommend this printer to a friend.

The printer is fairly large and heavy (look at the specs) so it may not be the best choice if you have limited space. With my old printer (an HP inkjet), I would keep the printer on a shelf and then move it to my desk whenever I needed to print. Not so with this printer. It is too heavy and bulky to move around every time you need to print.

However, this is not necessarily a "con" because I would rather have a heavy printer that works than a rinkey-dink inkjet.

Pros: It prints. :D
Still waiting to find out how much ink it guzzles.

Cons: If it was not for the deal don't buy this printer its an old school design out dated imo.

Other Thoughts: the ink is worth as much as the printer what the EGG!?

Pros: Easy setup in Win7 for a peer-to-peer network. From all of the previous positive reviews it seemed that this is a fairly high-quality printer. I did not expect razor-sharp imaging from the LED lasers. While not photo-quality, the printing quality of this printer is just fine. It is better than the last 3 inkjet printers I have had.

Cons: None.

Pros: We got this printer for our office where we anticipate a moderate amount of volume being printed. We are using it to print labels, flyers and packaging/shipping information. The software was easy to install on every computer and the picture quality is sharp. We are very happy that we no longer have to go to staples to print anything for marketing.

Cons: I downloaded the linux drivers from the Brother website and haven't gotten them to work yet. However, I am not an advanced linux user and I haven't spent a whole lot of time trying to figure it out. I'm confident the linux drivers work if you know what you are doing, and I have yet to figure it all out.

Other Thoughts: The toner comes in black, yellow, magenta and cyan, and each are $40. How this printer ships for $150 and the toner costs $120, it's beyond me, but I'm elated with the price!

Pros: This is a great printer for the cost. It connects as a standalone printer on your home/office LAN whether you're wireless or hard wired. You can configure all of the basic LAN elements, or just hook it up and let your DHCP configure it. It prints well, I even tried some photos which came out better than they really should for a color laser. Prints fairly quickly, with no artifact or blemishes.

Cons: It has limited RAM, though this is only an issue if you try to print large high resolution color images. Might want a RAM upgrade for that, but then if you want to print such images a laser is probably not the type of printer for you.

Other Thoughts: I got a full set of toner refills on (a popular online auction site) for about 70.00 usd, which included (2) black and one of each color and all four reset flag gears. Make sure you get the reset flag gears with the toner refills because Brother starter cartridges need that in order to refill properly. This is the most economical way to print your color documents, hands down! Great printer!

Pros: Good print quality
easy network setup
Linux drivers available for those who refuse to bow to Microsoft (works with Ubuntu).
I do hope they keep making it and work out the bugs.

Cons: NOT user friendly... any error keeps it from working.
"Ghost" paper jams somewhat common.
Ink needs changed way before toner used.
many toner cartridges ARE DEFECTIVE FROM FACTORY and after putting a new one in it will still demand you change it

Other Thoughts: I've got 3 of these. Two burnt out immediately after first plugging them in. The first one was hit by lightning. Two repaired under warranty. These are good little printers but be prepared for headaches. This would be a good daily user with a more reliable printer for urgent and critical jobs. With firmware updates and better q/c on printer and cartridges, this would be an excellent value.

Pros: You can print to this over the network! We use this at home as most people would use an inkjet, except the colors don't smear like ink does and the cartridges last way longer than any inkjet. I got this on sale for $160 so it was great deal too.

Cons: the manual feed tray doesn't hold very many sheets at a time, so if I'm using special paper I usually just put it in the main paper tray face down.

Other Thoughts: I use this printer with a mac, and I've had no driver problems.

Pros: Color, cost effective, network printing, trouble free.

Cons: Not super fast, but for the price range, it's very competitive. Can't believe some of the other brand's PPM rates in this price range. Who wants to wait 15-20 seconds for each page?

Other Thoughts: Brother comes through again, using several of their HL series printers(3040CN, 4040CN x2, 4070CDW), and they never fail me.

Pros: Prints very high quality even without adding additional memory on plain paper - everything I have printed looks good. The printer is relatively quiet and works quickly.

Cons: When something happens that raises a message - the printer stays in an "on" state, consuming more energy and generating more heat. It doesn't go to idle after being ignored for 5 minutes - which it probably should.

The manual feed door doesn't have any sort of attachment to support 8.5" x 11" paper - it's just a tiny thing of less than 3" and the paper slumps down over the end. This makes it challenging to print double sided documents (of course I can put them inside).

And - of course - there's always the problem of how to orient paper for double sided printing - why can't manufacturers simply put a little graphic label on the manual feed and sheet feed tray that depicts this so to prevent trial and error for those of us who infrequently print that way?

Other Thoughts: I finally replaced my first toner cartridge - about 650 pages (444 color) and the color cartridges are about ready to be replaced as well. As someone else noted - these are "starter cartridges" so I am looking forward to getting a solid year's use out of the full size version.

Pros: The printer gives surprisingly sharp detail and prints extremely crisp colors. Also toners provide some of the best cost per page according to statistics.

Cons: It gets pretty hot during printing, hotter than some other laser printers and can be a tad loud. Also it lacks automatic duplex printing, but no other printers in this range seem to have the option either. Plastic casing is not perfectly fitted all the way around, which doesn't affect the printing but some perfectionists may be upset.

Other Thoughts: This is my first personal laser printer, and I went with brother both because it's what we have at work and after some research it seemed to provide the best cost per page for toner usage. I've only had the printer a short time, but have done quite a few jobs on it already, and I must say I've been very impressed. I picked it up on sale for $199 and it was definitely well worth it.