Shopping for Laptop Netbook Computer Component Printer & Accessories

Great for college
Before freshman year started, my parents and I bought this printer along with a laptop so that I could take it to college. It's saved me a lot of money compared to having to pay to use the printers at school. It's simple and fast to use. I am still using this printer, and I am going into my 4th year at the university. However, lately it's been acting up with paper jams, but they are easy to fix. Simply open the paper tray and pull the paper out. I've also been getting some grey spotting on my paper, but I think that is a toner issue. This is a very good printer: print quality is excellent; noise level is low; prints fast; and the setup and use is very easy. This printer is very economical as well. From student to student, I would highly recommend this if there are lots of papers, lab reports, Powerpoint notes, etc. to be printed. I forgot how much this was, but I am sure it was quite affordable. It is worth every penny; 5 stars overall.

A warehouse work-horse that lasted for years.
I'll be honest - I bought this printer a few years ago for less than brand new through one of the "big box" office supply stores. I should have bought 2, especially since the toner costs more than the printer did. The 2040 has been a solid little work horse and has bee extremely reliable for several years. I print thousands of pages a month and I have never had any major issues with this printer. Toner can be expensive for any printer and one is wise to do their homework to see if there are any "tricks" to get more performance out of any given machine.

I just purchased the newer Brother HL-2140 as it is a little faster, a little quieter, and let's face it, after a number of years one starts to worry that their printer might die on them on the least opportune occasion! Don't worry, my trusty 2040 has been carefully boxed and "archived" so that if I need a back-up to the 2140 or need a second laser printer for any reason I can call it back into service.

Excellent Printer
I love this printer. Even more so since I see how much it costs on the web, and I picked it up second hand in a local thrift store for only .00 (twelve dollars) thinking it is likely broken but may be fixable. Much to my suprise and happiness, it worked perfectly.

It's quiet, quieter than my new HP 6500 by far. Page curl? Yeah there is some with the paper that was left in the printer (about 250 pages were left in it by the old owner), when I switched to my own 20lb paper the page curl was not noticible anylonger, or maybe it's the way that I use it, I stack paperwork on top of the printer, then print out the pages, stack more paperwork on top then print out the next document, on and on I go, so perhaps whatever curling is left is flattened out for me.

All that I really know is that I go to print a page and it's almost instantaneous, it take no more than a couple seconds to spit out my document, compared to my new HP 6500 which takes substantially longer, and even longer still if Im printing one page documents one after the next with 10 seconds breaks since the HP seems to want to re-align the printhead after each document, this Brother just keeps spitting out the documents one after the next.

It's an excellent little printer and I believe I'd be just as satisfied had I paid full retail for it too.


UPDATE: Of course I probably jinxed myself by writting up a positive review on this printer. No sooner had I written this review then I went to print out a document on the printer and the red paper light started flashing. I checked for paper jams but nothing was jammed. I looked it up on the web to see what else might be the matter with it and tried all the "solutions" I could find to no avail. As soon as I closed the front toner/drum door the printer would go to a green ready light and then go to a flashing red paper light.

It took me a while to figure it out but as it turns out there must be something wrong with the door on these, either warpage or the mechanism that detects the door being closed.

The solution to the red flashing paper light is to slide in the toner/drum into the slot but do NOT push it in until it "clicks" into place, now close the door on it and let the door push the toner/drum into place. It seems obvious to me that there is an issue with either aftermarket toner cartridges, or with the whole drum device and the way it's manufactured. In any event I've pulled the toner/drum out of this printer so many times now and each time if I push the toner/drum into place until it snaps into place, then the red flashing paper light will come on, however if I push it only in until it's slid in, and then use the door to push it into full position it will print perfectly.

Hope this helps anybody else that might have a red flashing paper light on their HL-2040 printer.

The solution to paper curl (if it affects you) is to change the printer driver settings to "thin paper" as that will minimize the paper curl, the thicker the setting (i.e. Thick Paper) in the driver, the worse the paper curl, I've always run it at thin paper so never really experienced the paper curl until I changed it to thick paper to see what all the hub bub was about and sure enough, using the thick paper setting on regular paper does produce paper curl. So change it to thin and you should be ok.

So, do I still think this printer is a good printer? Absolutely, when I can refill the toner myself for only .00 and get over 2,000 pages (all text) out of it for only .00 compared to my HP printer which gets roughly 1,000 pages (again, all text) for a .00 ink cartridge, then yes, this is still a great printer, even if I can't use the manual feed slot anylonger. Fortunately I do have the HP so I'll use that when I need to print envelopes since the curl on envelopes on the Brother HL-2040 is pretty bad and not worthy of sending out envelopes printed with it if you need to send out things like resumes, for regular business no problem, paying bills, no problem, sending resumes, don't use it.

Great price per print compared to newer inkjet printers by far.

Updated Update:
There may be one other issue, the printer drivers for this device on Windows Vista 64 Bit computers is built into the operating system and apparently Brother couldn't be bothered to put out new drivers that give the full printer package. Using the downloaded drivers, really only included the "interactive help" system that tells you what to check for the flashing lights. But it has a sort of built in tutorial system that demonstrates how to set certain things up like making your print smaller, however this stuff doesn't exist in the built in drivers for Vista 64 bit so no frilly accessory stuff is included with the drivers on vista 64 bit. If you need to reduce your pages to 93% like we do, you're pretty much out of luck. I make do and recycle the second page that never gets printed on for us except the top line since this is a work machine everybody ignores the top line of print as it's the "header" of the page and not used in our company and nobody could be bothered to remove the header before printing out their prints anyway.

Never the less, a full software package from Brother would be nice for the Vista 64 bit operating system, it seems they just don't care much unless you buy their newest printers.