In an improvement on its older sibling, the HL-1440, printing with the Brother HL-5040 Printer, which uses the Brother HL 5040 Toner, is relatively pain-free. That it sells for less than 300 dollars in most instances is a bonus that's hard to pass up. All-around, the HL-5040 is a qualitative jump up over the older model. It comes with paper storage and a better print speed output. It will make a good addition to most any office.

Ease of set-up for the HL-5040 is well within the abilities of most people. It's both Mac and PC compatible, so it has a versatility that isn't common in a printer in this price range. There's a comprehensive installation and instruction guide included with the unit. It provides numerous "how to" videos and maintenance tips, in addition to hyperlinks to the Brother website. This Brother unit could fill in quite capably for any small network's laser printer in a pinch. The network would hardly notice a difference.

The HL-5040 can store 250-sheets. This is upgradeable by another 250 sheets with the addition of a second tray. It also has a manual bypass input for odd printing jobs. With a total of 500 sheets, it won't need to be re-fed on a constant basis, either. You can also have it equipped with a 10/100 Ethernet interface for extra charge.

At 8MB of memory, the HL-5040 does its job well enough. It also uses printer driver screens where you can set up tasks from basic all the way to advanced jobs. There's a support screen, too. The printer allows you to designate things like paper size to be used, and which tray that paper will be taken from. You can also adjust print quality and line up a duplex printing job, if you need it. It's always best to practice a bit with this unit's abilities before going full-speed with it.

As far as print speed is concerned, the Brother will produce rich graphics pages at around 13 ppm and text products at 14 ppm, for the most part. As far as sub-300 dollar printers go, this is right in the middle of a very competitive playing field.

Good print quality is what you'd expect in this segment, and it serves its owner well. Text will print out crisp and clear, with no bleariness or smudging evident. It also is able to create detailed drawings and the quality of the printed photos is nice enough for the small office or home office (SOHO).

There's a standard 1 year warranty, and that can be extended an additional 2 years for a small charge. This makes a total of 3 years that the printer can be serviced under warranty, which is probably longer than most business people would have the printer around for. Online and telephone tech support is freely available, too.

This unit comes standard with a Brother HL-5040 toner cartridge that's good for around 3,500 pages of copy. A 6,500 page version is also available. Both will keep the per-page cost of printing to 2 cents or below, which makes this a smart option for a small office owner. Copy output looks fine, with no smudging or smearing. Both the printer and the toner operate well with each other. For more information visit http://www.qtoner.us.