The Brother HL-2140 Driver Download – For people who don’t require color, home and single-desk mono laser printers are more cost-effective to operate than inkjet printers. Brother is the second most popular brand of laser printer in the UK, according to its own literature; therefore, a new entry-level printer merits an early appraisal.
The Brother HL-2140 Driver is a fashionable, low-profile laser printer that comes in light gray and dark slate colors. Its vertical sides are significantly curved, with the exception of the front-left, which features a chic, concave curve under a huge, blue power button at the top.
Just beneath the power button are three more indications for toner, drum, and error status. A flip-up paper stand handles longer US legal-size paper. 250 A4 pages may be loaded into the main paper tray, which pulls out from the machine’s bottom front and can be folded down when printing. There is also a unique media feed; however, the pages lack functionality, so you must manually feed them. Together with its single-sheet feed, a pull-down panel at the back provides a straight-through paper route.
Just a USB 2.0 connector is included with this model of the printer; other models in the range allow extra Ethernet and wireless interfaces.
The Brother HL-2140 Driver produces a lot of its individual toner and drum components, and it is uncommon for a printer at this entry-level price point to lack even a single consumable. After a cover has been folded down, the two consumables are delivered as a single unit that slips in from the front of the printer. The Sibling HL-2140 Driver contains a starter cartridge with a non-standard capacity of 1,000 pages, even though the standard-capacity toner cartridge has a 1,500-page yield rating. This is done to encourage new owners to purchase early.
The Brother software automatically installs its driver and recognizes the USB connection, making software installation very straightforward. There is a printer status monitor, but other than that, you are limited to using the driver’s functions, which include printing multiple pages per sheet, creating posters, and adding watermarks. The Brother HL-2140 Driver does not have a built-in duplexer; however, there is software that can assist in manually printing on both sides of a page.
According to the Brother HL-2140 Driver, the printer can print up to 22 pages per minute, which means a five-page document should be finished in under 15 seconds. The first of our two documents, which was just text, took 21 seconds to complete, while the second, which had text and images, took 22 seconds. This translates to a maximum print speed of 14.3 ppm in regular print mode, which is just around two-thirds of the claimed speed.
When we tried printing our primary text at 300 dpi with toner saving turned on, the print speed was not much affected. The text print quality, which would be fairly good for the majority of print jobs and better than many draft modes on competing mono lasers, was unaffected by toner saving.
The quality is more than acceptable in standard print mode, with sharp, well-defined black text even at small font sizes. The corporate graphics and page rules created by the grayscale reproductions of the color originals are crisp, clear, and banding-free.
Even in our test images, there was no discernible banding and some shadow detail. Even with the highest quality setting of 2,400 dpi by 600 dpi on the printer, the dot pattern is shockingly obvious. Although the straight 600-dpi print option produces results that are almost identical, there is minimal benefit in terms of print speed.
For Brother, the HL-2140 Driver is a brand-new printer that is not yet accessible online. Also, it makes use of brand-new drum and toner units, which aren’t yet priced through the typical discount sources. The toner units have drums that should last 12,000 pages, and their normal and high capacity ratings are 1,500 and 2,600 pages, respectively. These capabilities are suitable in a normal home or small office setting, and maintenance expenses will be minimal.
We utilized Brother’s own printer cost statistics and the suggested retail pricing for drum and toner due to the early review’s exclusive nature. These numbers should decline as soon as the components are widely accessible. This is fortunate because the cost per ISO black page, which we estimate to be 3.14 p, is a bit high even for a printer with this low price.
Verdict
This mono laser printer is a good example of a one-per-desk device that is nicely built, intelligent, and personal. If we had our way, we would like a multi-purpose tray that can hold more than one page at once and a backup toner cartridge that has at least the same capacity as the standard-yield consumable.