Brother has a longstanding reputation in the world of printers and the new HL-2140 is their latest one. A monochrome laser printer - aimed at both home and office users - it promises low cost reliability and improved looks along with a small footprint. Let's see if it delivers.
Performance
The printer is easy to setup and the instructions are simple enough for anyone to install them. It took under 10 seconds to initialize once the printer was turned on.
Now for the tests,
Font size Printing
A page containing all alphabets of different sizes was printed. Under the medium quality setting it looked remarkably good and the letters had sharp contrast.
Text Print Speed
Entire pages full of black text were next on the list, the first page took over 10 seconds, contrary to the manufacturers claims. However, later on the fast 2.6 seconds per page was impressive and it reached the 23 pages per minute speed.
Presentation Document Speed
A higher resolution version of the above image was printed, in grayscale of course, since it's a monochrome printer, maintaining the 2.6 seconds was required to print even this. The quality is slightly reduced but it's not noticeable unless minutely observed.
Conclusion
Being a monochrome printer, its appeal for the casual home user might be limited. However it is aimed at the home-office user as well. It's a low-end printer, at Rs.5900 it is reasonably stylish and remarkably fast, maintaining 23 PPM consistently. It takes 460 watts while in operation and 80 watts in standby, this is quite high but laser printers do require more power. Luckily it goes into sleep mode in between prints during which it consumes 5 watts. There are two toner cartridges available for this - the Standard Yield TN-2130 and the High Yield TN-2150, which have duty cycles of 1,500 and 2,600 respectively. The drum and toner units are sold separately despite the printer being a low-end model. This is good because you run out of toner long before the drum unit needs to be replaced, so by being able to replace them separately you save on maintenance costs.
The drum unit is priced at Rs.3,925, the standard toner is Rs.1,900 and the high yield one costs Rs.2800. This brings the CCP (cost per page) to Rs.1.59 if you use standard toner and Rs.1.40 if you use high yield cartridges. Overall this is a great deal and one of the better printers around, this is definitely worth your money.
Test unit sourced from: Brother International,Mumbai.
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