Brother HL-2140 Laser Printer Review

Using the Brother 2140

The Brother 2140 prints good quality text and acceptable gray-scale graphics. It handles up to legal size paper. Because of its good print quality, it can easily be used professional-looking documents.

The printer has only three lights and a large blue lighted Go button. These are shown in Figure 9. The LED lights are labeled Toner, Drum, and Error. The Toner and Drum lights indicate replacement is needed soon. The Error light indicates no paper, a paper jam, or the cover open. The Go button is used as the wake-up button, error recovery, form feed, job cancel, and reprint. The form feed, job cancel and reprint functions are very useful. Again, more information on this functionality is in the manual, which is a must-read to get the most out of this printer.

Figure 9: The printer lights.

The only other control on the printer is the on/off switch, which can be seen on the right side of the printer in Figure 10. The printer air vents can also be seen in this Figure.

Figure 10: The right side of the printer.

The Brother 2140 handles card stock and envelopes quite well. These, however, must be fed in piece by piece using the manual feed slot, shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11: The manual feed.

Details on using the manual feed slot and feeding in envelops and other media can be f
ound in the User’s Guide, which is on the included CD and can also be found online. We had to play with the settings, adjusting to a “Thick Paper” setting to get some envelopes to print without smearing.

The only real printing problem that we had was in printing three-up checks. Even after adjusting the settings, the second and third check on each page were left with an imprint of the header of the first check.

There was one other problem. The toner light comes on way before the toner is actually depleted. But there are plenty of YouTube videos that will show you how to put a piece of tape over the toner cartridge sensors so you can get to use every last drop of toner. We used this trick and it worked beautifully.

The Brother 2140 has a monthly duty cycle of up to 10,000 sheets. It comes with a toner cartridge that is good for 1,000 pages. Replacement cartridges are available in regular and high-yield capacities that are rated for 1500 and 2600 pages, respectively. Street prices are USD 25 to USD 70. This is one item to really shop around for because prices vary greatly.

Brother estimates the street price of the HL-2040 to be USD 119.99, but we have actually seen it on specials for as low as USD 39. This makes it a real bargain.

One thing to watch out for is that this printer also has a replaceable drum. The drum is rated for 12,000 pages. Again prices vary widely, but if you got a deal on the printer, you may have to pay more for a new drum than you paid for the printer.

Besides saving money over printing with an ink jet printer, this laser printer has an Energy star rating that will save on electricity costs. It also has a Toner Saver mode that can save even a little more on the cost of consumables.