Brother Canada has a new line of colour laser printers and I am a lucky guinea pig who is testing the Brother HL-4070CDW colour laser printer.
#1 Tip: Word of Mouth marketing works if you have a product name that is easy to remember and easy to share.
HL-4070CDW.
Oh well, I can’t change the name. I can tell you about the experience.
According to Brother Canada, the HL-4070CDW is a colour laser printer for business use.
True. The HL-4070CDW is a good business printer.
It’s perfect at what it does:
* Prints documents quickly
* Prints in colour beautifully
* Prints double sided
This is definitely a business printer. If you have a home office and do a lot of printing, this is the printer for you.
It’s quite a bit larger than a standard personal printer, but it’s much smaller than a standard business printer. (Here it is next to my HP psc 1200 series inkjet printer.)
Is it the HL-4070CDW a good printer for me?
* This is a big printer. It’s heavy and takes up a fair share of desk space (like half the desk, it needs its own table)
* You need to install the driver, this is not plug and play, it’s plug, read the instructions, try once, read the instructions more carefully, try again.
What’s the promise of the Brother HL-4070CDW colour laser printer?
This is what the Brother Canada website says (I’ll bold the key features):
Quote: The fast, compact and Wi-Fi certified HL-4070CDW is designed for outstanding business performance. It produces brilliant business colour documents at up to 21 pages per minute. With up to 2400×600 dpi print quality, you can produce bold, eye-catching reports, brochures, and presentations right from your desktop. The HL-4070CDW naturally makes your work more effective. Its automatic two-sided printing saves paper and reduces costs. A USB direct interface allows direct PictBridge and USB flash memory drive printing. A unique front-loading consumable system makes replacing consumables a breeze. Powerful, user-friendly software and connectivity including USB, parallel, Ethernet (cables not included) and an 802.11 b/g wireless connection provide a seamless printing experience for your business.
$629.99
For $629.99, this is a great printer.
* It’s fast.
* It does colour.
* It prints nicely.
* It’s quiet.
So one more time, is it a good printer for me? I have a home office and I run my own company out of shared office space. I need to do high-quality printing on occasion. I print agendas for clients, I print project reports for people I need to impress, I print presentation handouts, I like printing photos. I work in a wireless environment. I work on a Mac. I hate reading instructions, I want things to be intuitive.
These were my pitfalls:
* I couldn’t get the wireless working and that was a big selling feature for me.
* The printer is cumbersome.
* Unpacking this printer took much longer than I hoped. Lots of packaging, lots of tabs to pull and set-up steps that seemed stupid. I had to pull out all these little tabs and pieces of paper–why were they there in the first place?
* The setup was no “Mac” experience–the packaging is not sexy, the set up required carefully reading of the manual. On a positive note, there were instructions for Mac and for PC. THANK YOU!
* The USB connection works great, but I would have been pissed if I didn’t have the appropriate cables already. This is a batteries-not-included experience.
* It only prints.
* It’s not clear how many prints you get on the toner cartridges. Toner cartridges cost $74.99 to $159.99.
Again, this is a business printer. In retrospect, I need a printer, fax, scanner, and copier so this printer might not be the perfect choice for me. Thankfully Brother also offers Multi-function Centres, multi-function printer, scanner, copiers.
Overall, good experience. Thank you Brother Canada.