Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer

Comments about Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer:

Some rating the Brother may not be aware of a few things: #1: the slowness/pauses are fixed by a cheap memory upgrade. I popped in an old laptop chip and am flying. The speed is very good, esp. considering all the options available.
#2: There is some paper curl, but no more than my old HP and straightens out for the Brother. You can minimize by finding out which orientation your paper should be fed first and **keeping your paper dry** (away from humidity). I keep excess in original coated wrapper. Only envelopes are strongly affected, but lasers are designed to print labels (which the Brother does very well) unless they have an envelope feeder. It's unfair to rate the machine low because it doesn't do something it wasn't designed for.
#3. Color issues: the Brother has outstanding control over color. I find it very good, but again, not designed to be a "photo printer." Judge for yourself at Staples as the samples are REAL and not professionally printed ads. I touched up the reds, grays, and brightness with the control panel when installed and I'm VERY happy with the color quality. I love the web interface for making changes and monitoring.

The comments on ease of install are true. The configuration is outstanding. Whatever interface you choose, the Brother basically "finds itself" during the install. I'm still amazed how well recent Brother drivers work. (I install a lot of printers.)

Toner costs are critical; as many others have stated, why buy a printer when replacement toners cost more than the printer? The Brother comes with full cartridges. Many come with "starters" which are half full. Calculating that into the price makes many seem outlandishly expensive by comparison. (Like buying inkjets...)

I'm not aware of any printer that combines the quality, options and running cost of the Brother. No, it's not perfect, but I couldn't find one that touched the HL-4070CDW all around.

Comments about Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer:

I've owned the Brother HL-4070 for almost five months, long enough to be ready for my first toner replacement. Thankfully, the toner replacement won't cost more than the machine itself as it does with the HP color lasers. [...]I should note that I also have a very expensive HP 3800dn in my CA office and quite frankly I prefer the Brother. The HP is slow to wake up from sleep, is always complaining about something or recalibarting itself, and doesn't better the Brother all that much in terms of print quality.The biggest complaint I have, and it's a minor one at that, is that the pages using 20lb Xerox Premium White from [...] do come out with a slight curl to them. As sonn as the paper cools, it flattens out, but I have read that other papers may not fully relax. For some owners this is a big problem, but not for us.The best thing about the printer is its great Windows driver. It comletely blows away the HP driver. You can control absolutely everything about the printer from the pinter. If you can't find it on the driver tabs, you can always log in directly via the built-in web server and tweak the printer's settings to your hearts content.Some have criticized the drop in performance when using the duplexer, but I can't say enough good things about it. Of course it cuts page throughput in half, but it's printing both sides! Without two complete toner banks, I don't see any way you could do it much faster. Certainly, the HP isn't that much faster despite costing more than twice as much.The wireless feature is very cool and essentially free with a duplexing color laser printer [...]The Wifi connection is so reliable, I removed the Cat5 cable after a few weeks. It simply wasn't needed. The set-up is also a piece of cake unless you're totally WiFi challenged.The 500-sheet paper tray is also great, although it took me forever to get one, because I refused to pay retail for the thing. You just lower the printer on the new tray and you're done. You do have to go back to the driver and let it discover the new tray, but once you do, the driver lets you control boh trays in every imaginable way. I keep our company letterhed in Tray 1 and plain white in Tray 2.I've also read a number of complaints about the lack of "eye-popping" color from the 4070. I don't expect that from a laser, and I certainly don't see it from the HP. I've never seen the output from a Konica or an Oki, but the Brother is fine for everything our business needs. If you want photographic quality, get an inkjet. If you want that wax look, get a Xerox Phaser, assuming they still make them.Bottom line is the HL-4070 does exactly what you want a color laser to do. It prints 2-sided color documents quickly, reliably, and wirelessly while selling for dramatically less than anything else with its feature set. Go buy one and enjoy.

Comments about Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer:

I almost didn't buy this printer because some people knocked it concerning set up. I owned a print shop for 22 years, so mine is an informed opinion. Don't listen to them, this is a great printer, especially for the low cost. The color quality is almost as good as a high end ink jet and because it is a laser the prints don't smudge. A 32 MB photoshop file took 21 seconds to begin print (wirelessly) and 50 pages popped out in less than 2 minutes. It is so much faster than an ink jet and the HP laser. The color output is better than an HP also. The new toner must by the solution because saturation was fantastic. I ran the same file in both before I bought. The HP showed some registration error, the Brother did not.
Everyone is correct when they say it is difficult to set up wirelessly but that was only with windows. Anytime you see "Wizard this" or "Wizard that," it is Bill Gates way of saying "I was a wizard to get you to buy my sorry software and you are the one that has to be a Wizard to make it work." I have rarely seen any "Wizard" actually work and I have never seen one that hasn't asked a question to which there was no correct answer. I ended up having to set it up config with my apple first, then it started working in windows.
On a MAC all you have to do is go tell your computer to print (from ANY program), choose "set up a rendevous printer" from the printer dialog box ( it's on the menu where you can change printers to print to). The Mac detected the Brother printer instantly, asked if this was the printer I wanted to make work then went onto internet and downloaded the EXACT software I needed, installed it, and I was good to go in 15 seconds. All without asking any stupid questions.
This is a great printer, so far.

Comments about Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer:

I have been using a Brother MFC 4350 (monochrome laser) printer for several years. Although it still prints well, I wished to replace it for three reasons. (1) I occasionally do large print runs, and I wanted more speed. (2) Those large print runs involve envelopes, and I can print only about seven envelopes at a time. (3) The manual duplex sometimes double-feeds sheets on the second run, leaving the pages out of order, so I wanted automatic duplex.

I selected the HL-4070CDW because I had read many positive reviews, the paper tray is large, it has automatic duplex, and printing in color has undeniable appeal. Ordinary simplex and duplex printing on standard paper seems to work quite well. And the color, while not photo quality, is good. However: (1) envelopes must be loaded in the “multi-purpose” tray which will hold only three at a time, so I would need to stand there feeding envelopes on my large runs. (2) The paper is severely curled. I am a musician, and I print my own compositions and arrangements. Curled paper will not stand on the music rack of a piano. The MFC 4350 curled the paper slightly, but the curling is severe on the HL-4070CDW and unacceptable for my purposes.

Comments about Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer:

We use color lasers to produce product manuals, marketing materials and newsletters. Our previous excellent experience was with Konica- Minolta 5400 series color lasers. We ordered this machine because[...]does not stock K-M printers any longer. The Brother's color output is somewhat washed-out. My big issue with the printer is that it cannot print a long color document without frequent pauses of up to twenty seconds while the "Please wait" message displays on the control panel. These same documents have printed without a hitch on our Konica-Minolta printers. My office prints close to 200,000 pages per year on our color laser printers. The Brother simply does not seem to be a production-class machine, though I suppose one gets what one pays for. It might be fine for a small office where mass-production is not an issue. We are returning the Brother and will try to obtain a Konica-Minolta 5440DL.

Comments about Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer:

Excellent when printing in black, but color is not sharp. The printer just burns through the toner and just turns off when low toner light is indicated. You can print a perfectly acceptable page, then have the printer stop working due to a low toner color. I find it hard to believe the toner cartridge is actually empty when the last page printed was just fine. Seems to be automatically programmed to shut down after it prints 1500 pages in color.