The Brother HL-4070CDW is a behemoth of a color laser printer, weighing in at nearly 65 pounds. The manual even warns you not to pick it up by yourself. But thankfully, heaving it out of the box and onto a sturdy table is more difficult than actually setting it up or printing with it.

 

Aimed at home office and small business settings, the HL-4070CDW has a variety of straightforward connectivity options. Of course you can connect it to a single Mac with a USB cable. But you can also attach it to a network via 10/100 Ethernet or built-in 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, which has WEP and WPA2 encryption. The included setup guide clearly explains all the connectivity scenarios, and the CD-ROM features videos that show you how to set up the printer as well as a full installer app that walks you through each step. Leopard drivers are bundled with the OS. We had the printer up and running on a wireless network in less than 10 minutes.

 

A USB port on the front lets you print directly from a thumb drive or a PictBridge-compatible camera. It’s a snap to make an index print for previewing, and after we picked an image to print, it came out in 35 seconds, with great detail, smooth gradients, and rich color and shadows for a laser printer.

 

Brother rates the printer’s speed at a zippy 21 pages per minute for monochrome or color, but we averaged closer to 17ppm when printing a 27-page Word doc (8ppm when using the duplex printing feature), and 10ppm for a 7-page Keynote presentation with full-color, full-bleed slides (4.5ppm duplex). Text and graphics looked sharp, and we noticed little to no banding in the gradients.

 

The HL-4070CDW uses four toner cartridges that cost $59.99 for black and $69.99 for cyan, magenta, and yellow—replacing all four will set you back $270, more than half the price of the printer. High-yield cartridges are $92.99 (black) and $129.99 (color) but should last twice as long. The paper tray holds 250 sheets, and a fold-out multipurpose tray can fit 50 more sheets, plus it will accommodate envelopes and other nonstandard sizes.

 

The bottom line. The HL-4070CDW is a speedy, versatile printer, and an economical choice until the toner runs out. With a maximum duty cycle of 35,000 pages per month, it’s a solid performer for a small business.

 

COMPANY:Brother

CONTACT: www.brother.com

PRICE: $499.99

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.2.4 or later; USB, Ethernet, or Wi-Fi

 

Easy duplex printing. Can print directly from USB drives or PictBridge cameras. Full installer app for the Mac.

Noisy. Expensive toner. cartridges. Small LCD. only. Can’t be used via FireWire.