Brother DCP 7040 - A Solid Addition to the Home Or Workplace

Printing with the Brother DCP-7040 printer is a snap in an all-in-one machine that's designed to work within the home office or small office workplace. It can store a decent amount of paper, which can be managed as needs require. It also costs less than 200 dollars. The relatively low price can make it a natural selection for the budget-minded owner who needs one unit to print, copy and scan.

The beauty of machines like this one is that they replace three units and reduce congestion in a small office. The DCP-7040 does this well. Add in also that it's a quality laser printer, which makes it perfect for handling all kinds of print taskings will little real effort. There's a typical one-year service warranty which can be extended through a number of different service plans for extra money.

This unit can hold about 250 sheets of paper, which is fine for a small three-in-one. There's also a bypass slot for feeding individual documents or envelopes and label jobs. You can't up paper capacity, but that's not usually a concern for machines of this type. It operates with both PCs and Macs, giving it even more versatility.

The Brother DCP-7040 printer is a really capable unit when it comes to handling print or copy and scan jobs. With a standard USB 2.0 port, it can easily be hooked up to any computer of recent vintage. When looking at the needs of the home office, no tech specialist will have to be called in to do the connecting.

As a straight-up printer, the DCP-7040 puts out about 23 ppm in black and white. For a unit at this price point, that's a good rate. Remember that print speeds vary by the complexity and requirements of each individual print job. There's about a ten-thousand page per month duty cycle, which is also good in a machine like this one.

This all-in-one has a print resolution of 2400 by 600 dpi, making documents clear and very readable. As a copier, it can kick out about 23 pages per minute of black-and-white text. It also can reduce or enlarge copies in a 25 to 400% range, which gives it good flexibility. Memory comes in at 16 megabytes, which is okay for the home office environment.

It can use either Windows or Mac OS platforms for its operating needs. With either of those platforms, it can scan in color or black and white quite easily, and with 600 by 2400 resolution, too. Both document management and optical character recognition (OCR) software suites are standard. At this price range, that's an excellent feature.